A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

Hey, at least I ran out of staples.

The third row will probably have to wait until 2034, and maybe longer. If I see a daytime supernova, I'll replace the meteor storm with that and consider it 3/3.

Real-life prospective-pairing curves over things like age can get depressing.

Also, we would really appreciate it if you could prominently refer to it as an 'eHit'.

And nothing for 'I'm glad I saw Epic Movie.'

It also works for anything you teach someone else to do. "Oh yeah, I trained a pair of neural nets, Emily and Kevin, to respond to support tickets."

'Come to what?' 'You. Me. This moment.'

Theory: Smugness is proportional to the negative second derivative of TV ownership rate with respect to time.

That's my hat! You took my hat!

Facebook defines relationships. 'Yeah, we would have broken up last night, but the net connection was down.'

Wait a minute. If I'm escaping from a submarine at 50 meters, then I'll *definitely* need a flashlight to find air pockets for gradual decompression on the way up. Time to start shopping professional dive lights.

And I can't believe some places still use fax machines. The electrical signals waste so much time going AROUND the Earth when neutrino beams can go straight through!

The graph is of the magnitude of the function with the real value between 0 and 2 and the imaginary between about 35 and 40. I've misplaced the exact parameters I used.

$Jill and Jack / began to frack. / The oil boosts their town. / But fractures make / the bedrock shake / and Jack came tumbling down.$

I'M PLUGGING IN MY PHONE BUT THE BATTERY ON THE SCREEN ISN'T CHARGING

Hurricane forums are full of excited comments about central pressure and wind speed and comparisons to Camille and 1931 and 1938, with hastily-tacked-on notes about how it will be tragic if anyone dies and they hope it's a dud.

I'm looking to virally monetize your eyeballs by selling them for transplants.

When we started distributing special status tokens that signify which people are important enough to join an elite group, we never could have imagined we might be creating some problems down the line.

The Gordian knot is an omniknot tied using every bend in the Ashley Book of Knots, and then for extra security the upper rope at every crossing is connected to the lower with a randomly-chosen hitch.

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood!

We live in a world where there are actual fleets of robot assassins patrolling the skies. At some point there, we left the present and entered the future.

Constantly stopping these briefings halfway through is becoming a pain.

Later, when I remember that I'm calling movers, I frantically scribble over the labels and write 'NORMAL HOUSE STUFF' on all of them, which actually makes things worse.

Of course, "Number of times I've gotten to make a decision twice to know for sure how it would have turned out" is still at 0.

My biggest fear is that colonial engineers will try to flood me to generate electricity. My biggest hope is that I'll develop sailing stones.

Disgusting

Today's consumers who order their drones off the internet don't know the joy of going out in nature and returning with a drone that you caught yourself, whose angry owners you fought off with your own two hands.

After a pail of water was thrown on the Wicked Witch of the West outside Salt Lake City, Utah's Great Salt Lake was measured to be 7 parts per trillion witch by volume.

You can just see his dejection as he realizes he's the lead guitar in 'Hedgeclipper'

zo'o ta jitfa .i .e'o xu do pendo mi

We're building on our earlier success getting web developers to pay to change the backslashes in our displayed payment URL to forward slashes.

Under quantum tax law, photons sent through a beamsplitter don't actually choose which path they took, or incur a tax burden, until their wavefunction collapses when the power is sold.

There are also a lot of global versions of this map showing traffic to English-language websites which are indistinguishable from maps of the location of internet users who are native English speakers.

If Google Maps stops letting you navigate to (Clay County District) A in West Virginia, you can try Jump, OH -> Ina, IL -> Big Hole, TX.

The bruises on my fingertips are my proof of work.

Tonight's top story: Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, died in his home this morning at the age of [unintelligible rune]. Due to the large number of sharks inhabiting his former kingdom, no body could be recovered.

Stay warm, little flappers, and find lots of plant eggs!

Conveniently for everyone, it turns out that dark energy is produced by subterranean parasitoid wasps.

These rocks are from a time before eyes, brains, and bones, pieces of a land warmed by an unseen sun.

Bad idea #271: Dropping into the half-pipe on a Segway.

I'm always installing tons of weird experimental keyboards because it serves as a good reminder that nothing I was going to type was really worth the trouble.

It's 10:34 PM for this user. They really need to get going, they have a thing early tomorrow. Are you sure you want to notify?

Look, you can't complain about this after giving us so many scenarios involving N locked chests and M unlabeled keys.

Or love in general, for that matter. It just leads to the idea that either your love is pure, perfect, and eternal, and you are storybook-compatible in every way with no problems, or you're LYING when you say 'I love you'.

Oh God, the tornado picked up snakes!

I wrote 20 short programs in Python yesterday. It was wonderful. Perl, I'm leaving you.

Forever comparing, never evaluating on any external scale. If you were a sort function, you'd never break the nlogn barrier.

Rome's declaration of war against Carthage was sent from a no-reply address, so Hannibal had to cross the Alps to deliver his "UNSUBSCRIBE" response in person.

But then the Ghost of Subjunctive Past showed up and told me to stay strong on 'if it were'.

The two best reasons to get into fossils are booping trilobites and getting to say the word "fossiliferous" a lot.

The Wikipedia page "List of Numbers" opens with "This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it."

Menu -> Manage -> [Optimize space usage, Encrypt disk usage report, Convert photos to text-only, Delete temporary files, Delete permanent files, Delete all files currently in use, Optimize menu options, Download cloud, Optimize cloud , Upload unused space to cloud]

"You know lightning, right? When electric charge builds up in a cloud and then discharges in a giant spark? Ask me why that happens." "Why does tha--" "No clue. We think it's related to the hair thing."

If it falls below 20% full, my bag turns red and I start to panic.

There's no group chat member more enigmatic than the cool person who you all assume has the chat on mute, but who then instantly chimes in with no delay the moment something relevant to them is mentioned.

If I wait a while, it's not so bad, because then it's just shaped like me, plus some pipes and tanks and probably eventually all of Earth's oceans.

High-speed collisions at the Baby Park track may support the hypothesis that Daisy is her own evil twin, a theory first suggested by Nintendo in the game Majorana's Mask.

P.P.S. I can kill you with my brain.

Our lawyers were worried because it turns out the company inherits its debt from the parent universe, but luckily cosmic inflation reduced it to nearly zero.

"Sir, it looked really cool." "Oh no--prestige TV. Okay, which of you has a terrible secret that's being slowly revealed to the audience through flashbacks? Just spit it out so we can escape this arc!"

In retrospect, it's weird that as a kid I thought completely random outbursts made me seem interesting, given that from an information theory point of view, lexical white noise is just about the opposite of interesting by definition.

RFC 1149.5 specifies 4 as the standard IEEE-vetted random number.

I can't get over the suspicion that all those viral pictures are photoshopped and 'Flemish' belongs in the lower right circle.

"Even split between us, this will pay way better than the Jumanji sponsorship I came into the date with."

Physicists who want to protect traditional Christmas realize that the only way to keep from changing Christmas is not to observe it.

People think power over ethernet is so great, and yet when I try to do water over ethernet everyone yells at me.

Why I'm Moving Most of My Social Activity to Slack, Then Creating a Second Slack to Avoid the People in the First One, Then Giving Up on Social Interaction Completely, Then Going Back to Texting

In the aviation world, they don't use AM/PM times. Instead, all times are assumed to be AM unless they're labeled NOTAM.

I don't think the Lakeshore Air Crash Museum really belongs under 'Tourist Attractions.' It's not a museum--it's just an area near the Lake Festival Laser Show where a lot of planes have crashed.

The social media reaction to this asteroid announcement has been sharply negative. Care to respond?

My first try at drawing a real face in years

It's a long way down.

For the moment it's a standoff

(six hours later) ARGH. How are these stupid microchips so durable?! All I want is to undo a massive industrial process with household tools!

Fine, walk away. I'm gonna go cry into a pint of Ben&Jerry's Brownie Batter(tm) ice cream [link], then take out my frustration on a variety of great flash games from PopCap Games(r) [link].

The Carnot cycle is more properly known by its full title, the "Carnot-Tolkien-Wagner Ring Cycle."

This one goes out to xxCrazyPixie1987xx

I bet she gets you to mow the lawn, doesn't she?

I don't see why everyone is so hungry for BAD news, but fine, I'll give in to feedback and add a dark mode.

Using a classic Timothy Zahn EU/Legends novel is bad enough, but at least the style and setting aren't too far off. If you really want to mess with people, try using Splinter of the Mind's Eye.

Staplers are actually in Pseudosuchia, making them more closely related to crocodiles than to dinosaurs.

If you ask "why are leaves green?" the usual answer is "because they're full of chlorophyll, and chlorophyll is green," even though "why does chlorophyll scatter green light?" is a great question too.

The bunch of disadvantaged kids I was tutoring became too good at writing, and their essays were forcing me to confront painful existential questions, so I started trying to turn them on to drugs and crime instead.

Stephen Douglas actually died soon after the debates and election, but if you demand historical accuracy in your webcomics you should be reading Hark! A Vagrant.

Hey, so did you ever finish your video series about Cassie and the caterpillar morph? I loved the first three, but never ... no, sorry, I get it, this isn't the place. Sorry! Sorry.

Opening dialogue by Scott

I hear in some places, you need one form of ID to buy a gun, but two to pay for it by check. It's interesting who has what incentives to care about what mistakes.

Any electrician will warn you to first locate and flip the house's CAUSALITY circuit breaker before touching the CIRCUIT BREAKERS one.

Once, long ago, I saw this girl go by. I didn't stop and talk to her, and I've regretted it ever since.

Anyone else watching this Youtube video in 1954? If so, my last trip definitely messed with the timeline.

Hey, I don't make the rules. It's in the book.

In the 60s, Marvin Minsky assigned a couple of undergrads to spend the summer programming a computer to use a camera to identify objects in a scene. He figured they'd have the problem solved by the end of the summer. Half a century later, we're still working on it.

Guess who has two thumbs and spent the night in an ER after trying to rescue a kitten that ran under his car at a stoplight and climbed up into the engine compartment? And, thanks to antibiotics, will continue having two thumbs? THIS GUY. (P.S. kitten is safe!)

The misguided search for a perpetual motion machine has run substantially longer than any attempted perpetual motion machine.

[after a minute] "Okay, I think I've got it, thanks. Can I--" "oOOOooOOooo!"

I average out the spring and fall changes and just set my clocks 39 minutes ahead year-round.

Reductio ad absurdum fails when reality is absurd.

I was there, dude.

Most of our universe consists of dark matter rendered completely undetectable by our spacetime codec's dynamic range issues.

I'm happy with my Kindle 2 so far, but if they cut off the free Wikipedia browsing, I plan to show up drunk on Jeff Bezos's lawn and refuse to leave.

I mean, if it's that easy to get a theorem named for you ... "a straight line that passes through the center of a coplanar circle always divides the circle into two equal halves." Can I have that one? Wait, can I auction off the naming rights? It can be the Red Bull Theorem or the Quicken Loans Theorem, depending who wants it more.

Chuck Jones is a vengeful god.

Saying 'what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano' is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.

If data fails the Teacher's t test, you can just force it to take the test again until it passes.

Sci-fi has energy weapons because otherwise the people like me who watch it get distracted counting shots.

I want this engraved on my tombstone like the Epitaph of Stevinus.

"This is the reference implementation of the self-referential joke."

It may remain in equilibrium for some time, slowly growing, and then suddenly become significantly redder.

'And then whisper 'anapest' in my ear as you hold me?'

An x-ray gyroscope is used to determine exactly which toppings they included in the pita.

colors.rgb("blue") yields "#0000FF". colors.rgb("yellowish blue") yields NaN. colors.sort() yields "rainbow"

Certified skydiving instructors know way more about safely falling from planes than I do, and are way more likely to die that way.

The vaccine stuff seems pretty simple. But if you take a closer look at the data, it's still simple, but bigger. And slightly blurry. Might need reading glasses.

'How about a little ... *family growth*?' 'Dude, that's not until round two.'

If the flyers don't work, we'll switch to the LEAST subtle method of informing a town of the existence of a trebuchet club.

"Technically that sentence started with 'well', so--" "Ooh, a rock with a fossil in it!"

[after typing 1,500 words on feathered dinosaurs, paleontology, sexism, lava, and dinosaurs as animals rather than movie monsters] Sorry to cut it short, I'm on my phone. When I'm back at a keyboard, I can give you another 5,000 words.

BREAKING: Channing Tatum and his friends explore haunted city

They're standing at the lip of the canyon, which isn't clear at all.

If only my ancestors had been fortunate enough to marry into the branch of the bacteria family that could photosynthesize, like all my little green cousins here.

The typical Shadow Biology Department is housed in a building coated in a thin layer of desert varnish which renders it invisible to normal-world university staff.

Grayton also proposed making college scholarships available exclusively to sexually active teens, amnesty for illegal immigrants who create room for themselves by killing a citizen, and a graduated income tax based on penis size. He has been endorsed by Tracy Morgan, John Wilkes Booth's ghost, and the Time Cube guy.

Don't forget to add another term for "probability that the Modified Bayes' Theorem is correct."

One of the survivors, poking around in the ruins with the point of a spear, uncovers a singed photo of Richard Stallman. They stare in silence. "This," one of them finally says, "This is a man who BELIEVED in something."

If you ever want to get beaten up by a bunch of graphic designers, try removing the serifs from Times New Roman and adding them to Comic Sans.

Hourly haircuts would be annoying, but they'd be easier to do yourself, since you'd have adjacent hairs as a guide. Growing it out would be a huge pain, though.

The reverse only works if the subject has a nervous twitch.

Hey, when you're done draining the syrup, just leave the hole, okay?

'Now, minions, I'm off to inspect our shark cages.' 'Do you really need to inspect them this often?' 'PRISONERS MUST NEVER ESCAPE.'

Hobby: seeing how many menu selections you can get someone to go through before they realize you're not an automated system and/or hang up.

In the LotR map, up and down correspond LOOSELY to northwest and southeast respectively.

I plugged in this lamp and my dog went rigid, spoke a sentence of perfect Akkadian, and then was hurled sideways through the picture window. Even worse, it's one of those lamps where the switch is on the cord.

When I began trying to form a new claim by stitching together these parts in such an unnatural way, some called me mad.

I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34.

This plan may sound appealing to people who know a little about the immune system, but the drawbacks are clear to people who know a lot about the immune system and also to people who don't know anything about it.

And when I think about it, a lot of "things I want to do" are just learning about and discussing new tools for tinkering with the chain.

It's like you tried to define a formal grammar based on fragments of a raw database dump from the QuickBooks file of a company that's about to collapse in an accounting scandal.

I mean, half of these are undefined. And your multiplication dots are too low; they look like decimal points.

I'm going to change the sign so the pole is horizontal and the sign is mounted on the front like a plunger, so I can carry it around like a lance to gently push people back if they try to approach.

The SLS head engineer plans to invite Shania Twain to stand under the completed prototype, then tell her, 'I don't expect you to date me just because I'm a rocket scientist, but you've gotta admit--this is pretty fucking impressive.'

Neither a spokesperson for the organization nor the current world champion could be reached for comment.

Numbers can be tricky. On the day of my 110th birthday, I'll be one day younger than John Tukey was on his.

To ensure lasting immunity, doctors recommend destroying a second Death Star some time after the first.

'So how DID you go from working at the employment records office to becoming president of MIT and CEO of IBM?' 'I guess I just have an eye for opportunities.'

I've looked through a few annotated versions of classic books, and it's shocking how much of what's in there is basically pop-culture references totally lost on us now.

To motivate it to fire its harpoons hard enough, Rosetta's Philae lander has been programmed to believe it is trying to kill the comet.

The full analysis is of course much more complicated, but I can't stay to talk about it because I have a date.

My password is just every Unicode codepoint concatenated into a single UTF-8 string.

IATA stands for International AirporT Abbreviation.

'Does the substance feel weird to the touch?' is equally likely to get the answers 'Don't be ridiculous, you would never put your hand near a sample. We have safety protocols.' and 'Yeah, and it tastes AWFUL.'

I always figured the word 'blog' would sound *less* silly as the years went by.

CIRCULAR VIDEO - PROS: Solves aspect ratio problem. CONS: Never trust anyone who talks to you from inside a circle.

'YOUR CLOTHES. GIVE THEM TO ME.' 'Shit, uh ... you are now breathing manually!' 'I AM ALWAYS BREATHING MANUALLY.'

The floor should be slightly curved, but we haven't figured out artificial gravity yet, so for now we just added a trace intoxicating gas to the air that messes with your inner ear and gives you a sense that the ground is tilting away from you.

I don't even *want* this package! Why did I join the stinging insect of the month club, anyway?

Turns out I've been "practicing social distancing" for years without even realizing it was a thing!

Biology is really struggling; they're barely at 93% and they keep finding more ants.

I mean, what's more likely -- that I have uncovered fundamental flaws in this field that no one in it has ever thought about, or that I need to read a little more? Hint: it's the one that involves less work.

The pile gets soaked with data and starts to get mushy over time, so it's technically recurrent.

A technology that is '20 years away' will be 20 years away indefinitely.

Sometimes when I steer shopping carts around corners, I slide them a little and pretend I'm getting the blue spark boost.

I think about self-reference a lot. Example: this comment.

Someone bring me a pocket fan so I can drift around the yard.

I first saw this problem on the Google Labs Aptitude Test. A professor and I filled a blackboard without getting anywhere. Have fun.

Computer viruses currently fall somewhere between prions and fire.

I don't know what's worse -- that there exists broken-hard-drive-sound techno, or that it's not half bad.

An old astronomer trick for distinguishing the Sun from other stars is to take multiple photos a few minutes apart and overlay them, making the Sun stand out due to its high proper motion.

#pugglewumper Tashari got me some ink pens! I've been experimenting with them.

Aww, the oceanic crust and the continental crust are getting married!

Mrs. Roberts would have gotten up sooner, of course, but she was busy piping find ~ and find ~nomad into xargs shred, just in case.

I would describe my personal alignment as "lawful heterozygous silty liquid."

Bonus strip: just read the rightmost panels straight down.

When it explodes, it will cast off its outer layers, leaving behind nothing but a slowly fading PalmPilot, calculator, or two-way pager.

Washington, DC: Eastern gray squirrel, Amur honeysuckle. Puerto Rico: Crested anole, sea grape. US as a whole: Mallard, eastern poison ivy.

I find so much fun in language.

When advertisers figure this out, our only weapon will be blue sharpies and "[disputed]".

Listen, in a few thousand years you'll invent a game called 'SimCity' which has a 'disaster' button, and then you'll understand.

Building codes in hurricane zones rely on studies of how easily flying debris can break residential windows. If you're looking for a science fair project idea and you hate your neighbors, I'm sure they could always use more data!

Out in a field, not another car for miles, silence but for the rain drumming on the sunroof, warm thick folds of the blanket hiding wordless fingertip games ...

And the ten minutes striking up a conversation with that strange kid in homeroom sometimes matters more than every other part of high school combined.

You can evade blue shells in Double Dash, but it is deep magic.

Speed Limit: 45 MPH / Minimum: 65 MPH

I think you mean 'GNU Info Override'.

To combat the threat, many airlines are installing wing-mounted spray bottles.

If you find and stop the video, but you've--against all odds--gotten curious about the trade summit, just leave the tab opened. It will mysteriously start playing again 30 minutes later!

And no avian society ever develops space travel because it's impossible to focus on calculus when you could be outside flying.

In Universe Pro®™ the laws of physics remain unchanged under time reversal, to maintain backward compatibility.

Ahem. We are STRICTLY an Orbiter shop.

The good news is that if the number of work and friend relationships you have exceeds your willingness to do the bare minimum to keep up with everyone's life events and stuff, one way or another that problem eventually solves itself.

If you're planning to challenge the royal family, you should probably wait 6-8 weeks, since a number of the younger ones have diplomas and Kate was actually on the varsity lightsaber team at St Andrews.

You know I've always hated her.

Proper User Policy apparently means Simon Says.

There are so many well-meaning conservatives around here who just assume global warming is only presented as a moral issue for political reasons.

Shoot for the Moon. If you miss, you'll end up co-orbiting the Sun alongside Earth, living out your days alone in the void within sight of the lush, welcoming home you left behind.

"Are you concerned the witches won't breed in captivity?" "Honestly, we're more concerned that they WILL. We don't know what it involves, but our biologists theorize that it's 'harrowing.'"

Cracked.com is another inexplicable browser narcotic. They could write a list of '17 worst haircuts in the Ottoman Empire' and I'd read through to the end, then click on all the links at the end.

The new crowd is heavily shaped by this guy named Eric, who's basically the Paris Hilton of the amateur plastic crazy straw design world.

Or whatever's handy! I'm pretty much pure alcohol and water, so it doesn't really matter!

It's important to learn the moves that take you into the vortex, but it's best not to study vortex itself too closely. Even grandmasters who have built up a tolerance lose the ability to play for a few hours after studying it.

No two adjacent circles are the same color.

Strangely, they still celebrate by eating hot dogs. Since they don't have mouths, they just kinda toss them in the air and let them fall back down into their propeller blades. It's pretty messy.

Before you say anything, no, I know not to leave my computer sitting out logged in to all my accounts. I have it set up so after a few minutes of inactivity it automatically switches to my brother's.

It can't be very MUCH money ... they apparently can't even afford a sampler. I mean, with a little remixing, some of this could be kinda good!

Once you see it, you can't help seeing it every time. Until your body finishes metabolizing the mushrooms.

Buildings constructed from softer materials were damaged by chili pepper impacts to the storm's high Richter-Fujita-Scoville-Mohs hardness rating.

'Hey, can you call my cell?' '...I'm trying, but it says this number is blocked?' 'Ok, thanks, just checking.'

Thank you for making me feel less alone.

My upcoming album, 'Linked List', has covers of 'The Purple People Eater', the Ninja Turtles theme, 'Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini', and the Power Rangers theme, with every song played to the tune of the next.

Does the screeching chill your blood and herald death? If yes, banshee. If no, seagull.

This message brought to you by the Society of Astronomers Trapped on the Surface of a Sphere.

Screw these 36-degree angles. I'm converting to Judaism.

Sequoia Brussels sprouts are delicious but it's pretty hard to finish one.

They're continuing to search for a square with the same area as the circle, as efforts to construct one have run into difficulties.

The laws of physics are fun to try to understand, but as an organism with incredibly delicate eyes who evolved in a world full of sharp objects, I have an awful lot of trust in biology's calibration of my flinch reflex.

You were on the internet before I was born? Well, so was I.

Facebook, Apple, and Google all got away with their monopolist power grabs because they don't have any 'S's in their names for critics to snarkily replace with '$'s.

We're right under the flight path for the scheduled orbital launch, but don't worry--it's too cold out for the rockets to operate safely, so I'm sure they'll postpone.

'I'm here to return what Prometheus stole.' would be a good thing to say if you were a fighter pilot in a Michael Bay movie where for some reason the world's militaries had to team up to defeat every god from human mythology, and you'd just broken through the perimeter and gotten a missile lock on Mount Olympus.

The projection for those who think the Mercator projection gives people a distorted idea of how big Greenland is, but a very accurate idea of how big it SHOULD be.

Eno's storied aria was once soloed by Judge Lance Ito on the alto oboe at Ohio's AirAsia Arena.

The key caps use LCD displays for all the vowels, so they can automatically adjust over the years to reflect ongoing vowel shifts while allowing you to keep typing phonetically.

Ugh, today's kids are forgetting the old-fashioned art of absentmindedly reading the same half-page of a book over and over and then letting your attention wander and picking up another book.

Hard to imagine political rhetoric more microtargeted at me than 'I love Venn diagrams. I really do, I love Venn diagrams. It's just something about those three circles.'

And it says a lot about you that when your friends jump off a bridge en masse, your first thought is apparently 'my friends are all foolish and I won't be like them' and not 'are my friends ok?'.

"Off-by-one errors" isn't the easiest theme to build a party around, but I've seen worse.

I wish I knew how to quit this so I wouldn't have to quit you.

'Well, there's speculation that it's due to a mantle hotspot.' --a geologist who's trying to cover up the fact that they didn't hear your question

The strongest incentive we have to develop faster-than-light travel is that it would let us apologize in advance.

This dating is corroborated by the presence of stone tools at the site, rather than earlier and less effective helium ones.

I was fired by the National Weather Service five minutes after they hired me for going into their code base and renaming all the tornado warnings to "tornado spoiler alerts."

I spent a long time thinking about how to design a system for long-term organization and storage of subject-specific informational resources without needing ongoing work from the experts who created them, only to realized I'd just reinvented libraries.

We watched DAYTIME TV. Do you realize how soul-crushing it was? I'd rather eat an iPad than go back to watching daytime TV.

Amazon.com took a surprise early lead with 'Time required to transport a package from Iquitos, Peru to Manaus, Brazil' but then lost it at 'Minutes to skeletonize a cow'.

PROTIP: You can get around the Shannon-Hartley limit by setting your font size to 0.

My pet theory is that in real life, the kid at the beginning of Jurassic Park who made fun of the 'six-foot turkey' never got a talking-to from Dr. Grant, and grew up to produce several of the movie's sequels.

This rumpled fabric at the corner looks like evidence of ongoing tectonic activity.

Using diacritics correctly is not my forté.

It's important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.

I actually kind of feel like John and Surf King wouldn't like each other, which is a lot to unpack.

I take the view that "open-faced sandwiches" are not sandwiches, but all other physical objects are.

The contagious period ends right around when you start to sound sick over the phone, which is probably evidence of cold viruses evolving to spread optimally in the workplace.

But he has a hat AND a toolbox! Where could someone planning a heist get THOSE?

Actual actual reality: nobody cares about his secrets. (Also, I would be hard-pressed to find that wrench for $5.)

It's possible. Better to be on the safe side.

If you live in the Northern hemisphere, anyway. In the southern hemisphere, due to the coriolis effect, babies are born nine months BEFORE they're conceived.

We've also developed the semi-semi-log scale, where the Y-axis for the left half of the graph is a log scale but on the right half it isn't.

You might think most people you know are reliable voters, or that your nudge won't convince them, and you will usually be right. But some small but significant percentage of the time, you'll be wrong, and that's why this works.

Neutral Evil is for people who like keeping the weight nicely centered in the carton, but also hate everyone else who wants that.

If you want to be extra safe, check that there's a big block of jumbled characters at the bottom.

I'm excited about the proposal to add a "brontosaurus" emoji codepoint because it has the potential to bring together a half-dozen different groups of pedantic people into a single glorious internet argument.

It's important to teach yourself to feel responsible for random events, because with great responsibility comes great power. That's what my wise Uncle Ben told me right before he died; he might still be alive today if only I'd said rabbit rabbit that year!

This comic shows estimated average frequency. I wanted to include the pitch drop experiment, but it turns out the gif format has some issues with decade-long loops.

"Some people say light is waves, and some say it's particles, so I bet light is some in-between thing that's both wave and particle depending on how you look at it. Am I right?" "YES, BUT YOU SHOULDN'T BE!"

Just thought you should know

A big obstacle in experimenting with the mind's dream-simulation-engine is holding onto the details as you wake up. With TCMP you can bring back any information you want.

On the plus side, she wrote 'Welcome to the AAA Club!' in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, and left me a membership/roadside assistance card on the counter.

Except in reality crossing a stream of marshmallows would create a giant Bill Murray.

Even governmental elevator inspectors get bored halfway through asking where the building office is.

Earth clearly hasn't been inspected, since it's definitely contaminated with salmonella.

'Beyond that lies a vale of fire through which my vision cannot penetrate' is the kind of fun thing geologists, heliophysicists, and early universe cosmologists have a lot of opportunities to say.

Their biggest mistake was bringing Rachael Ray and Emeril to tour the lab and sign off on the project. That's when Spielberg caught wind of it.

In my reboot, Dennis the Menace was just trying to send Mr. Wilson a nice comet, but accidentally wiped out his dinosaur garden.

Further research is needed to fully understand how we managed to do such a good job.

Of all the nations, the armies of the ununoctium-benders are probably the least intimidating. The xenon-benders come close, but their flickery signs are at least effective for propaganda.

She won the first half of all our chemo Scrabble games, but then her IV drugs started kicking in and I *dominated*.

Fun fact: The standard North American NAD83 coordinate system is misaligned from the actual Earth, off-center by about 7 feet. Someone knows where I am, and I'm in the wrong place.

2040s: RNA formed the basis for life each of the five known times it arose on the early Earth.

The government has been trying to sell off the Federal Helium Reserve for a few years now, but the sale has been on hold while they try to figure out how to explain this situation to buyers.

Unsafe vehicles, hills, and philosophy go hand in hand.

Data adapted from 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum' by A.S. Dyke et. al., which was way better than the sequels 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: The Meltdown' and 'The Laurentide and Innuitian ice sheets during the Last Glacial Maximum: Continental Drift'.

I'm the Philosopher until someone hands me a burrito.

Bluetooth is actually named for the tenth-century Viking king Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson, but the protocol developed by Harald was a wireless charging standard unrelated to the modern Bluetooth except by name.

The value of n is still unknown, but new results constrain it to fall between 8 and 10^500, ruling out popular 'n=1' and 'n=2' theories.

Also, I apologize for the time I climbed down into your world and everyone freaked out about the lesbian orgy overseen by a priest.

The warning diamond on the Materials Safety Data Sheet for this stuff just has the "😰" emoji in all four fields.

Type IIII error: Mistaking tally marks for Roman numerals

At least, I don't think there's evidence. My claim that there's no evidence hasn't been falsified. At least, not that I know of.

He's kind of an asshole, when you think about it

Really, the only honest 24-hour stores are the ones in places like Arizona and Hawaii, and many of them are still wrong in certain years.

'It has a ghost in it. Take it back.' 'No.'

Starting a meta-leaderboard for tracking who holds the record for ranking behind the most distinct people on an online leaderboard.

First prize is a free ticket to the kissing booth.

We have email and social media now, so we probably don't need to keep exchanging business cards by pressing them gently against each others' faces with an open palm and smearing them around.

Can you pass the nackle?

Others include "We've incrementally improved the estimate of this coefficient," "Maybe all these categories are wrong," and "We found a way to make student volunteers worse at tasks."

Hey, man, the 1670s called. They were like 'Wherefore this demonic inſtrument? By what ſorcery does it produce ſuch ſounds?"

It's okay, we can just feed the one-pixel image into an AI upscaler and recover the original image, or at least one that's just as cool.

I was thinking of observing stars to verify Einstein's theory of relativity again, but I gotta say, that thing is looking pretty solid at this point.

Edward Tufte's 'The Visual Display of Quantitative Information' is a fantastic book, and should be required reading for anyone in either the sciences or graphic design.

Okay, I'm just gonna order pizza, and let's never talk about this again.

So do you have any plans for z=-0.000000000000045?

After the test, she said that if she had a choice, she wouldn’t defend herself against drones using a tennis ball and racket, though she would absolutely pick them over other sports equipment. But, she added, "Drones don't bother me."

I don't know about houseflies, but we definitely caught a lot of fruit flies with our vinegar bowl. Hooray science!

If you shrank the Solar System to the size of Texas, the Houston metro area would be smaller than a grasshopper in Dallas.

It would be pretty unfair to give to someone a blank version of this map as a 'how many states can you name?' quiz. (If you include Alaska and Hawaii, you should swap the Aleutian Islands with the Hawaiian ones.)

Romantic comedy heroines, I'm talking to you.

And if you labeled your axes, I could tell you exactly how MUCH better.

I hope that somewhere in the world, "Panamax" is the last option on a "size" drop-down menu on a sex toy site.

Squinting at a graph is fine for getting a rough idea of the answer, but if you want to pretend to know it exactly, you need statistics.

I may be the kind of person who wastes a year implementing a Turing-complete computer in Dwarf Fortress, but that makes you the kind of person who wastes ten more getting that computer to run Minecraft.

It's cool, it's totally ethical--they're all programmed to hunt whichever bird of prey is most numerous at the moment, so they leave the endangered ones alone until near the end.

Protip: You can win every exchange just by being one level more precise than whoever talked last. Eventually, you'll defeat all conversational opponents and stand alone.

Calling a cab means cutting into beer money.

Plus the reaction in the Tumblverse is always 'repeatedly get hit by a dog and fall down the stairs'.

I wonder what year I'll discard the last weird food item that I bought online in early 2020.

Because they orbit the Earth every 90 minutes, some astronauts should try to argue that, due to CDC regulations and time zone technicalities, they should be able to get their second dose just 30 or 40 hours after their first.

I just Googled 'roomba sojourner mod' and was sorely disappointed. Be the change, I guess!

I'm sure a discussion of the reason for the disappearance of adventure games in favor of RPGs would be fascinating

Actually, I think if all higher math professors had to write for the Simple English Wikipedia for a year, we'd be in much better shape academically.

No matter how fast I swing, I can never travel outside this loop! Maybe space outside it doesn't exist! But I bet it does. This tire came from somewhere.

It ships with a version of Google Now that alerts you when it's too late to leave for your appointments.

Yes, Eminem is wearing a sleeveless hoodie. What of it?

At least we can all agree on the enormity of this usage.

CLARIFICATION: By 9/13, I mean September 13th, not the 9th day of Jancember, the cursed 13th month that exists between December and January in the transdimensional temporal plane.

Our investigation into whining-based remedies became the first study to be halted by the IRB on the grounds that the treatment group was 'too annoying.'

Soon, linguists will be wandering around everywhere, saying things like "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" and "more people have been to Russia than I have," and speech will become unintelligible.

Want to feel old? Wait.

Assume r' refers to the radius of Earth Prime, and r'' means radius in inches.

Juraaaassic Park, Juraaaassic Park, God shed his grace on theeeee

I love how Google handles dimensional analysis. Stats are ballpark and vary wildly by time of day and whether your mom is in town.

'Which one?' 'I dunno, it's your house. Just check each object.' 'Check it for *what*?' 'Whether it looks like it might have touched a paper towel at some point and then forgotten to let go.' '...' 'You can also Google to learn how to check which things are using which resources.' 'You know, I'll just leave the towel there and try again tomorrow.'

The way out is to use the marker you have to add a box that says 'get a marker' to the line between you and 'start', then add a 'no' line from the trap box to 'end'.

'Hey, everyone, you can totally trust that I didn't do a word count on MY edit!'

Trivia: Elaine is actually her middle name.

You can do a lot better than 1% if you start keeping track of the patterns in what numbers people pick.

$We didn't even get to the continued fractions!$

And then do it again in a moment now that they're out of Star Power

Dinosaur Cosmics

Remember, models aren't for telling you facts, they're for exploring dynamics. This model apparently explores time travel.

For decades I've been working off the accumulated rotation from one long afternoon on a merry-go-round when I was eight.

Following this, the pong paddle went on a mission to destroy Atari headquarters and, due to a mixup, found himself inside the game The Matrix Reloaded. Boy, was THAT ever hard to explain to him.

'Taft in a wet t-shirt contest' is the key image here.

We should have you at the gate in just under two hours--two and a half if we get pulled over.

These anomalies are known as Miyake events, named for the pioneering scientist who discovered them and was tragically devoured by a carnivorous tree.

If you find an ash deposition layer from a year in which an eruption destroyed an island that had Camellia sinensis growing on it, you can make a Gone Island Ice_τ.

Benthic Santas weren't even discovered until the 1970s, but many scientists now believe Christmas may have originally developed around hydrothermal vents and only later migrated to the surface.

"TURN OFF THE LASER GUIDE STAR" "WHY" "STAR CATS"

You might want to bring your frost-sensitive plants in from the patio. The high-level aerosols may result in short-term cooling across the entire backyard.

I'd like to see more damage assessments for hurricanes hitting New York and flooding Manhattan -- something like the 1938 Long Island Express, but aimed a bit more to the west. It's just a matter of time.

You could at least not wear the lab coat everywhere, dude.

To picture 10^18, just picture 10^13, but then imagine you connect the left side of the 3 to close off the little bays.

Ultimately, history would imperfectly record the story of the Foal of Troy.

We didn't actually land on the moon -- it just looked like we did because of precession. Also, gyroscopes caused 9/11.

Life goal #29 is to get enough of them rejected that I can publish a comparative analysis of the rejection letters.

I'd like 0.4608 apples, please.

How about posts that are public, but every time a company accesses a bunch of them, the API makes their CEO's account click 'like' on one of them at random so you get a notification.

Click and drag.

But then she does that thing with her tongue and I remember why I left you.

NOTE TO FUTURE ETYMONLINGUISTS: Our best guess is that 'blimp' is onomatopoeia. The 'B-Limp' thing is a folk etymology.

Thank you to Katie Mack for teaching me about this effect, and to Janelle Shane for describing redshifts as 'like galaxies sinking into a pool of dilute blood,' which is how I'll see them from now on.

CVS's pharmacies are fine, but I much prefer their [censored]s.

Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.

Fortunately, after a brief skirmish, I seem to have gained the upper hand in the battle against my internal organs, at least until they learn to read and find out the mean stuff I've said about them.

autoexec code posted by verified twitter users

My New Year's resolution for 2014-54-12/30/14 Dec:12:1420001642 is to learn these stupid time formatting strings.

DUCKLOOP'D?

It took a lot of booster rockets, but luckily Amazon had recently built thousands of them to bring Amazon Prime same-day delivery to the Moon colony.

'Arrest me, I'm a skateboarder' is an even more obnoxious variant.

Add main-belt asteroids to taste.

Sadly, it probably won't even have enough gas to make it to the first border crossing.

In this situation, gzip /dev/inside to deflate, then pipe the compressed air to /dev/input to clean your keyboard. Avert your eyes when you do.

Qua qua qua is the sine qua non of sine qua non qua sine qua non.

They all made fun of Autometalogolex, but someday there will be a problem with Christmas that can only be solved if Santa somehow gets a serious headache, and then they'll see.

How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It's hard to throw a rock without throwing one!

I have a thing for corrupt women.

The experimental math department's budget is under scrutiny for how much they've been spending on trains leaving Chicago at 9:00pm traveling at 45 mph.

Yes, it took a lot of work to make the cards and pieces, but it's worth it--the players are way more thorough than the tax prep people ever were.

P.S. If you have time travel, come to my birthday party Saturday!

The key is portion control, which is why I've switched to eating smaller cans of frosting instead of full bottles.

A lot of these are actually non-venomous, but I can see which species you mistook them for. If you pause the crane for a sec I can give you some ID pointers for next time!

Listen, I'm not a fan of the Spanish Inquisition OR predatory multi-level marketing schemes...

According to every stud finder I've tried to use, my walls contain a rapidly shifting network of hundreds and hundreds of studs.

Scientists occasionally invent alternative periodic table layouts, which is usually a sign that they don't have enough enrichment in their enclosures.

Before I install any patch, I always open the patch notes and Ctrl-F for 'supervolcano', 'seagull', and 'garbage disposal', just to be safe.

The great thing is, the sentence is really just a reminder to the listener to worry about whatever aspects of the technology they're already feeling alarmist about, which in their mind gives you credit for addressing their biggest anxieties.

RIP, Gary.

If you hold the meteor too long, it may imprint on you and form a contact binary, making reintroduction to space difficult.

If you have any ideas, I hear you can send them to iaupublic@iap.fr.

Good luck to Democrats in the upcoming Georgia runoff elections, and to the Google Sheets SREs in the current run-on elections.

P.S. We're going to the beach this weekend, so I'm attaching my preregistration forms for that trip now, before we find out whether it produces any interesting results.

dpkg: error processing package (--purge): subprocess pre-removal script returned error exit 163: OH_GOD_THEYRE_INSIDE_MY_CLOTHES

A tattoo of a tattoo parlor receipt

It's not our fault we caught a group on their way home from a geography bee. And they taught us that Uzbekistan is one of the world's two doubly-landlocked countries!

As my standard, I use going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 8 AM.

I usually respond to someone else doing something good by figuring out a reason that they're not really as good as they seem. But I've been realizing lately that there's an easier way to handle these situations, and it involves zero internet arguments.

But Einstein said it was the most powerful force in the universe, and I take all my investment advice from flippant remarks by theoretical physicists making small talk at parties.

Look, I just think we need to stop coddling those hedonistic roundabout hogs who get into the inner lane and circle for hours, wasting valuable capacity.

Suckville is considered by the Census Bureau to be part of the Detroit metropolitan statistical area, despite not being located anywhere near Detroit.

It's believed to be related to the Stellar Sea Cow.

As the King of All Cosmos remarked, 'Is it that it's fun, or that it lets you forget yourself?'

We're also stuck with blurry, juddery, slow-panning 24fps movies forever because (thanks to 60fps home video) people associate high framerates with camcorders and cheap sitcoms, and thus think good framerates look 'fake'.

Oh no, I changed the future and now I'm disappearing! Wait, never mind, it was just my hat slipping down over my eyes.

The IAU is sad to announce that at 00:39 UTC on December 22nd, Jupiter and Saturn did unfortunately come into contact, and appear to have blooped together.

They actually started the reversed-text practice in 1977 -- not for ease-of-reading reasons, but because too many people were driving backward down the highway blasting the Star Wars opening theme.

<3 If there's anything you can do, I'll let you know. For the moment, any simple distracting online games sent to sick@xkcd.com will not go unappreciated [EDIT: Holy crap 2,700 games before noon. I love you guys; thank you. They will be passed along and played by us all.]

This map preserves the shapes of Tissot's indicatrices pretty well, as long as you draw them in before running the resize.

Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy called the man's arguments that he could be either Alito or Ginsburg "surprisingly compelling, but ultimately unconvincing."

There are two or three songs out there with beeps in the chorus that sound exactly like the clock radio alarm I had in high school, and hearing it makes me think my life since junior year has been a dream I'm about to wake up from.