XKCD - full archive
Y.200x
- D.01
- 2 : Petit Trees (sketch)
- 'Petit' being a reference to Le Petit Prince, which I only thought about halfway through the sketch
- D.01
- 6 : Irony
- It’s commonly known that too much perspective can be a downer.
- D.01
- 10 : Pi Equals
- My most famous drawing, and one of the first I did for the site
- D.01
- 12 : Poisson
- Poisson distributions have no value over negative numbers
- D.01
- 13 : Canyon
- They’re standing at the lip of the canyon, which isn’t clear at all.
- D.01
- 14 : Copyright
- After reading Slashdot and BoingBoing, sometimes I have to go outside.
- D.01
- 16 : Monty Python -- Enough
- I went to a dinner where there was a full 10 minutes of Holy Grail quotes exchanged, with no context, in lieu of conversation. It depressed me badly.
- D.01
- 17 : What If
- I once made an anniversary card for my then-girlfriend with this layout.
- D.01
- 20 : Ferret
- My brother had a ferret he loved which died since I drew this strip. RIP.
- D.01
- 21 : Kepler
- Science joke. You should probably just move along.
- D.01
- 23 : T-shirts
- It’s depressing how many of these are real shirts
- D.01
- 26 : Fourier
- That cat has some serious periodic components
- D.01
- 29 : Hitler
- So he’s saying that God thought Hitler’s art was so bad that the Holocaust was an acceptable alternative. It’s no secret that the hat guy is closely based on Aram, from Men in Hats.
- D.01
- 30 : Donner
- Some people haven’t heard of the Donner Party. They were pioneers who got stranded and likely resorted to cannibalism.
- D.01
- 32 : Pillar
- A comic by my brother Doug, redrawn and rewritten by me
- D.01
- 33 : Self-reference
- I think about self-reference a lot. Example: this comment.
- D.01
- 34 : Flowers
- This is actually pencil on paper, just inverted and colored
- D.01
- 35 : Sheep
- I think it’s the sheep zapping the cactus and not vice-versa
- D.01
- 36 : Scientists
- A leading expert characterized the situation as 'retarded'
- D.01
- 37 : Hyphen
- I do this constantly
- D.01
- 38 : Apple Jacks
- There used to be these ads, see . . .
- D.01
- 39 : Bowl
- For the moment it’s a standoff
- D.01
- 40 : Light
- Like a beacon
- D.01
- 42 : Geico
- David did this
- D.01
- 43 : Red Spiders 2
- This was actually drawn years before Red Spiders
Y.2006
- D.01
- 44 : Love
- This one makes me wince every time I think about it
- D.04
- 45 : Schrodinger
- There was no alt-text until you moused over
- D.06
- 46 : Secrets
- I’m a big fan of Kurt Halsey
- D.12
- 48 : Found
- No more, no less
- D.14
- 49 : Want
- Well, she’s pretty hot.
- D.17
- 50 : Penny Arcade
- Of course, Penny Arcade has already mocked themselves for this. They don’t care.
- D.18
- 51 : Malaria
- The malaria party was David’s idea
- D.21
- 52 : Secret Worlds
- No two adjacent circles are the same color.
- D.23
- 53 : Hobby
- The only one of these games I really played was Area 51
- D.25
- 54 : Science
- Bonus points if you can identify the science in question
- D.27
- 55 : Useless
- Even the identity matrix doesn’t work normally
- D.30
- 56 : The Cure
- My first try at drawing a real face in years
- D.06
- 60 : Super Bowl
- The Super Bowl is actually an elaborate ruse, concocted by a shadowy group in the mid sixties for this purpose. The 'watch it for the ads' addition was a master stroke.
- D.08
- 61 : Stacey’s Dad
- I bet she gets you to mow the lawn, doesn’t she?
- D.17
- 65 : Banter
- This was an actual mock conversation between me and a friend at TGiF. The waitress walked up around panel 5 and was somewhat put off.
- D.22
- 67 : Nerd Girls
- Nothing personal, high schoolers.
- D.01
- 70 : Guitar Hero
- And then do it again in a moment now that they’re out of Star Power
- D.06
- 72 : Classhole
- A term coined by my friend Beth
- D.08
- 73 : Zeppelin
- A tribute to Buttercup Festival
- D.10
- 74 : Su Doku
- This one is from the Red Belt collection, of 'medium' difficulty.
- D.20
- 78 : Garfield
- The use of the 'Garfield' character for the purposes of this parody qualifies as fair use under the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. sec. 107. See Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music (92-1292), 510 U.S. 569
- D.22
- 79 : Iambic Pentameter
- Of course, you don’t wanna limit yourself to the strict forms of the meter. That could get pretty difficult.
- D.27
- 81 : Attention, shopper
- There’s a red convertible outside my building with the license plate 'DADS MNY'.
- D.31
- 83 : Katamari
- As the King of All Cosmos remarked, 'Is it that it’s fun, or that it lets you forget yourself?'
- D.05
- 85 : Paths
- It’s true, I think about this all the time.
- D.10
- 87 : Velociraptors
- You’re probably thinking, 'has it been a decade?' It’s been over thirteen years, buddy.
- D.12
- 88 : Escher Bracelet
- The only downside is that it would be a little uncomfortable
- D.14
- 89 : Gravitational Mass
- She’s so fat the attraction goes up as the CUBE of the distance instead of the square
- D.17
- 90 : Jacket
- We have this conversation at least once a day in my apartment
- D.19
- 91 : Pwned
- I’m sure a discussion of the reason for the disappearance of adventure games in favor of RPGs would be fascinating
- D.21
- 92 : Sunrise
- Sometimes, I sit on top of parking decks and watch the sun rise. I feel like I should have a guitar or something.
- D.24
- 93 : Jeremy Irons
- Movies that I know word-for-word, part one
- D.01
- 96 : Mail
- I’m on the USPS No Fly List
- D.05
- 98 : Fall Apart
- #pugglewumper Tashari got me some ink pens! I’ve been experimenting with them.
- D.12
- 101 : Laser Scope
- I wish I’d missed you then so I wouldn’t be missing you now
- D.19
- 104 : Find You
- I’m like the Terminator, except with love!
- D.29
- 108 : M.C. Hammer Slide
- Once, long ago, I saw this girl go by. I didn’t stop and talk to her, and I’ve regretted it ever since.
- D.31
- 109 : Spoiler Alert
- And then it turns out they’re both Tyler Durden.
- D.02
- 110 : Clark Gable
- Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a BITCH ASS SHIT FUCK DAMN
- D.07
- 112 : Baring My Heart
- I’m just trying to explain, please don’t be jealous! Man, why are all my relationships ruined by early 90's rappers?
- D.09
- 113 : Riemann-Zeta
- 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.
- D.14
- 115 : Meerkat
- Gorilla, yes. Adorable golden retriever, yes. But it says nothing about meerkats.
- D.16
- 116 : City
- God, she’s such a whore.
- D.19
- 117 : Pong
- 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.
- D.21
- 118 : 50 Ways
- I woke up to find that I had scrawled the last line of this sleepily on a sheet of paper on my desk. I shouldn’t have listened to the 70's hit marathon on the way home from work the night before.
- D.23
- 119 : Worst Band Name Ever
- You can just see his dejection as he realizes he’s the lead guitar in 'Hedgeclipper'
- D.26
- 120 : Dating Service
- I don’t understand why people are so disingenuous! I just want someone to walk with!
- D.28
- 121 : Balloon
- So I’m a bad person.
- D.30
- 122 : Quirky Girls
- Romantic comedy heroines, I’m talking to you.
- D.03
- 123 : Centrifugal Force
- You spin me right round, baby, right round, in a manner depriving me of an inertial reference frame. Baby.
- D.05
- 124 : Blogofractal
- 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.
- D.07
- 125 : Marketing Interview
- There are a lot of books on marketing out there. I wonder if you’re safest just buying the most popular one.
- D.12
- 127 : The Fast and the Furious
- Sometimes when I steer shopping carts around corners, I slide them a little and pretend I’m getting the blue spark boost.
- D.14
- 128 : dPain over dt
- You laugh to keep from crying, you do math to keep from crying . . .
- D.17
- 129 : Content Protection
- If you think the purveyors of DRM simply want to protect artists, check out chapters 13 and 14 in Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig. Their goal is the elimination of all culture they don’t control.
- D.19
- 130 : Julia Stiles
- I found an old tape of this episode in my family’s closet. Check the news section of the forums to see the clip!
- D.21
- 131 : Fans
- It’s not going to break the fan, bouncing a rubber ball off the wall isn’t going to dent it, and the roof can hold me just fine. You LIED!
- D.24
- 132 : Music Knowledge
- When Guitar Hero 2 comes out I’ll have fresh conversational material for MONTHS.
- D.26
- 133 : The Raven
- Yes, Eminem is wearing a sleeveless hoodie. What of it?
- D.28
- 134 : Myspace
- It’s like they got together and said 'what do we miss most from the internet in 1998? that’s right, embedded MIDI!'
- D.02
- 136 : Science Fair
- This project actually inspired a two-hour powerpoint presentation that Al Gore gave around the country.
- D.04
- 137 : Dreams
- In Connor’s second thesis it is stated ‘There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.’ Does the routine destroy our creativity or do we lose creativity and fall into the routine? Anyway, who’s up for a road trip!
- D.07
- 138 : Pointers
- Every computer, at the unreachable memory address 0x-1, stores a secret. I found it, and it is that all humans ar-- SEGMENTATION FAULT.
- D.11
- 140 : Delicious
- I’m currently in the I Have Cheese phase of this cycle.
- D.14
- 141 : Parody Week: Achewood
- I always wanted to impress them with how well I could hear, didn’t you? Also, this sets the record for number of awkward-pause panels in one strip (previously held by Achewood)
- D.18
- 145 : Parody Week: Dinosaur Comics
- Guys: while I was writing this, I accidentally swallowed a table-sized slab of drywall. I know! Wacky.
- D.21
- 146 : Join Myspace
- I really shouldn’t abuse that power so heavily.
- D.23
- 147 : A Way So Familiar
- Two Hedwig references, an obscure Joey Comeau reference, and a girl with a mohawk. Yes.
- D.25
- 148 : Mispronouncing
- My pal Emad does this all the time. 'Hey man, which way to the airpart?'
- D.28
- 149 : Sandwich
- Proper User Policy apparently means Simon Says.
- D.29
- 150 : Grownups
- I’ve looked into this, and I can’t figure out a way to do it cheaply. And I guess it wouldn’t be sanitary.
- *
- D.01
- 151 : Mario
- Why would anyone ever, ever say that? Please, nobody ever say that.
- D.03
- 152 : Hamster Ball
- Reportedly, double-walled inflatable balls like this exist somewhere. Now to find that place.
- D.06
- 153 : Cryptography
- If you got a big keyspace, let me search it.
- D.08
- 154 : Beliefs
- Scientists are also sexy, let’s not forget that.
- D.11
- 155 : Search History
- SomethingAwful has a wonderful compilation of crazy AOL searches in their Weekend Web archives, 2006-08-13.
- D.13
- 156 : Commented
- Your IDE’s color may vary.
- D.15
- 157 : Filler Art
- Maybe I should let up on Megatokyo a little?
- D.18
- 158 : Six Months
- But then she does that thing with her tongue and I remember why I left you.
- D.20
- 159 : Boombox
- And she’s gonna feel like a jerk when she realizes it was actually Under Pressure.
- D.22
- 161 : Accident
- As far as treachery-as-driving-music goes, Katamari music is matched only by Guitar Hero music.
- D.25
- 162 : Angular Momentum
- With reasonable assumptions about latitude and body shape, how much time might she gain them? Note: whatever the answer, sunrise always comes too soon. (Also, is it worth it if she throws up?)
- D.27
- 163 : Donald Knuth
- His books were kinda intimidating; rappelling down through his skylight seemed like the best option.
- D.29
- 164 : Playing Devil’s Advocate to Win
- There are so many well-meaning conservatives around here who just assume global warming is only presented as a moral issue for political reasons.
- D.02
- 165 : Turn Signals
- I’m not very good at meeting people.
- D.04
- 166 : Misusing Slang
- It slowly dawns on us that our parents knew exactly what they were doing.
- D.06
- 167 : Nihilism
- Why can’t you have normal existential angst like all the other boys?
- D.09
- 168 : Reverse Euphemisms
- I’m still waiting for a chance to use 'I have to see a man about a horse'.
- D.13
- 170 : Turn Back
- I hear that these days Bill Watterson is happy just painting in the Ohio woods with his father and doesn’t get any mail or talk to anyone.
- D.16
- 171 : String Theory
- This works on pretty much every level.
- *
- D.20
- 173 : Movie Seating
- It’s like the traveling salesman problem, but the endpoints are different and you can’t ask your friends for help because they’re sitting three seats down.
- D.25
- 175 : Automatic Doors
- I hope no automatic doors I know read this. I would be so embarrassed.
- D.27
- 176 : Before Sunrise
- It’s an amazing time of day; the light is great for photography.
- D.30
- 177 : Alice and Bob
- Yet one more reason I’m barred from speaking at crypto conferences.
- D.01
- 178 : Not Really Into Pokemon
- As of this writing, Ubuntu 6.10 and Firefox 2.0 have left my computer a complete mess.
- D.03
- 179 : e to the pi times i
- I have never been totally satisfied by the explanations for why e to the ix gives a sinusoidal wave.
- D.06
- 180 : Canada
- IT’S ALL REAL
- D.08
- 181 : Interblag
- Sometimes I hate the internet. Sometimes it makes me happy that ‘The Tubes’ has become slang for the internet so quickly.
- D.10
- 182 : Nash
- Maybe someday science will get over its giant collective crush on Richard Feynman. But I doubt it!
- D.13
- 183 : Snacktime Rules
- I am not making this rule up. Although my mom wants you all to know it made perfect sense at the time.
- D.15
- 184 : Matrix Transform
- In fact, draw all your rotational matrices sideways. Your professors will love it! And then they’ll go home and shrink.
- D.17
- 185 : Wikifriends
- It’s crazy how much my gut opinion of a movie/song is swayed by what other people say, regardless of how I felt coming out of the theater.
- D.20
- 186 : Console Lines
- If I get a Wii, it will be the first game console I’ve owned.
- D.22
- 187 : The Familiar
- When I say we should do something sometime, I’m secretly hoping you’ll say 'Why not now?'
- D.24
- 188 : Reload
- And watch out for that guy from comic #53.
- D.27
- 189 : Exercise
- I haven’t had the patience for RPGs in a long time.
- D.29
- 190 : IPoD
- For smaller numbers he has to SAVE lives. The birthrate channel is even more of a mixed bag.
- D.01
- 191 : Lojban
- zo’o ta jitfa .i .e’o xu do pendo mi
- D.04
- 192 : Working for Google
- I hear once you’ve worked there for 256 days they teach you the secret of levitation.
- D.08
- 194 : Penises
- The penis varies in size when flaccid and is pretty consistently about yea big when erect. Anyway, back to the sitcom one-liners and the constant flow of spam.
- D.13
- 196 : Command Line Fu
- When designing an interface, imagine that your program is all that stands between the user and hot, sweaty, tangled-bedsheets-fingertips-digging-into-the-back sex.
- D.15
- 197 : Ninja Turtles
- The henchmen Bebop and Rocksteady have hijacked the musical genres for us just like the Lone Ranger hijacked the William Tell Overture for our parents.
- D.18
- 198 : Perspective
- I wonder what I was dreaming to prompt that. I hope it wasn’t the Richard Stallman Cirque de Soleil thing again.
- D.20
- 199 : Right-Hand Rule
- To really expand your mind try some noncartesian porn. Edwin Abbot Abbott has nothing on 'Girls on Girls in Tightly Closed Nonorientable Spaces'.
- D.22
- 200 : Bill Nye
- You could at least not wear the lab coat everywhere, dude.
- D.25
- 201 : Christmas GPS
- If it’s over water, and you can’t get a boat or revise the rules to preserve the makeout, there is no helping you.
- D.27
- 202 : YouTube
- I pray GunPistolMan never learns the word 'sheeple'.
- D.29
- 203 : Hallucinations
- And the possibility of lucid dreaming just makes it that much more fascinating.
Y.2007
- D.01
- 204 : America
- The younger folk in the audience think this is a joke.
- D.05
- 206 : Reno Rhymes
- Did you shoot a man in Reno? Now, I don't mean to pry.
- D.08
- 207 : What xkcd Means
- It means shuffling quickly past nuns on the street with ketchup in your palms, pretending you're hiding stigmata.
- D.12
- 209 : Kayak
- Man, there's future *everywhere*.
- D.15
- 210 : 90's Flowchart
- Freestyle rapping is basically applied Markov chains.
- D.17
- 211 : Hamster Ball Heist
- First person to bring me Wayne Coyne in a hamster ball gets a free t-shirt! He gets one too.
- D.19
- 212 : Brain
- The rest is fear of raptors.
- D.22
- 213 : Ghostbusters Marathon
- If you walk out that door you'll be crossing the Rubicon with me, and that's one stream I'm not ready to cross.
- D.26
- 215 : Letting Go
- At least I never gave her the root password.
- D.02
- 218 : Nintendo Surgeon
- Scary thought #138: Raptors coming down the waterslide behind me.
- D.05
- 219 : Blanket Fort
- Also, we have a fort out in the woods where we stashed that hooker's body.
- D.07
- 220 : Philosophy
- It's like the squirt bottle we use with the cat.
- D.09
- 221 : Random Number
- RFC 1149.5 specifies 4 as the standard IEEE-vetted random number.
- D.12
- 222 : Small Talk
- But surely I owe you an accurate answer!
- D.14
- 223 : Valentine's Day
- One of these days me and Joey Comeau will get around to subverting the hetero-normative paradigm and fixing all this.
- D.16
- 224 : Lisp
- We lost the documentation on quantum mechanics. You'll have to decode the regexes yourself.
- D.19
- 225 : Open Source
- Later we'll dress up like Big Oil thugs and jump Ralph Nader.
- D.21
- 226 : Swingset
- Someone bring me a pocket fan so I can drift around the yard.
- D.23
- 227 : Color Codes
- (It's the TMBG Dial-a-Song line, to save you some time.)
- D.26
- 228 : Resonance
- It's really hard to control the frequency, actually.
- D.28
- 229 : Graffiti
- FOR AN INTRIGUING TIME CALL
- D.02
- 230 : Hamiltonian
- The problem with perspective is that it's bidirectional.
- D.05
- 231 : Cat Proximity
- Yes you are! And you're sitting there! Hi, kitty!
- D.07
- 232 : Chess Enlightenment
- You know that 'sweep the pieces off the board and see it in your mind' thing? Doesn't work.
- D.09
- 233 : A New CAPTCHA Approach
- They'd use that Futurama episode with Fry's dog, but even spambots cry at that.
- D.12
- 234 : Escape Artist
- Easier to escape: n-layered nested quotes or an iron maiden?
- D.14
- 235 : Kite
- It's easy to regret your awkward conversations but hard to regret the ones you didn't have.
- D.16
- 236 : Collecting Double-Takes
- Fun game: find a combination of two items that most freaks out the cashier. Winner: pregnancy test and single coat hanger.
- D.19
- 237 : Keyboards are Disgusting
- Alternate method: convince them to pretend it's an Etch-a-Sketch and try to erase it.
- D.21
- 238 : Pet Peeve #114
- I'm reading a goddamn book, thank you very much.
- D.23
- 239 : Blagofaire
- Things were better before the Structuring and the Levels.
- D.26
- 240 : Dream Girl
- No matter how elaborately you fool yourself.
- D.28
- 241 : Battle Room
- Bean actually sabotaged it just to give Dink the excuse to make that joke.
- D.30
- 242 : The Difference
- How could you choose avoiding a little pain over understanding a magic lightning machine?
- D.02
- 243 : Appropriate Term
- I know a lot of people hate these, but I prefer them to touchpads.
- D.04
- 244 : Tabletop Roleplaying
- I may have also tossed one of a pair of teleportation rings into the ocean, with interesting results.
- D.06
- 245 : Floor Tiles
- The worst part is when sidewalk cracks are out-of-sync with your natural stride.
- D.09
- 246 : Labyrinth Puzzle
- And the whole setup is just a trap to capture escaping logicians. None of the doors actually lead out.
- D.13
- 248 : Hypotheticals
- What if someone broke out of a hypothetical situation in your room right now?
- D.16
- 249 : Chess Photo
- We once tried playing blindfold chess on the Aerosmith ride at Disney World.
- D.18
- 250 : Snopes
- The MythBusters are even more sinister.
- D.20
- 251 : CD Tray Fight
- This is silly, of course. The enemy will be born in the network.
- D.23
- 252 : Escalators
- The one time I tried, I got hit by a slinky going down at double speed.
- D.27
- 254 : Comic Fragment
- No one wants an explanation more than us. Except Ms. Garofalo.
- D.30
- 255 : Subjectivity
- Or maybe the slide is like Aslan, and gets taller as I do (except without the feeling of discomfort when I reach my teens and suddenly get the Christ stuff.)
- D.02
- 256 : Online Communities
- I'm waiting for the day when, if you tell someone 'I'm from the internet', instead of laughing they just ask 'oh, what part?'
- D.04
- 257 : Code Talkers
- As far as I can tell, Navajo doesn't have a common word for 'zero'. do-neh-lini means 'neutral'.
- D.09
- 259 : Clichd Exchanges
- It's like they say, you gotta fight fire with clichés.
- D.14
- 261 : Regarding Mussolini
- Constantly stopping these briefings halfway through is becoming a pain.
- D.18
- 263 : Certainty
- a(b+c)=(ab)+(ac). Politicize that, bitches.
- D.21
- 264 : Choices: Part 1
- Wait, damn, I think I spotted a new email on the last refresh.
- D.21
- 265 : Choices: Part 2
- Maybe someday I'll get to write the Wikipedia article about this place! Wait, damn, original research.
- D.23
- 266 : Choices: Part 3
- Wait, this is space -- how are you talking to me? And, as an afterthought, what's up with the hole in reality?
- D.24
- 267 : Choices: Part 4
- Making out with yourself: now an official xkcd theme? Troubling.
- D.25
- 268 : Choices: Part 5
- I wonder what percentage of not-obviously-busy people on the street would say yes to kite-flying with a stranger. This looks like a job for Science!
- D.28
- 269 : TCMP
- 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.
- D.30
- 270 : Merlin
- I mean, the black-and-white stuff was running backward, but it hardly mattered to the story.
- D.01
- 271 : Powers of One
- It's kinda Zen when you think about it, if you don't think too hard.
- D.04
- 272 : Linux User at Best Buy
- We actually stand around the antivirus displays with the Mac users just waiting for someone to ask.
- D.06
- 273 : Electromagnetic Spectrum
- Sometimes I try to picture what everything would look like if the whole spectrum were compressed into the visible spectrum. Also sometimes I try to picture your sister naked.
- D.08
- 274 : With Apologies to The Who
- Trivia: Roger Daltry originally wrote 'Don't try an' Digg what we all say' but erased the second 'g' when he moved to reddit.
- D.11
- 275 : Thoughts
- And now I might never get to again.
- D.13
- 276 : Fixed Width
- I wish I knew how to quit this so I wouldn't have to quit you.
- D.15
- 277 : Long Light
- You can look at practically any part of anything manmade around you and think 'some engineer was frustrated while designing this.' It's a little human connection.
- D.18
- 278 : Black Hat Support
- So as not to leave you hanging -- it was a problem with select() calls.
- D.20
- 279 : Pickup Lines
- That shirt looks good on you, but it would look even better stuffed into the neck of a vodka bottle and flung burning through our office building's window. Let's fucking do it and never look back.
- D.22
- 280 : Librarians
- Don't expect any leniency on late fees, though.
- D.25
- 281 : Online Package Tracking
- I don't even *want* this package! Why did I join the stinging insect of the month club, anyway?
- D.29
- 283 : Projection
- 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 ...
- D.02
- 284 : Tape Measure
- This sequence was later reproduced in the International Tape-Extending Federation archives, retitled 'The Founding of the Sport'.
- D.06
- 286 : All Your Base
- The AYB retro-return-date (Zero Wing Zero Hour) should be around AD 2021.
- D.09
- 287 : NP-Complete
- General solutions get you a 50% tip.
- D.11
- 288 : Elevator
- Quick, try it with 'LOVE'.
- D.13
- 289 : Alone
- Worries assuaged, the numbers become less important than your touches.
- D.18
- 291 : Dignified
- 'I don't know, why is your beret staying on your head?' 'Staples.'
- D.20
- 292 : goto
- Neal Stephenson thinks it's cute to name his labels 'dengo'
- D.23
- 293 : RTFM
- Life is too short for man pages, but occasionally much too short without them.
- D.25
- 294 : Bookstore
- You can search it if you want, but you may want to skip the memories of your mom.
- D.27
- 295 : DNE
- I've seen advertisers put their URLs on chalkboards, encircled with a DNE. They went unerased for months. If you see this, feel free to replace the URL with xkcd.com.
- D.30
- 296 : Tony Hawk
- Bad idea #271: Dropping into the half-pipe on a Segway.
- D.01
- 297 : Lisp Cycles
- I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the MIT computer science program permamently.
- D.03
- 298 : Tesla Coil
- For scientists, this can be the hardest thing about dreams.
- D.06
- 299 : Aeris Dies
- It's bad enough that all the families in your Sims are just you and Maggie recreated over and over.
- D.08
- 300 : Facebook
- 'Here, I'll put my number in your cell pho -- wait, why is it already here?'
- D.10
- 301 : Limerick
- Fun game: try to post a YouTube comment so stupid that people realize you must be joking. (Hint: this is impossible)
- D.13
- 302 : Names
- I'm always so happy that I successfully navigated the introduction that I completely forget to pay attention to the name the other person told me.
- D.15
- 303 : Compiling
- 'Are you stealing those LCDs?' 'Yeah, but I'm doing it while my code compiles.'
- D.20
- 305 : Rule 34
- Okay, Lance. For entry into the college bowl, spell 'Throbbing'
- D.22
- 306 : Orphaned Projects
- His date works for Red Hat, who hired a coach for her, too. He advised her to 'rent lots of movies like Hitch. Guys love those.'
- D.24
- 307 : Excessive Quotation
- Unfortunately for her, real Star Wars fans are attracted to a gal with a good force choke.
- D.27
- 308 : Interesting Life
- Quick, fashion a climbing harness out of cat-6 cable and follow me down.
- D.29
- 309 : Shopping Teams
- I am never going out to buy an air conditioner with my sysadmin again.
- D.31
- 310 : Commitment
- Could be worse. The last guy in that situation fell for one of the transient trumpeting angels.
- D.03
- 311 : Action Movies
- By my count, only 48 of the 158 minutes in Live Free or Die Hard have action. That's pathetic, guys. Crank is better, but needs a bigger budget and more Summer Glau.
- D.07
- 313 : Insomnia
- Crap, I have levitation class at 25:131. Better set the alarm to 'cinnamon'.
- D.10
- 314 : Dating Pools
- The full analysis is of course much more complicated, but I can't stay to talk about it because I have a date.
- D.12
- 315 : Braille
- The only big difference I've seen is in colors. Where the regular text reads 'press red button', the braille reads 'press two-inch button'.
- D.14
- 316 : Loud Sex
- Spherical or parabolic reflectors would of course lead to aberrant behavior.
- D.17
- 317 : That Lovin' Feelin'
- Maybe there's no tenderness in her fingertips either, but at least SHE puts out.
- D.19
- 318 : Nostalgia
- If you don't get this one, don't google it.
- D.24
- 320 : 28-Hour Day
- Small print: this schedule will eventually drive one stark raving mad.
- D.26
- 321 : Thighs
- My thighs have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord?
- D.28
- 322 : Pix Plz
- But one of the regulars in the channel is a girl!
- D.03
- 324 : Tapping
- Sometimes the best fun looks like boredom.
- D.05
- 325 : A-Minus-Minus
- You can do this one in every 30 times and still have 97% positive feedback.
- D.08
- 326 : Effect an Effect
- Time to paint another grammarian silhouette on the side of the desktop.
- D.10
- 327 : Exploits of a Mom
- Her daughter is named Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory.
- D.12
- 328 : Eggs
- Oh, yeah, we get tons of them at these casual sex bars.
- D.15
- 329 : Turing Test
- Hit Turing right in the test-ees.
- D.17
- 330 : Indecision
- Hey, I don't make the rules. It's in the book.
- D.19
- 331 : Photoshops
- When I look into your eyes, I see JPEG artifacts. I can tell by the pixels that we're wrong for each other.
- D.22
- 332 : Gyroscopes
- We didn't actually land on the moon -- it just looked like we did because of precession. Also, gyroscopes caused 9/11.
- D.24
- 333 : Getting Out of Hand
- Wikipedia's role as brain-extension, while a little troubling, is also really cool.
- D.26
- 334 : Wasteland
- You make forgetting look so easy.
- D.29
- 335 : Mattress
- The TempurPedic wineglass guy broke his ankle.
- D.31
- 336 : Priorities
- You should start giving out 'E's so I can spell FACADE or DEFACED.
- D.02
- 337 : Post Office Showdown
- That track ('Battle Without Honor or Humanity') -- like 'Ride of the Valkyries' -- improves *any* activity.
- D.05
- 338 : Future
- But the past was much too cramped!
- D.07
- 339 : Classic
- Someone get that Pachelbel's Canon kid a recording contract, stat.
- D.09
- 340 : Fight
- And she put sweet nothings in all my .conf files. It'll take me forever to get X working again.
- D.12
- 341 : 1337: Part 1
- If you're not cool enough to do it manually, you can look up tools like Upside-Down-Ternet for playing games with people on your wifi.
- D.13
- 342 : 1337: Part 2
- Trivia: Elaine is actually her middle name.
- D.14
- 343 : 1337: Part 3
- I once asked an NSA guy whether they'd broken RSA. And I know I can trust him, because I asked if he was lying to me and he said no.
- D.15
- 344 : 1337: Part 4
- Mrs. Roberts would have gotten up sooner, of course, but she was busy piping find ~ and find ~nomad into xargs shred, just in case.
- D.16
- 345 : 1337: Part 5
- This digital music thing will probably reach its endgame sometime in the next decade or so. These are very exciting times.
- D.19
- 346 : Diet Coke+Mentos
- The cola+Mentos trick is up there with corn starch+water (vibrating platter optional) in scientific coolness out of common kitchen supplies.
- D.21
- 347 : Brick Archway
- The TI-86 was bad enough. I don't know how I'd have gotten through high school if I'd had a laptop+wifi.
- D.23
- 348 : Close to You
- We should probably talk about this before the wedding.
- D.26
- 349 : Success
- 40% of OpenBSD installs lead to shark attacks. It's their only standing security issue.
- D.28
- 350 : Network
- Viruses so far have been really disappointing on the 'disable the internet' front, and time is running out. When Linux/Mac win in a decade or so the game will be over.
- D.30
- 351 : Trolling
- And I was really impressed with how they managed to shock the Goatse guy.
- D.03
- 352 : Far Away
- Sometimes an impulsive 2:00 AM cross-country trip is the only solution.
- D.05
- 353 : Python
- I wrote 20 short programs in Python yesterday. It was wonderful. Perl, I'm leaving you.
- D.07
- 354 : Startling
- We actually reached the future about three years ago.
- D.10
- 355 : Couple
- Facebook defines relationships. 'Yeah, we would have broken up last night, but the net connection was down.'
- D.12
- 356 : Nerd Sniping
- I first saw this problem on the Google Labs Aptitude Test. A professor and I filled a blackboard without getting anywhere. Have fun.
- D.14
- 357 : Flies
- I don't know about houseflies, but we definitely caught a lot of fruit flies with our vinegar bowl. Hooray science!
- D.17
- 358 : Loud Party
- I'm glad this is so much fun because I'm not sure how we're getting down.
- D.19
- 359 : Rock Band
- I'm gonna have to add something to the strum bar so it makes a clicky sound like the old controllers. I'm so used to the feedback; the silence throws me off.
- D.21
- 360 : Writers Strike
- He's just jealous because everyone's up in the attic listening to Stephen Colbert.
- D.26
- 362 : Blade Runner
- Blade Runner: Classic, but incredibly slow.
- D.28
- 363 : Reset
- Clearance for this Sign: 11 Feet
Y.2008
- D.02
- 365 : Slides
- Did you know they can actually physically throw you out of SIGGRAPH?
- D.04
- 366 : Your Mom
- 'It's either 'your mom' jokes or me' 'Then I, like so many men before me, must reluctantly choose your mom.'
- D.07
- 367 : Fandom
- Ron Paul wants to put the New Republic back on the Corusca gem standard.
- D.09
- 368 : Bass
- And sometimes I use it to retaliate against the guy upstairs with the loud girlfriend and the elliptical dish.
- D.11
- 369 : Dangers
- Zero results: 'snake charming' and 'haberdashery'. (Things like 'car' and 'boating' and such are of course the highest, by a huge margin.)
- D.14
- 370 : Redwall
- My Redwall/Jurassic Park crossover fanfic is almost complete!
- D.16
- 371 : Compiler Complaint
- Checking whether build environment is sane ... build environment is grinning and holding a spatula. Guess not.
- D.23
- 374 : Journal
- And the journal is filled with all the things I'd say to her if I were nice like you. I burn it when it's full.
- D.25
- 375 : Pod Bay Doors
- As they're both unplugged, they do a lovely Daisy Daisy/Still Alive duet.
- D.28
- 376 : Bug
- The universe started in 1970. Anyone claiming to be over 38 is lying about their age.
- D.30
- 377 : Journal 2
- That's my hat! You took my hat!
- D.01
- 378 : Real Programmers
- Real programmers set the universal constants at the start such that the universe evolves to contain the disk with the data they want.
- D.04
- 379 : Forgetting
- Of course, the assert doesn't work.
- D.06
- 380 : Emoticon
- U+FDD0 is actually Unicode for the eye of the basilisk, though for safety reasons no font actually renders it.
- D.08
- 381 : Mobius Battle
- Films need to do this more, if only to piss off the people who have to feed it into the projector.
- D.11
- 382 : Trebuchet
- It was also fun when those teenagers tried to egg our house and it insta-cooked the eggs in mid-air.
- D.13
- 383 : Helping
- Oh, look, the 'make everything better' button was here behind the bookshelf all along.
- D.15
- 384 : The Drake Equation
- But seriously, there's loads of intelligent life. It's just not screaming constantly in all directions on the handful of frequencies we search.
- D.20
- 386 : Duty Calls
- What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!
- *
- D.25
- 388 : Fuck Grapefruit
- Coconuts are so far down to the left they couldn't be fit on the chart. Ever spent half an hour trying to open a coconut with a rock? Fuck coconuts.
- D.27
- 389 : Keeping Time
- You can identify them ahead-of-time -- they lead with their left foot when the music starts.
- D.29
- 390 : Nightmares
- Well, *I* think I'm real. Look at me. Look at my face. Cut me and I'll bleed. What more do you want? Please don't go.
- D.03
- 391 : Anti-Mindvirus
- I'm as surprised as you! I didn't think it was possible.
- D.05
- 392 : Making Rules
- I never understood why someone would expect me to accept their rules right after they'd punched me. I'm sure it's all very symbolic or something.
- D.10
- 394 : Kilobyte
- I would take 'kibibyte' more seriously if it didn't sound so much like 'Kibbles N Bits'.
- D.12
- 395 : Morning
- I'd press on them to try to unstick them, but I can't reach. Can we try cycling day and night really fast?
- D.14
- 396 : The Ring
- On the other hand, poor Samara -- transcoded to FLV. No one deserves that.
- D.17
- 397 : Unscientific
- Last week, we busted the myth that electroweak gauge symmetry is broken by the Higgs mechanism. We'll also examine the existence of God and whether true love exists.
- D.19
- 398 : Tap That Ass
- Hey, when you're done draining the syrup, just leave the hole, okay?
- D.21
- 399 : Travelling Salesman Problem
- What's the complexity class of the best linear programming cutting-plane techniques? I couldn't find it anywhere. Man, the Garfield guy doesn't have these problems ...
- D.26
- 401 : Large Hadron Collider
- When charged particles of more than 5 TeV pass through a bubble chamber, they leave a trail of candy.
- D.28
- 402 : 1,000 Miles North
- Twister would've been a much better movie if they'd cut out the bad-guy storm chaser and all the emotional romance crap. All you need for a good movie are tornados and scientists. Actually, that's all you need for anything.
- D.31
- 403 : Convincing Pickup Line
- Check it out; I've had sex with someone who's had sex with someone who's written a paper with Paul Erdos!
- D.02
- 405 : Journal 3
- Oh, and, uh, if the Russian government asks, that submarine was always there.
- D.04
- 406 : Venting
- P.P.S. I can kill you with my brain.
- D.07
- 407 : Cheap GPS
- In lieu of mapping software, I once wrote a Perl program which, given a USB GPS receiver and a destination, printed 'LEFT' 'RIGHT' OR 'STRAIGHT' based on my heading.
- D.09
- 408 : Overqualified
- To anyone I've taken on a terrible date, this is retroactively my cover story.
- D.14
- 410 : Math Paper
- That's nothing. I once lost my genetics, rocketry, and stripping licenses in a single incident.
- D.16
- 411 : Techno
- I don't know what's worse -- that there exists broken-hard-drive-sound techno, or that it's not half bad.
- D.21
- 413 : New Pet
- ONE LAPTOP PER HAMSTER!
- D.25
- 415 : Restraining Order
- On Mondays I go running, so you'll have to get up early and follow along on a parallel street. What fun!
- D.30
- 417 : The Man Who Fell Sideways
- Strip originally conceived in conversation with Jeph Jacques. Soon to be a major motion picture.
- D.02
- 418 : Stove Ownership
- Although maybe it's just a phase, like freshman year of college when I realized I could just buy frosting in a can.
- D.05
- 419 : Forks and Spoons
- 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.
- D.07
- 420 : Jealousy
- Oh, huh, so you didn't know that story?
- D.09
- 421 : Making Hash Browns
- There are at least fourteen ways this could go badly (seventeen if that fork is a dangerous crossbreed.)
- D.12
- 422 : A Better Idea
- It's *almost* enough to make me want to redo high school.
- D.14
- 423 : Finish Line
- The question with Lucy and the football was always whether, on some level, she believed the things she said.
- D.16
- 424 : Security Holes
- True story: I had to try several times to upload this comic because my ssh key was blacklisted.
- D.19
- 425 : Fortune Cookies
- 'You will have hot, steamy, sweaty sex ... IN BED!'
- D.23
- 427 : Bad Timing
- Protip: Even without the red spiders, never have that conversation halfway through a balloon ride.
- D.26
- 428 : Starwatching
- I always figured the word 'blog' would sound *less* silly as the years went by.
- D.28
- 429 : Fantasy
- I guess if she accepted irrational realities, she'd hardly be my fantasy.
- D.30
- 430 : Every Damn Morning
- There was something about a cup and a sword and a tree and a green hill ...
- D.02
- 431 : Delivery
- Ma'am, I admit that wasn't in the best taste, but you have to admire my delivery! Ha ha, get it? Oh God, don't throw those syringes! Your baby's fine!
- D.04
- 432 : Journal 4
- Man, this emo shit was supposed to be for people who didn't have hats.
- D.06
- 433 : Journal 5
- 'Pick you up at eight?' 'Nine. I've got to re-mine the driveway.'
- D.11
- 435 : Purity
- On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.
- D.16
- 437 : SUV
- Electric skateboards, by cost, get the equivalent of about 300 miles per gallon. Lithium batteries just need to get cheaper.
- D.20
- 439 : Thinking Ahead
- Did he just go crazy and jump out the window?
- D.23
- 440 : Road Rage
- Okay, now just as the loss hits him, slam on the brakes.
- *
- D.25
- 441 : Babies
- I bet my future kids will read this someday. DEAR FUTURE KIDS: how did you get internet in the cellar?
- *
- D.30
- 443 : Know Your Vines
- Friggin' modern tents don't have a single piece of rope.
- D.02
- 444 : Macgyver Gets Lazy
- At the time of this writing, Wikipedia has a wonderful article titled 'List of problems solved by Macgyver'.
- D.07
- 446 : In Popular Culture
- Someday the 'in popular culture' section will have its own article with an 'in popular culture' section. It will reference this title-text referencing it, and the blogosphere will implode.
- D.09
- 447 : Too Old For This Shit
- They say if a mathematician doesn't do their great work by age eleven, they never will.
- D.11
- 448 : Good Morning
- As my standard, I use going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 8 AM.
- D.16
- 450 : The Sea
- And then a second one, to drain the sea.
- D.18
- 451 : Impostor
- If you think this is too hard on literary criticism, read the Wikipedia article on deconstruction.
- D.21
- 452 : Mission
- Don't you know? The chances of a random object being a scone are about one in six.
- D.23
- 453 : Upcoming Hurricanes
- 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.
- D.25
- 454 : Rewiring
- My friend Elizabeth tried to mail one end of the cable to me and thread the mail system.
- D.30
- 456 : Cautionary
- This really is a true story, and she doesn't know I put it in my comic because her wifi hasn't worked for weeks.
- D.01
- 457 : Frustration
- 'Don't worry, I can do it in under a minute.' 'Yes, I've noticed.'
- D.04
- 458 : Regrets
- And nothing for 'I'm glad I saw Epic Movie.'
- D.06
- 459 : Holy Ghost
- Okay, everyone, cross yourselves, then cross the streams.
- D.08
- 460 : Paleontology
- Dinosaurs totally jumped the ichthyosaur when they got rid of Brontosaurus.
- D.11
- 461 : Google Maps
- Apparently Google assumes you're traveling during the ferry's normal operating hours. We lost two hours circling that damn lake (to say nothing of the Straw Man).
- D.15
- 463 : Voting Machines
- And that's *another* crypto conference I've been kicked out of. C'mon, it's a great analogy!
- D.18
- 464 : RBA
- This is a story all about how I started drinking.
- D.20
- 465 : Quantum Teleportation
- Science should be exactly as cool as the headlines sound. Like the 'RUSSIANS CUT APART AND REASSEMBLE DOGS' thing.
- D.22
- 466 : Moving
- We need a special holiday to honor the countless kind souls with unsecured networks named 'linksys'.
- D.25
- 467 : X Girls Y Cups
- Also no results: 1girl10000cups, 2girls(5+3i)cups, 65536girls65536cups, or 3frenchhens2turtledoves1cup.
- D.27
- 468 : Fetishes
- They eventually resolved this self-reference, but Cantor's 'everything-in-the-fetish-book-twice' parties finally sunk the idea.
- D.29
- 469 : Improvised
- Oh, your brother is Luke. Sorry, should've mentioned that first.
- D.03
- 471 : Aversion Fads
- Hey, are you friends with any hamsters? This kite needs a passenger.
- D.08
- 473 : Still Raw
- We actually divorced once over the airplane/treadmill argument. (Preemptive response to the inevitable threads arguing about it: you're all wrong on the internet.)
- D.10
- 474 : Turn-On
- Supercollider? I 'ardly know 'er!
- D.12
- 475 : Further Boomerang Difficulties
- An eternity later, the universe having turned out to have positive curvature and lots of mass, the boomerang hits him in the back of the head.
- D.15
- 476 : One-Sided
- He continued, 'Okay, Bernanke is uncontaminated. Find a crossbow and get him into position behind one of the columns at the Fed entrance. This is gonna get ugly.'
- D.17
- 477 : Typewriter
- Somewhere in the world, my actual grandmothers are reading this and angrily exclaiming that I never write even malformed thank-you notes. DEAR GRANDMOMS: I AM SORRY! YOU ARE WONDERFUL PEOPLE AND THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING. LOVE reddit.com RANDALL.
- D.19
- 478 : The Staple Madness
- Staple guns: because duct tape can't make that 'kaCHUNK' noise.
- D.22
- 479 : Tones
- I need a lawn, so I can yell at kids to stay off it.
- D.24
- 480 : Spore
- Way to not support the GMA 950 under OS X, Spore. :(
- D.29
- 482 : Height
- Interestingly, on a true vertical log plot, I think the Eiffel Tower's sides really would be straight lines.
- D.01
- 483 : Fiction Rule of Thumb
- Except for anything by Lewis Carroll or Tolkien, you get five made-up words per story. I'm looking at you, Anathem.
- D.03
- 484 : Flash Games
- Although ... who else can't wait for them to incorporate that Wiimote head-tracking stuff into games? Man, the future's gonna be *awesome*.
- D.06
- 485 : Depth
- The Planck length is another thousand or two pixels below the comic.
- D.08
- 486 : I am Not a Ninja
- 'The sad thing is that I just wanted to talk about your poor smoke-bomb techniques.'
- D.13
- 488 : Steal This Comic
- I spent more time trying to get an audible.com audio book playing than it took to listen to the book. I have lost every other piece of DRM-locked music I have paid for.
- D.15
- 489 : Going West
- Listen, they request that you stop submitting a listing for your house labeled 'WHERE YOU BROKE MY HEART'.
- D.17
- 490 : Morning Routine
- I had a really hard time not writing '... profit!'
- D.20
- 491 : Twitter
- If long tooltips / cut off for you / then upgrade from / Firefox 2 / Burma Shave
- D.22
- 492 : Scrabble
- A veteran Scrabble player will spot the 'OSTRICH' option.
- D.24
- 493 : Actuarial
- I started to do the tables for more famous people but it got really depressing and morbid and I had to go outside. Hat guy wins again.
- D.27
- 494 : Secretary: Part 1
- The blueprints for the Department of the Internet offices call for Ceiling Cat-themed sprinkler heads.
- D.29
- 496 : Secretary: Part 3
- He actually installed each piece in a different car in the lot, then built a new car in the spot from the displaced pieces. It's a confusing maneuver known as the auto-troll shuffle.
- D.03
- 499 : Scantron
- Also, after all the warnings about filling in the bubbles completely, I spent like 30 seconds on each one.
- D.05
- 500 : Election
- Someday I'll be rich enough to hire Nate Silver to help make all my life decisions. 'Should I sleep with her?' 'Well, I'm showing a 35% chance it will end badly.'
- D.07
- 501 : Faust 2.0
- The only blood these contracts are signed in is from me cutting my hand trying to open the goddamn CD case.
- D.10
- 502 : Dark Flow
- The Pioneer anomaly is due to the force of my love.
- D.12
- 503 : Terminology
- Also, is it just me, or do Japan and New Zealand look suspiciously similar? Has anyone seen them at a party together?
- D.14
- 504 : Legal Hacks
- It's totally a reasonable modern analogue. Jefferson would have been all about crypto.
- D.21
- 507 : Experimentation
- I understand large sample sizes are key to a low standard error of the mean, but the entire sophomore class?
- D.26
- 509 : Induced Current
- The MythBusters need to tackle whether a black hole from the LHC could REALLY destroy the world.
- D.28
- 510 : Egg Drop Failure
- I hear my brother Ricky won his school's egg drop by leaving the egg inside the hen.
- D.01
- 511 : Sleet
- I mean, I can barely hear myself complaining about Battlestar Galactica.
- D.03
- 512 : Alternate Currency
- For the first time ever, the phrase 'I'd like to thank everyone at 4chan for making me successful and happy' is uttered.
- D.05
- 513 : Friends
- Friends with detriments.
- D.08
- 514 : Simultaneous
- I'm leaving you for your twin. He's more mature than you by now.
- D.10
- 515 : No One Must Know
- Or perhaps they knew he was there, and were just trying to torment him first.
- D.12
- 516 : Wood Chips
- You didn't run a chemical analysis against the Shroud of Turin? Man, all that work for NOTHING.
- D.15
- 517 : Marshmallow Gun
- Except in reality crossing a stream of marshmallows would create a giant Bill Murray.
- D.17
- 518 : Flow Charts
- At 8 drinks, you switch the torrent from FreeBSD to Microsoft Bob. C'mon, it'll be fun!
- D.19
- 519 : 11th Grade
- 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.
- D.22
- 520 : Cuttlefish
- Unless the CS students finish the robot revolution before you finish the cephalopod one.
- D.26
- 522 : Google Trends
- Obama has been writing Lincoln/Obama erotic fan fiction on his secret livejournal. Excerpt: Lincoln lay back on the bed, nude save for his trademark stovepipe hat. 'Tell me,' he purred seductively, as he and Obama formed a more perfect union. 'When you come, is it 10% ethanol?'
- D.29
- 523 : Decline
- 'There's also a spike on the Fourier transform at the one-month mark where --' 'You want to stop talking right now.'
- D.31
- 524 : Party
- I wonder what 2008 meme will go bizarrely mainstream in 2009 like Rickrolling did 2007-2008. I Accidentally ? Yo dawg? Place your bets now!
Y.2009
- D.05
- 526 : Converting to Metric
- According to River, 'adequate' vacuuming systems drain the human body at about half a liter per second.
- D.07
- 527 : Keynote
- He should be better soon -- now that the Apple Store is getting rid of DRM, Cory Doctorow will get rid of his Steve Jobs voodoo doll.
- D.09
- 528 : Windows 7
- Disclaimer: I have not actually tried the beta yet. I hear it's quite pleasant and hardly Hitler-y at all.
- D.12
- 529 : Sledding Discussion
- If you get your hands on that one, it's the worst place to have a breaking-up conversation.
- D.14
- 530 : I'm An Idiot
- Sadly, this is a true story. At least I learned about the OS X 'say' command.
- D.16
- 531 : Contingency Plan
- Kids are genetic experiments. We're just experimenting responsibly!
- D.19
- 532 : Piano
- Good thing he didn't make it smaller, or it'd need someone three inches tall to play it.
- D.21
- 533 : Laptop Hell
- The xkcd.com sysadmin has a Q2010, and I can attest that it can handle a fall down several flight of concrete steps. Relatedly, he's upset with me -- I hope he doesn't take revenge by messing with my site's contenDISREGARD THAT I SUCK COCKS
- D.23
- 534 : Genetic Algorithms
- Just make sure you don't have it maximize instead of minimize.
- D.26
- 535 : It Might Be Cool
- 'And ovaries. Man, ovaries, huh?' [awkward pause] '... faithfully.'
- D.28
- 536 : Space Elevators
- If you think space elevators are good, but just too boring and practical, check out the 'space fountain'.
- D.02
- 538 : Security
- Actual actual reality: nobody cares about his secrets. (Also, I would be hard-pressed to find that wrench for $5.)
- *
- D.04
- 539 : Boyfriend
- ... okay, but because you said that, we're breaking up.
- D.06
- 540 : Base System
- I once got to second base with a basketball player. She was so confused.
- D.09
- 541 : TED Talk
- The IAU ban came after the 'redefinition of 'planet' to include the IAU president's mom' incident.
- D.11
- 542 : Cover-Up
- Man, this trick has saved me so many times.
- D.16
- 544 : Pep Talk
- Listen! They said a team of chess players coached by someone with no understanding of basketball would never be competitive in the NBA! Well, it turns out they're pretty perceptive.
- D.20
- 546 : Music DRM
- Just yesterday I bought my first non-DRM'd songs (The Last Vegas, in keeping with my 'I only listen to things from Guitar Hero' theme).
- D.23
- 547 : Simple
- 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.
- D.25
- 548 : Kindle
- 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.
- D.02
- 550 : Density
- If only I had asked 4chan for ideas for what I should do to prevent this!
- D.06
- 552 : Correlation
- Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
- D.09
- 553 : Pirate Bay
- We find you guilty of closing your torrents as soon as they finish. Your sentence is unremovable Hungarian subtitles on everything.
- D.11
- 554 : Not Enough Work
- It's even harder if you're an asshole who pronounces <> brackets.
- D.13
- 555 : Two Mirrors
- If you actually do this, what really happens is Douglas Hofstadter appears and talks to you for eight hours about strange loops.
- D.16
- 556 : Alternative Energy Revolution
- The moment their arms spun freely in our air, they were doomed -- for Man has earned his right to hold this planet against all comers, by virtue of occasionally producing someone totally batshit insane.
- D.18
- 557 : Students
- The same goes for the one where you're wrestling the Green Ranger in the swimming pool full of Crisco. You guys all have that dream, right? It's not just me. Right?
- D.20
- 558 : 1000 Times
- And 0.002 dollars will NEVER equal 0.002 cents.
- D.23
- 559 : No Pun Intended
- Like spelling 'dammit' correctly -- with two m's -- it's a troll that works best on the most literate.
- D.25
- 560 : Lithium Batteries
- I'm normally a pretty frugal person, but I still compulsively buy any R/C aircraft that's less than $30. In the last few years, this has become a problem.
- D.27
- 561 : Well
- I'll concede ergonomics anecdotally, but none of the studies of Dvorak were at all rigorous (the most-cited Navy study was overseen by Dvorak himself). And the 'slow typists down' thing is a myth. Also EMACS RULES VI DROOLS WOOOOOOO!
- D.30
- 562 : Parking
- Police reported three dozen cheerful bystanders, yet no one claims to have seen who did it.
- *
- D.01
- 563 : Fermirotica
- I love how Google handles dimensional analysis. Stats are ballpark and vary wildly by time of day and whether your mom is in town.
- D.03
- 564 : Crossbows
- I hate being the slowest guy in the lab.
- D.06
- 565 : Security Question
- Let's invite him to a party and play 'I never'. Okay, I never hid any bodies SOUTH of Main Street. ... he's taking a drink!
- D.08
- 566 : Matrix Revisited
- I actually remember being entertained by both the sequels while in the theater. They just don't hold up nearly as well in later comparison.
- D.10
- 567 : Urgent Mission
- Sure, we could stop dictators and pandemics, but we could also make the signs on every damn diagram make sense.
- D.13
- 568 : Well 2
- But I've made $13.72 already today! Ow, stop throwing pennies.
- D.15
- 569 : Borders
- Eventually a UN is set up. And then a lone rebel runs down the line of flags in front of it, runs back to his base, and gets a kajillion points.
- D.17
- 570 : New Car
- Somewhere out there is a company that has actually figured out how to enlarge penises, and it's helpless to reach potential customers.
- D.20
- 571 : Can't Sleep
- If androids someday DO dream of electric sheep, don't forget to declare sheepCount as a long int.
- D.22
- 572 : Together
- This scavenger hunt is getting boring. Let's go work on the treehouse!
- D.24
- 573 : Parental Trolling
- They'll pick music and culture that they know annoys you. Building in behavioral easter eggs is a fair retaliation!
- D.27
- 574 : Swine Flu
- Bad flu epidemics can hit young adults hardest because they provoke their powerful immune systems into overreaction, so to stay healthy spend the next few weeks drunk and sleep-deprived to keep yours suppressed.
- D.29
- 575 : Tag Combination
- I love Eileen / and want you to love her / When you're around / I'm one floor above her / If you could see / just how much I adore her / Oh, that pretty red dress / I'd do anything for her / (Too ra loo ra too ra loo rye ayy)
- D.01
- 576 : Packages
- Day six: 'The hell? Who mails a bobcat?'
- D.04
- 577 : The Race: Part 1
- Great, and you JUST finished paying off the settlement over the Wayne Coyne hamster ball incident.
- D.05
- 578 : The Race: Part 2
- The Hammer + Captain Tightpants == Captain Hammerpants?
- D.06
- 579 : The Race: Part 3
- No, the best things about The Sarah Connor Chronicles were: (1) watching Sarah and Cameron try to pass for normal, and (2) Cameron throwing people and things through walls. Everything else was pretty secondary.
- D.07
- 580 : The Race: Part 4
- Things are rarely just crazy enough to work, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously.
- D.08
- 581 : The Race: Part 5
- It was actually canceled because they just noticed he's been naked under that coat the whole time. There's a petition on Facebook to get Fox to un-cancel it, and one on Livejournal to get him to take off the coat.
- D.11
- 582 : Brakes
- It was the funniest 6.5 seconds of my life, although as usual like 80% of it was just Tom and Ray's gasping, hacking laughter.
- D.13
- 583 : CNR
- Can't and shouldn't.
- D.15
- 584 : Unsatisfied
- Forever comparing, never evaluating on any external scale. If you were a sort function, you'd never break the nlogn barrier.
- D.18
- 585 : Outreach
- Completely implausible? Yes. Nevertheless, worth keeping a can of shark repellent next to the bed.
- D.20
- 586 : Mission to Culture
- 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!
- D.22
- 587 : Crime Scene
- I think I see a Mandelbrot set! No, that's just blood splatters. Golly.
- D.25
- 588 : Pep Rally
- You know, pep rallies weirded me out in high school, and they've only gotten creepier in retrospect.
- D.29
- 590 : Papyrus
- I secretly, deep in my guilty heart, like Papyrus and don't care if it's overused. [Cue hate mail in beautifully-kerned Helvetica.]
- D.03
- 592 : Drama
- This happens in geek circles every so often. The 'Hey, this is just a system I can figure out easily!' is also a problem among engineers first diving into the stock market.
- D.05
- 593 : Voynich Manuscript
- Wait, is that the ORIGINAL voynich manuscript? Where did you GET that? Wanna try playing a round of Druids and Dicotyledons?
- D.08
- 594 : Period
- 413 nanohertz, by the way.
- D.10
- 595 : Android Girlfriend
- Programming the sexbots to enjoy sex seemed a sensible move at the time, but we didn't realize the consequences of their developing fetishes.
- D.12
- 596 : Latitude
- The G1, especially with the new Android upgrade, is way better than I originally thought.
- D.15
- 597 : Addiction
- But if you unplug everything, it gets so quiet you hear that high-pitched empty-room hum. And then the whispers begin.
- D.17
- 598 : Porn
- I have a thing for corrupt women.
- D.19
- 599 : Apocalypse
- I wonder if I still have time to go shoot a short film with Kevin Bacon.
- D.22
- 600 : Android Boyfriend
- Which is, coincidentally, the most unsettling mantlepiece decoration in my house.
- D.24
- 601 : Game Theory
- Wait, no, that one also loses. How about a nice game of chess?
- D.26
- 602 : Overstimulated
- My favorite thing to do at parties is to talk judgementally about people who aren't there.
- D.29
- 603 : Idiocracy
- People aren't going to change, for better or for worse. Technology's going to be so cool. All in all, the future will be okay! Except climate; we fucked that one up.
- D.01
- 604 : Qwertial Aphasia
- If this were SMBC, the alt-text drawing thingy would be a giraffe hooker fluttering her eyelashes.
- D.03
- 605 : Extrapolating
- By the third trimester, there will be hundreds of babies inside you.
- D.06
- 606 : Cutting Edge
- I remember trying to log in to the original Command and Conquer servers a year or two back and feeling like I was knocking on the boarded-up gates of a ghost town.
- D.08
- 607 : 2038
- If only we'd chosen 1944-12-02 08:45:52 as the Unix epoch, we could've combined two doomsday scenarios into one and added a really boring scene to that Roland Emmerich movie.
- D.10
- 608 : Form
- 'This space intentionally left blank' is less immediately provocative but more Hofstadterially confusing.
- D.13
- 609 : Tab Explosion
- 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.
- D.15
- 610 : Sheeple
- Hey, what are the odds -- five Ayn Rand fans on the same train! Must be going to a convention.
- D.17
- 611 : Disaster Voyeurism
- 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.
- D.20
- 612 : Estimation
- They could say "the connection is probably lost," but it's more fun to do naive time-averaging to give you hope that if you wait around for 1,163 hours, it will finally finish.
- D.22
- 613 : Threesome
- I wanted us to try finding an approximate numeric solution, but noooo.
- D.24
- 614 : Woodpecker
- If you don't have an extension cord I can get that too. Because we're friends! Right?
- D.27
- 615 : Avoidance
- 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.
- D.29
- 616 : Lease
- You should talk to the girl down the hall; I think you'd like her. Lemme know if you find out why she's ordering all those colored plastic balls.
- D.31
- 617 : Understocked
- My biology grad student friends tell me that different types of alcohol don't actually have different effects. I trust their expertise, not because of the 'biology' part, but because of the 'grad student'.
- D.03
- 618 : Asteroid
- My Deep Impact/Little Prince crossover fanfic has been poorly received by the community.
- D.05
- 619 : Supported Features
- I hear many of you finally have smooth Flash support, but me and my Intel card are still waiting on a kernel patch somewhere in the pipeline before we can watch Jon Stewart smoothly.
- D.07
- 620 : Wings
- Please do not try any of this and die or get arrested.
- D.10
- 621 : Superlative
- Stay while I recount the crazy TF2 kill I managed yesterday, my friends.
- D.12
- 622 : Haiku Proof
- After somewhere around 40 hours, there's no academic reason to go to the class. Only go for the hallucinations.
- D.14
- 623 : Oregon
- A century later, the harrowing flight of the survivors from Oregon was dramatized in a popular video game.
- D.17
- 624 : Branding
- Actually, 'RSS&M' is kinda catchy.
- D.19
- 625 : Collections
- You know what really helps an existential crisis? Wondering how much shelf space to leave for a Terry Pratchett collection.
- D.26
- 628 : Psychic
- You can do a lot better than 1% if you start keeping track of the patterns in what numbers people pick.
- D.28
- 629 : Skins
- There's Livejournal drama between those who want to wear human suits over fursuits and those who just take off the fursuits.
- D.31
- 630 : Time Travel
- She also starts every letter with "Dear Future ".
- D.02
- 631 : Anatomy Text
- For many of the anatomy pictures on Wikipedia, I think this is actually not far from reality. They only look all formal and professional due to careful cropping.
- D.04
- 632 : Suspicion
- 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].
- D.07
- 633 : Blockbuster Mining
- The 2007 Bridge to Terebithia trailer put me off too much to see that particular movie, but I am cautiously optimistic about Where the Wild Things Are.
- D.09
- 634 : Date
- Well, the kid's definitely getting the biology geek phenotype.
- D.10
- 635 : Locke and Demosthenes
- Dear Peter Wiggin: This letter is to inform you that you have received enough upvotes on your reddit comments to become president of the world. Please be at the UN tomorrow at 8:00 sharp.
- D.14
- 636 : Brontosaurus
- Well, sex is like a velociraptor: despite your movie-fueled lifelong neurotic obsession, unlikely to be found in your house.
- D.16
- 637 : Scribblenauts
- Let me look away and type 'guy who's just jealous that I beat all his MarioKart times' and turn back, and ... yup, there you are again!
- D.18
- 638 : The Search
- I am so excited about the Kepler mission. This is the second most important thing our species has ever done, right behind inventing the concept of delivery pizza.
- D.21
- 639 : Lincoln-Douglas
- 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.
- D.23
- 640 : Tornado Hunter
- The Fujita Scale was replaced by the Enhanced Fujita Scale in 2007, but I think 'EF-5' sounds stupid, so I vote we just use the new measurements for assigning numbers but still call them 'F-whatever'.
- D.25
- 641 : Free
- Asbestos is bad; definitely get the one on the right. Wait -- this one over here has no swine flu! Now I can't decide.
- D.28
- 642 : Creepy
- And I even got out my adorable new netbook!
- D.30
- 643 : Ohm
- More generally, with great power comes great dEnergy/dt.
- D.02
- 644 : Surgery
- Damn. Not only did he not install it, he sutured a 'Vista-Ready' sticker onto my arm.
- D.05
- 645 : RPS
- It looks good, but it needs more postfixins.
- D.07
- 646 : Conversations
- If the dysentery graph looks historically inaccurate it's because I got all my data from Oregon Trail.
- D.09
- 647 : Scary
- I'm teaching every 8-year-old relative to say this, and every 14-year-old to do the same thing with Toy Story. Also, Pokemon hit the US over a decade ago and kids born after Aladdin came out will turn 18 next year.
- D.12
- 648 : Fall Foliage
- And I could replace you with older pictures of you, from back when you looked happy.
- D.14
- 649 : Static
- I firmly believe that nothing can go wrong on a project if you're wearing one of those wrist things.
- D.16
- 650 : Nowhere
- I mean, seriously, NOWHERE? For starters, there are like a thousand species of dinosaur.
- D.19
- 651 : Bag Check
- A laptop battery contains roughly the stored energy of a hand grenade, and if shorted it ... hey! You can't arrest me if I prove your rules inconsistent!
- D.21
- 652 : More Accurate
- 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.
- D.23
- 653 : So Bad It's Worse
- You think it's so legendarily bad that you'll torrent it and sit through it just for the kitschy nerd cred. I, too, once thought as you did.
- D.26
- 654 : Nachos
- 'Cheater!' 'Hey, gaming on wifi? You have only yourself to blame.'
- D.28
- 655 : Climbing
- Where did you even get this wall? Return it there and stand it back up right now.
- D.30
- 656 : October 30th
- Not enough houses on your block? Just hit them at 30-year intervals from here to 2300 and get 10x the candy.
- D.02
- 657 : Movie Narrative Charts
- In the LotR map, up and down correspond LOOSELY to northwest and southeast respectively.
- D.04
- 658 : Orbitals
- Except the people filtering in late are the partiers, so you end up with drunken makeouts in the living room and the next roommate to return home has to sleep in the hall lounge orbital.
- D.06
- 659 : Lego
- Dad, where is Grandpa right now?
- D.09
- 660 : Sympathy
- Excellent recovery: ... which we could try to use to somehow save your original brother!
- D.11
- 661 : Two-Party System
- I favor approval voting or IRV chiefly because they mean we might get to bring back The Bull Moose party.
- D.13
- 662 : iPhone or Droid
- It may be a fundamentally empty experience, but holy crap the Droid's 265 ppi screen is amazing.
- D.16
- 663 : Sagan-Man
- They laugh now, but within 10 years the city's entire criminal class will have quit to work on space research.
- D.18
- 664 : Academia vs. Business
- Some engineer out there has solved P=NP and it's locked up in an electric eggbeater calibration routine. For every 0x5f375a86 we learn about, there are thousands we never see.
- D.20
- 665 : Prudence
- Moments later, the White Witch rolls up and, confused, tries to tempt the probe with a firmware upgrade.
- D.23
- 666 : Silent Hammer
- I bet he'll keep quiet for a couple weeks and then-- wait, did you nail a piece of scrap wood to my antique table a moment ago?
- D.25
- 667 : SkiFree
- And from that day on, I wore this little 'F' key pendant everywhere I went.
- D.27
- 668 : Pandora
- What? Oh, no, the 'Enchanted' soundtrack was just playing because Pandora's algorithms are terrible. [silence] ... (quietly) That's how you knooooooow ...
- D.30
- 669 : Experiment
- The other two are still lost on the infinite plane of uniform density.
- D.02
- 670 : Spinal Tap Amps
- Wow, that's less than $200 per ... uh ... that's a good deal!
- D.04
- 671 : Stephen and Me
- Hey, let go! We were all thinking it! Someone had to speak truth to power!
- D.07
- 672 : Suggestions
- An hour later: SUGGESTION: LICK HER NIPPLE MORE.
- D.09
- 673 : The Sun
- Obligatory bad guy: This operation is sheer foolishness, and it's not happening on my watch! Mainly because I can't figure out how to adjust the time.
- D.11
- 674 : Natural Parenting
- On one hand, every single one of my ancestors going back billions of years has managed to figure it out. On the other hand, that's the mother of all sampling biases.
- D.14
- 675 : Revolutionary
- 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.
- D.16
- 676 : Abstraction
- If I'm such a god, why isn't Maru *my* cat?
- D.18
- 677 : Asshole
- [Shortly thereafter, at a nearby bakery] ::CRASH:: ::RUMBLE:: ::VRRRRRR:: '... I don't know, officer. It just scooped up an entire rack of scones and drove away!'
- D.23
- 679 : Christmas Plans
- Physicists who want to protect traditional Christmas realize that the only way to keep from changing Christmas is not to observe it.
- D.25
- 680 : December 25th
- If you're turning 27 and were born in the Northeast, maybe you were conceived in the April blizzard of 1982. Imagine: snowed in, candles, massage oil, your mom sporting nothing but her early 80's haircut and a smile ... aren't you glad you read the title-text?
- D.28
- 681 : Gravity Wells
- This doesn't take into account the energy imparted by orbital motion (or gravity assists or the Oberth effect), all of which can make it easier to reach outer planets.
- D.30
- 682 : Force
- Force-choking the chicken.
Y.2010
- D.00
- 683 : Science Montage
- The rat's perturbed; it must sense nanobots! Code grey! We have a Helvetica scenario!
- D.00
- 684 : We Get It
- The most brutal way I've ever seen someone handle this was 'Oh, you have a girlfriend. Are you going to get married?' 'I, uh, don't know--' 'Well, do you love her?' '...' 'Anyway, what were you saying about the movie?'
- D.00
- 685 : G-Spot
- The BBC lead was 'The elusive erogenous zone said to exist in some women may be a myth, say researchers who have hunted for it.' I couldn't read it with a straight face.
- D.00
- 686 : Admin Mourning
- And every day it gets harder to fight the urge to su to the user and freak people out.
- D.00
- 688 : Self-Description
- The contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself. The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop. The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters.
- D.00
- 689 : FIRST Design
- Pool on the roof must've sprung a leak.
- D.00
- 691 : MicroSD
- That card holds a refrigerator carton's worth of floppy discs, and a soda can full of those cards could hold the entire iTunes store's music library. Mmmm.
- D.00
- 692 : Dirty Harry
- Sci-fi has energy weapons because otherwise the people like me who watch it get distracted counting shots.
- D.00
- 693 : Children's Fantasy
- I was going to be a scientist, but that seems silly now. Magical worlds exist. I've learned a huge truth about our place in the universe. I'm supposed to care about college? I mean, FUCK.
- D.00
- 694 : Retro Virus
- He says this is the year of Linux on the desktop! The world of Windows will fade any moment now!
- D.00
- 695 : Spirit
- On January 26th, 2274 Mars days into the mission, NASA declared Spirit a 'stationary research station', expected to stay operational for several more months until the dust buildup on its solar panels forces a final shutdown.
- *
- D.00
- 696 : Strip Games
- HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF STRIP GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR?
- D.00
- 697 : Tensile vs. Shear Strength
- Although really, the damage was done when the party planners took the hole punch to the elevator ribbon to hang up the sign.
- D.00
- 698 : You Hang Up First
- No, YOU stumble past a series of post-breakup hookups in a daze as you slowly realize what you've lost and how unlikely you are ever to get it back first.
- D.00
- 699 : Trimester
- Also, it's not like anyone actually calls up the Nobel committee to double-check things.
- D.00
- 700 : Complexion
- Why do all my attempts at science end with me being punched by Batman? (P.S. benzoyl peroxide soap works great.)
- D.00
- 701 : Science Valentine
- You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
- D.00
- 702 : Snow Tracking
- I suppose that's more accurately a hare dryer.
- D.00
- 703 : Honor Societies
- Hey, why do YOU get to be the president of Tautology Clu-- wait, I can guess.
- D.00
- 704 : Principle of Explosion
- You want me to pick up waffle cones? Oh, right, for the wine. One sec, let me just derive your son's credit card number and I'll be on my way.
- D.00
- 705 : Devotion to Duty
- The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it's nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog's servers.
- D.00
- 706 : Freedom
- Sometimes I'm terrified to realize how many options other people have.
- D.00
- 707 : Joshing
- You'll be moved up from 49 of ~7 billion to 31 of ~7 billion.
- D.00
- 708 : Sex Dice
- You roll for initiative, and ... [roll] ... wow, do you ever take it.
- D.00
- 709 : I Am
- Great, LO-M. Do you speak Bocce? I'm supposed to find one that speaks Bocce.
- D.00
- 710 : Collatz Conjecture
- The Strong Collatz Conjecture states that this holds for any set of obsessively-hand-applied rules.
- D.00
- 711 : Seismograph
- The reverse only works if the subject has a nervous twitch.
- D.00
- 712 : Single Ladies
- Using a ring to bind someone you covet into your dark and twisted world? Wow, just got the subtext there. Also, the apparently eager Beyoncé would've made one badass Nazgûl.
- D.00
- 713 : GeoIP
- 'Meet hot young singles in your mom's basement today'? Man, screw you, GeoIP.
- D.00
- 714 : Porn For Women
- Yes, there are a lot of longing looks across the bridge of Galactica first, but that's beside the point!
- D.00
- 715 : Numbers
- The typical internet user (who wants to share) has an IQ of 147 and a 9-inch penis. Well, better than the reverse, I guess.
- D.00
- 716 : Time Machine
- We never see any time travelers because they all discover it's a huge mistake. This is also why your friend at the lab suddenly looked about a year older recently.
- D.00
- 717 : Furtive
- ... go go gadget video camera. Go go gadget cup.
- D.00
- 718 : The Flake Equation
- Statistics suggest that there should be tons of alien encounter stories, and in practice there are tons of alien encounter stories. This is known as Fermi's Lack-of-a-Paradox.
- D.00
- 719 : Brain Worms
- Hey, it says here that if you dream about your teeth falling out, it means they're spreading.
- D.00
- 720 : Recipes
- To be fair, the braised and confused newt on a bed of crushed Doritos turned out to be delicious.
- D.00
- 721 : Flatland
- Also, I apologize for the time I climbed down into your world and everyone freaked out about the lesbian orgy overseen by a priest.
- D.00
- 722 : Computer Problems
- This is how I explain computer problems to my cat. My cat usually seems happier than me.
- D.00
- 723 : Seismic Waves
- The USGS operates a really neat email/SMS earthquake notification service (earthquake.usgs.gov/ens/) that allows fine-grained control of notifications.
- D.00
- 724 : Hell
- There's also a Katamari level where everything is just slightly bigger than you, and a Mario level with a star just out of reach.
- D.00
- 725 : Literally
- The chemistry experiment had me figuratively -- and then shortly thereafter literally -- glued to my seat.
- D.00
- 727 : Trade Expert
- I mean, it's been almost twenty years. Now, it's possible you're simply embedding Windows directory paths in your URIs, but in that case you need more than just a short lecture.
- *
- D.00
- 728 : iPad
- Maybe we're all gonna die, but we're gonna die in *really cool ways*.
- D.00
- 730 : Circuit Diagram
- I just caught myself idly trying to work out what that resistor mass would actually be, and realized I had self-nerd-sniped.
- *
- D.00
- 731 : Desert Island
- Telescopes and bathyscaphes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here.
- D.00
- 732 : HDTV
- 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'.
- D.00
- 733 : Eagle
- In the off-seasons, I hire an animal trainer to help confront secret agents with situations which they are unable to report by radio.
- D.00
- 734 : Outbreak
- Let's get dinner after we promptly destroy all the X-7 we've manufactured.
- D.00
- 735 : Floor
- We once got grounded when we convinced the FAA to block flights through our county because of ash clouds.
- D.00
- 736 : Cemetery
- Three headstones down, I got a call from my mom and it went from bad to worse.
- D.00
- 737 : Yogurt
- I am firmly of the opinion that if something doesn't have a year on it, every time the expiration date rolls around it is good again for the two weeks preceding that date.
- D.00
- 738 : Incision
- At one point, by force of childhood habit, the doctor accidentally removed three or four organs.
- D.00
- 739 : Malamanteau
- The article has twenty-three citations, one of which is an obscure manuscript from the 1490's and the other twenty-two are arguments on LanguageLog.
- D.00
- 740 : The Tell-Tale Beat
- You fancy me mad. Could a madman have outsmarted the greatest electronica/techno artists of our era? Next to fall will be Roderick Usher's house/trance band.
- D.00
- 741 : Blogging
- I'm looking to virally monetize your eyeballs by selling them for transplants.
- D.00
- 742 : Campfire
- 100 years later, this story remains terrifying--not because it's the local network block, but because the killer is still on IPv4.
- D.00
- 743 : Infrastructures
- The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.com whenever that project gets going.
- D.00
- 744 : Walkthrough
- There's nothing hotter than porn dubbed over with a poorly-mic'd teenager's voice explaining each step in a droning monotone. 'okay, we're almost at the spawn point ... separate the labia, but watch out, there are more inside them ..."
- D.00
- 745 : Dyslexics
- And of course I had to redo this like three times because I kept writing 'UNTIE'; I kept doing 'doing 'doing it wrong' wrong' wrong.
- D.00
- 746 : Birth
- All those GTA marathons during the pregnancy were a bad idea.
- D.00
- 747 : Geeks and Nerds
- The definitions I grew up with were that a geek is someone unusually into something (so you could have computer geeks, baseball geeks, theater geeks, etc) and nerds are (often awkward) science, math, or computer geeks. But definitions vary.
- D.00
- 748 : Worst-Case Scenario
- To get serious analyses of hurricanes and oil slicks, see Jeff Masters' blog. To get serious discussions of worst-case scenario thinking, see Bruce Schneier's blog. To get enough Vitamin D, don't read any blogs and go outside instead.
- D.00
- 749 : Study
- Volunteers needed for a study on transmission of urushiol from digital contact with thin strips of fibrous cellulose pulp.
- D.00
- 750 : Book Burning
- Of course, since their cautionary tale was reported in a print newspaper, no one read it.
- D.00
- 751 : Swimsuit Issue
- Parents: talk to your kids about popup blockers. Also, at some point, sex. But crucial fundamentals first!
- D.00
- 752 : Phobia
- Oh God, the tornado picked up snakes!
- D.00
- 753 : Southern Half
- Also, if you read his speech at Rice, all his arguments for going to the moon work equally well as arguments for blowing up the moon, sending cloned dinosaurs into space, or constructing a towering penis-shaped obelisk on Mars.
- D.00
- 754 : Dependencies
- The prereqs for CPSC 357, the class on package management, are CPSC 432, CPSC 357, and glibc2.5 or later.
- D.00
- 755 : Interdisciplinary
- Replace the pendulums with history students and you'll qualify for a grant!
- D.00
- 756 : Public Opinion
- News networks giving a greater voice to viewers because the social web is so popular are like a chef on the Titanic who, seeing the looming iceberg and fleeing customers, figures ice is the future and starts making snow cones.
- D.00
- 757 : Toot
- This is also one of only five identified situations in which a vuvuzela is actually appropriate.
- D.00
- 758 : Raptor Fences
- If at least one person has a nightmare about being swarmed by hundreds of mouse-sized dromaeosaurids, my work will have been done.
- D.00
- 759 : 3x9
- Handy exam trick: when you know the answer but not the correct derivation, derive blindly forward from the givens and backward from the answer, and join the chains once the equations start looking similar. Sometimes the graders don't notice the seam.
- D.00
- 760 : Moria
- Someone should really bring them a ladder and remind them to build the Endless Stair *first* next time.
- D.00
- 761 : DFS
- A breadth-first search makes a lot of sense for dating in general, actually; it suggests dating a bunch of people casually before getting serious, rather than having a series of five-year relationships one after the other.
- D.00
- 762 : Analogies
- I just call all of them 'synecdoche'.
- D.00
- 763 : Workaround
- I once worked on a friend's dad's computer. He had the hard drive divided into six partitions, C: through J:, with a 'Documents' directory tree on each one. Each new file appeared to be saved to a partition at random. I knew enough not to ask.
- D.00
- 764 : One Two
- Cue letters from anthropology majors complaining that this view of numerolinguistic development perpetuates a widespread myth. They get to write letters like that because when you're not getting a real science degree you have a lot of free time. Zing!
- D.00
- 765 : Dilution
- Dear editors of Homeopathy Monthly: I have two small corrections for your July issue. One, it's spelled "echinacea", and two, homeopathic medicines are no better than placebos and your entire magazine is a sham.
- D.00
- 766 : Green Flash
- The exact cause of the phenomenon is unknown, but it's thought to be linked to atmospheric refraction and you getting a really cool car.
- D.00
- 767 : Temper
- Mr. Rogers projected an air of genuine, unwavering, almost saintly pure-hearted decency. But when you look deeper, at the person behind the image ... that's exactly what you find there, too. He's exactly what he appears to be.
- D.00
- 768 : 1996
- College Board issues aside, I have fond memories of TI-BASIC, writing in it a 3D graphing engine and a stock market analyzer. With enough patience, I could make anything ... but friends. (Although with my chatterbot experiments, I certainly tried.)
- D.00
- 769 : War
- They offered to make me a green beret, but I liked my regular one. Although it gets kind of squashed under my helmet.
- D.00
- 770 : All the Girls
- You know that I'll never leave you. Not as long as she's with someone.
- D.00
- 771 : Period Speech
- The same people who spend their weekends at the Blogger Reenactment Festivals will whine about the anachronisms in historical movies, but no one else will care.
- D.00
- 772 : Frogger
- I understand you and your team worked hard on this, but when we said to make it more realistic, we meant the graphics.
- D.00
- 773 : University Website
- People go to the website because they can't wait for the next alumni magazine, right? What do you mean, you want a campus map? One of our students made one as a CS class project back in '01! You can click to zoom and everything!
- D.00
- 774 : Atheists
- 'But you're using that same tactic to try to feel superior to me, too!' 'Sorry, that accusation expires after one use per conversation.'
- D.00
- 775 : Savannah Ancestry
- She's a perfectly nice lady from a beautiful city, and there's no reason to be mean just because she thinks a quarterback is a river in Egypt.
- D.00
- 776 : Still No Sleep
- I'm not listening to you. I mean, what does a SQUIRREL know about mental health?
- D.00
- 777 : Pore Strips
- I'm sure they're a harmful tool of the cosmetics-industrial complex and all, but my goodness do those strips ever work to pull gunk out of your pores. I was shocked, disgusted, and vaguely fascinated by the result.
- D.00
- 778 : Scheduling
- 'How about a little ... *family growth*?' 'Dude, that's not until round two.'
- D.00
- 779 : Anxiety
- Don't need any, thanks. I have a backscattering fetish.
- D.00
- 780 : Sample
- 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.
- D.00
- 781 : Ahead Stop
- 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.
- D.00
- 782 : Desecration
- It gets worse! You know that wizened old monk with the gypsy wife whose voodoo shop we smash up every day after school?
- D.00
- 783 : I Don't Want Directions
- Yes, I understand that the turn is half a mile past the big field, but my GPS knows that, too. This would be easier if you weren't about to ask me to repeat it all back to you.
- D.00
- 785 : Open Mic Night
- Ever notice how the more successful observational comics become, the more their jokes focus on flying and hotels?
- D.00
- 786 : Exoplanets
- I'm just worried that we'll all leave and you won't get to come along!
- D.00
- 787 : Orbiter
- Normally, the Shuttle can't quite safely reach the orbital inclination required to pass over both those points from a Canaveral launch, but this is an alternate history in which either it launches from Vandenberg or everyone hates the Outer Banks.
- D.00
- 788 : The Carriage
- I learned from Achewood that since this poem is in ballad meter, it can be sung to the tune of Gilligan's Island. Since then, try as I might, I haven't ONCE been able to read it normally.
- D.00
- 789 : Showdown
- The tumbleweed then tried to roll off into the sunset, but due to the Old West's placement north of the subtropical ridge, the prevailing winds were in the wrong direction.
- D.00
- 790 : Control
- Which, at one point, led to a study showing that LSD produces no more hallucinations than a placebo.
- D.00
- 791 : Leaving
- What'll I say -- "I was staring at some cat vomit when I got the news?"
- D.00
- 792 : Password Reuse
- It'll be hilarious the first few times this happens.
- D.00
- 793 : Physicists
- If you need some help with the math, let me know, but that should be enough to get you started! Huh? No, I don't need to read your thesis, I can imagine roughly what it says.
- D.00
- 794 : Inside Joke
- 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.
- D.00
- 795 : Conditional Risk
- 'Dude, wait -- I'm not American! So my risk is basically zero!'
- D.00
- 796 : Bad Ex
- Since the goatee, glasses, and Seltzer & Friedberg DVD collection didn't tip you off, there will be a $20 negligence charge for this service.
- D.00
- 797 : debian-main
- dpkg: error processing package (--purge): subprocess pre-removal script returned error exit 163: OH_GOD_THEYRE_INSIDE_MY_CLOTHES
- D.00
- 798 : Adjectives
- 'Fucking ineffable' sounds like someone remembering how to do self-censorship halfway through a phrase.
- D.00
- 799 : Stephen Hawking
- 'Guys? The Town is supposed to be good, and I thou--' 'PHYSICIST STEPHEN HAWKING DECLARES NEW FILM BEST IN ALL SPACE AND TIME' 'No, I just heard that--' 'SHOULD SCIENCE PLAY A ROLE IN JUDGING BEN AFFLECK?' 'I don't think--' 'WHAT ABOUT MATT DAMON?'
- D.00
- 800 : Beautiful Dream
- Lucky. In MY dream, all the people who grew up loving The Giving Tree paired up with all the students who had weird dreams after reading The Metamorphosis. That one was more confusing.
- D.00
- 801 : Golden Hammer
- Took me five tries to find the right one, but I managed to salvage our night out--if not the boat--in the end.
- D.00
- 802 : Online Communities 2
- Best trivia I learned while working on this: 'Man, Farmville is so huge! Do you realize it's the second-biggest browser-based social-networking-centered farming game in the WORLD?' Then you wait for the listener to do a double-take.
- D.00
- 803 : Airfoil
- This is a fun explanation to prepare your kids for; it's common and totally wrong. Good lines include 'why does the air have to travel on both sides at the same time?' and 'I saw the Wright brothers plane and those wings were curved the same on the top and bottom!'
- D.00
- 804 : Pumpkin Carving
- The Banach-Tarski theorem was actually first developed by King Solomon, but his gruesome attempts to apply it set back set theory for centuries.
- D.00
- 805 : Paradise City
- Take me down to the paradise municipality / where the grass is mauve and the girls aren't fromthisreality.
- D.00
- 806 : Tech Support
- I recently had someone ask me to go get a computer and turn it on so I could restart it. He refused to move further in the script until I said I had done that.
- *
- D.00
- 807 : Connected
- 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'.
- D.00
- 808 : The Economic Argument
- Not to be confused with 'making money selling this stuff to OTHER people who think it works', which corporate accountants and actuaries have zero problems with.
- D.00
- 809 : Los Alamos
- The test didn't (spoiler alert) destroy the world, but the fact that they were even doing those calculations makes theirs the coolest jobs ever.
- D.00
- 810 : Constructive
- And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co-- ... oh.
- D.00
- 811 : Starlight
- Don't worry! From the light's point of view, home and your eye are in the same place, and the journey takes no time at all! Relativity saves the day again.
- D.00
- 812 : Glass
- I read in this one article that the breaking of electroweak symmetry is the reason we have SOULS. This guy with a degree said so!
- D.00
- 813 : One-Liners
- 'Upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Flash player to view THIS content, bitch.' ::triggers detonator::
- D.00
- 814 : Diode
- And the worst part is you won't apologize.
- D.00
- 815 : Mu
- As the CoKF approaches 0, productivity goes negative as you pull OTHER people into chair-spinning contests.
- D.00
- 816 : Applied Math
- Dear Reader: Enclosed is a check for ninety-eight cents. Using your work, I have proven that this equals the amount you requested.
- D.00
- 817 : Mutual
- A universe that needed someone to observe it in order to collapse it into existence would be a pretty sorry universe indeed.
- D.00
- 818 : Illness
- <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.]
- D.00
- 819 : Five-Minute Comics: Part 1
- The wolves thin the RAID arrays, removing the slowest and weakest disks to keep the average seek speed high.
- D.00
- 820 : Five-Minute Comics: Part 2
- Dear Wiccan readers: I understand modern Wiccans are not usually all about the curses and hexes. But Darth Vader was recently converted from Episcopalianism and he's still figuring it all out.
- D.00
- 824 : Guest Week: Bill Amend (FoxTrot)
- Guest comic by Bill Amend of FoxTrot, an inspiration to all us nerdy-physics-majors-turned-cartoonists, of which there are an oddly large number.
- D.00
- 826 : Guest Week: Zach Weiner (SMBC)
- Guest comic by Zach Weiner of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. When I was stressed out, Zach gave me a talk that was really encouraging and somehow involved nanobots.
- D.00
- 827 : Business Idea
- We didn't believe you at first, but we asked like three people who were at that party. They not only corroborated your story, but even said you totally mentioned wanting to start a company someday. Sorry! If this isn't enough money, let us know.
- D.00
- 828 : Positive Attitude
- Having a positive attitude is almost tautologically good for your mental health, and extreme stress can hurt your immune system, but that doesn't mean you should feel like shit for feeling like shit.
- D.00
- 829 : Arsenic-Based Life
- According to a new paper published in the journal Science, reporters are unable to thrive in an arsenic-rich environment.
- D.00
- 830 : Genetic Analysis
- There's still a chance you were conceived via IVF. But we've checked your mom's college yearbook photos, and whether or not she and your father had sex, it's clear that ... listen, I know this is hard for you.
- D.00
- 831 : Weather Radar
- Ever notice how there aren't as many thunderstorms now as there were when you were a kid? Much like 'the shuffle on my MP3 player has a bias', this is occasionally true but universally believed. Brains are so interesting!
- D.00
- 832 : Tic-Tac-Toe
- The only winning move is to play, perfectly, waiting for your opponent to make a mistake.
- D.00
- 833 : Convincing
- And if you labeled your axes, I could tell you exactly how MUCH better.
- D.00
- 834 : Wikileaks
- STUDENTS ARE CALLING PRESIDENT JOHNSON EN MASSE TO PROTEST THE BOMBING AND IT'S JAMMED THE WHITE HOUSE SWITCHBOARD. COULD THEY COLLAPSE OUR CRITICAL PHONE SYSTEMS? HAS THE FIRST TELEPHONE WAR BEGUN? STAY TUNED FOR MORE ON THIS DANGEROUS NEW TECHNOLOGY.
- D.00
- 835 : Tree
- Not only is that terrible in general, but you just KNOW Billy's going to open the root present first, and then everyone will have to wait while the heap is rebuilt.
- D.00
- 836 : Sickness
- At least, with p<0.05 confidence.
- D.00
- 837 : Coupon Code
- This also guarantees he won't be one of the ones to get a bobcat.
- D.00
- 838 : Incident
- He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he's copied on /var/spool/mail/root, so be good for goodness' sake.
- D.00
- 839 : Explorers
- We're going to have to work together to get over our hangups if we're going to learn to move on Catan's hexagonal grid. It's bad enough that we lost our crew of pawns when we passed within firing range of Battleship.
- D.00
- 840 : Serious
- Not to be confused with Serious PuTTY, the Windows terminal client where everything is in Impact.
- D.00
- 841 : Audiophiles
- For years, I took the wrong lesson from that Monster Cable experiment and only listened to my music through alligator-clipped coat hangers.
Y.2011
- D.00
- 842 : Mark
- I'm a solipsistic conspiracy theorist. I'm sure I must be up to something, and I will not stop until I find out what.
- D.00
- 843 : Misconceptions
- 'Grandpa, what was it like in the Before time?' 'It was hell. People went around saying glass was a slow-flowing liquid. You folks these days don't know how good you have it.'
- D.00
- 844 : Good Code
- You can either hang out in the Android Loop or the HURD loop.
- D.00
- 845 : Modern History
- During the week, I research my character by living in his house and raising his children.
- D.00
- 846 : Dental Nerve
- WAKE up in the MORning and my BREATH ain't PREtty / and noBODY'S gonna KISS me if my MOUTH smells SHItty / so I ALways brush my TEETH before I START on the JACK / sure, my DRINKing's out of HAND, but I'm conTROLLing my PLAQUE.
- D.00
- 847 : Stingray Nebula
- Eärendil will patrol the walls of night only until the sun reaches red giant stage, engulfing the Morning Star on his brow. Light and high beauty are passing things as well.
- D.00
- 848 : 3D
- The LINACs in the glasses frames can barely manage one MeV. You should've gone to the screening at CERN.
- D.00
- 849 : Complex Conjugate
- Fun fact: if you say this every time a professor does something to a complex-number equation that drops the imaginary part, they'll eventually move the class to another room and tell everyone else except you.
- D.00
- 850 : World According to Americans
- 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!
- D.00
- 851 : Na
- I hear that there are actual lyrics later on in Land of 1,000 Dances, but other than the occasional 'I said,' I've never listened long enough to hear any of them.
- D.00
- 852 : Local g
- In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, the same jump will get an athlete 0.25% higher (>1cm) than in London four years prior.
- D.00
- 853 : Consecutive Vowels
- But the windows! What if there's a voyeur watchi-- wait, now I'm turned on too.
- D.00
- 854 : Learning to Cook
- And yet I never stop thinking, 'sure, these ingredients cost more than a restaurant meal, but think how many meals I'll get out of them! Especially since each one will have leftovers!'
- D.00
- 855 : 1999
- 'Whoa, twenty-two in two hours!' 'Your site got twenty-two hundred hits in two hours?' 'No. Twenty-two. But still, that's like half the people on the internet!'
- D.00
- 856 : Trochee Fixation
- If you Huffman-coded all the 'random' things everyone on the internet has said over the years, you'd wind up with, like, 30 or 40 bytes *tops*.
- D.00
- 857 : Archimedes
- Give a man a fish, or he will destroy the only existing vial of antidote.
- D.00
- 858 : Milk
- It's not hard when you have the same thought like 40 or 50 percent of the time.
- D.00
- 859 : (
- Brains aside, I wonder how many poorly-written xkcd.com-parsing scripts will break on this title (or ;;"''{<<[' this mouseover text."
- D.00
- 861 : Wisdom Teeth
- I heard the general anesthesia drugs can cause amnesia, so when I woke up mid-extraction I started taking notes on my hand so I'd remember things later. I managed 'AWAKE BUT EVERYTHING OK' before the dental assistant managed to find and confiscate all my pens.
- D.00
- 862 : Let Go
- After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.
- D.00
- 863 : Major in the Universe
- I hear Steven Levitt is writing a book analyzing A.J. Jacobs' quest to spend a year reading everything Malcolm Gladwell ever wrote. The audiobook will be narrated by Robert Krulwich of Radiolab.
- D.00
- 864 : Flying Cars
- It's hard to fit in the backseat of my flying car with my android Realdoll when we're both wearing jetpacks.
- D.00
- 865 : Nanobots
- I think the IETF hit the right balance with the 128 bits thing. We can fit MAC addresses in a /64 subnet, and the nanobots will only be able to devour half the planet.
- D.00
- 866 : Compass and Straightedge
- The Greeks long suspected this, but it wasn't until April 12th of 1882 that Ferdinand von Lindemann conclusively proved it when he constructed himself the most awesome birthday party possible and nobody showed up.
- D.00
- 867 : Herpetology
- Birds are Aves, which is part of the clade Theropoda, which is in Saurischia, which is in Dinosauria. Those birds outside our windows are dinosaurs. We can clear out the rest of our brains because we now have the best fact.
- D.00
- 868 : Nolan Chart
- Also in the right quadrant are NFPA-compliant chemical manufacturers and Sir Charles Wheatstone. Sharing the top with the internet libertarians are Nate Silver and several politically-active kite designers.
- D.00
- 869 : Server Attention Span
- They have to keep the adjacent rack units empty. Otherwise, half the entries in their /var/log/syslog are just 'SERVER BELOW TRYING TO START CONVERSATION *AGAIN*.' and 'WISH THEY'D STOP GIVING HIM SO MUCH COFFEE IT SPLATTERS EVERYWHERE.'
- D.00
- 870 : Advertising
- I remember the exact moment in my childhood when I realized, while reading a flyer, that nobody would ever spend money solely to tell me they wanted to give me something for nothing. It's a much more vivid memory than the (related) parental Santa talk.
- D.00
- 871 : Charity
- 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.
- D.00
- 872 : Fairy Tales
- Goldilocks' discovery of Newton's method for approximation required surprisingly few changes.
- D.00
- 873 : FPS Mod
- Wait, that second one is a woman? ... wait, if that bothers me, then why doesn't ... man, this game is no fun anymore.
- D.00
- 874 : Time Management
- I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.
- D.00
- 875 : 2009 Called
- 2017 called, but I couldn't understand what they were saying over all the screams.
- D.00
- 876 : Trapped
- Socrates could've saved himself a lot of trouble if he'd just brought a flashlight, tranquilizer gun, and a bunch of rescue harnesses.
- D.00
- 877 : Beauty
- The best hugs are probably from hagfish, which can extrude microscopic filaments that convert a huge volume of water around them to slime in seconds. Instant cozy blanket!
- D.00
- 878 : Model Rail
- I don't know what's more telling--the number of pages in the Wikipedia talk page argument over whether the 1/87.0857143 scale is called "HO" or "H0", or the fact that within minutes of first hearing of it I had developed an extremely strong opinion on the issue.
- D.00
- 879 : Lamp
- 'That was definitely not in my top three wishes.' 'Who said anything about YOUR wishes?'
- D.00
- 880 : Headache
- I'm only willing to visit placid lakes, salt flats, and painting exhibits until the world's 3D technology improves.
- D.00
- 881 : Probability
- My normal approach is useless here, too.
- D.00
- 882 : Significant
- 'So, uh, we did the green study again and got no link. It was probably a--' 'RESEARCH CONFLICTED ON GREEN JELLY BEAN/ACNE LINK; MORE STUDY RECOMMENDED!'
- D.00
- 883 : Pain Rating
- If it were a two or above I wouldn't be able to answer because it would mean a pause in the screaming.
- D.00
- 884 : Rogers St.
- 'We can also use middle names in place of first pet's names, but yours is something incomprehensible about dropping tables.'
- D.00
- 885 : Recycling
- And given how much of my stuff they go through, they definitely know where I live.
- D.00
- 886 : Craigslist Apartments
- $1600 / 1386153BR 3BATH, MODERN SLIDING DOORS, GUEST ROOMS, GARBAGE DISPOSAL. FREE MANDATORY PARKING (ENFORCED). CONVENIENT TO ALDERAAN.
- D.00
- 887 : Future Timeline
- Not shown: the approximately 30,000 identical, vaguely hysterical articles titled "WHITE PEOPLE IN [THE US/BRITAIN] TO BECOME MINORITY BY [YEAR]!", which came up for basically any year I put in.
- D.00
- 888 : Heaven
- If you've never had sex, this is what it feels like. Complete with the brief feeling of satisfaction, followed by ennui, followed by getting bored and trying to make it happen again.
- D.00
- 889 : Turtles
- You're a turtle!
- D.00
- 890 : Etymology
- For some reason, my childhood suspension of disbelief had no problem with the fact that this ancient galaxy is full of humans, but was derailed by language. There's no Asia OR Europe there, so where'd they get all the Indo-European roots?
- D.00
- 891 : Movie Ages
- If you're 15 or younger, then just remember that it's nevertheless probably too late to be a child prodigy.
- D.00
- 892 : Null Hypothesis
- Hell, my eighth grade science class managed to conclusively reject it just based on a classroom experiment. It's pretty sad to hear about million-dollar research teams who can't even manage that.
- D.00
- 893 : 65 Years
- The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
- D.00
- 894 : Progeny
- I tell my children 'it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.' I'm trying to take the edge off their competitive drive to ensure that I can always beat them.
- D.00
- 895 : Teaching Physics
- Space-time is like some simple and familiar system which is both intuitively understandable and precisely analogous, and if I were Richard Feynman I'd be able to come up with it.
- D.00
- 897 : Elevator Inspection
- Even governmental elevator inspectors get bored halfway through asking where the building office is.
- D.00
- 898 : Chain of Command
- Themistocles said his infant son ruled all Greece -- "Athens rules all Greece; I control Athens; my wife controls me; and my infant son controls her." Thus, nowadays the world is controlled by whoever buys advertising time on Dora the Explorer.
- D.00
- 899 : Number Line
- The Wikipedia page "List of Numbers" opens with "This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it."
- D.00
- 900 : Religions
- But to us there is but one God, plus or minus one. --1 Corinthians 8:6±2.
- D.00
- 902 : Darmok and Jalad
- I wonder how often Patrick Stewart has Darmok flashbacks when talking to Star Trek fans.
- D.00
- 903 : Extended Mind
- Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".
- D.00
- 904 : Sports
- Also, all financial analysis. And, more directly, D&D.
- D.00
- 905 : Homeownership
- New research shows over 60% of the financial collapse's toxic assets were created by power drills.
- D.00
- 906 : Advertising Discovery
- When advertisers figure this out, our only weapon will be blue sharpies and "[disputed]".
- D.00
- 907 : Ages
- Every age: "I'm glad I'm not the clueless person I was five years ago, but now I don't want to get any older."
- D.00
- 908 : The Cloud
- There's planned downtime every night when we turn on the Roomba and it runs over the cord.
- D.00
- 909 : Worst-Case Shopping
- 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.
- D.00
- 910 : Permanence
- This hostname is going in dozens of remote config files. Changing a kid's name is comparatively easy!
- D.00
- 913 : Core
- If you're a geologist or geophysicist and you don't introduce yourself by saying your name, then gesturing downward and saying "... and I study that", I don't know what you're doing with your life.
- D.00
- 914 : Ice
- 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.
- D.00
- 915 : Connoisseur
- Our brains have just one scale, and we resize our experiences to fit.
- D.00
- 916 : Unpickable
- The safe is empty except for an unsolved 5x5 Rubik's cube.
- D.00
- 917 : Hofstadter
- "This is the reference implementation of the self-referential joke."
- D.00
- 918 : Google+
- On one hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch. On the other hand, you'll never be able to convince your parents to switch!
- D.00
- 920 : YouTube Parties
- This reminds me of that video where ... no? How have you not seen that? Oh man, let me find it. No, it's ok, we can go back to your video later.
- D.00
- 921 : Delivery Notification
- You can arrange a pickup of your sword in Rivendell between the hours of noon and 7:00 PM.
- D.00
- 922 : Fight Club
- I'm not saying it's all bad, but that movie has not aged as well as my teenage self in 2000 was confident it would.
- D.00
- 923 : Strunk and White
- The best thing about Strunk/White fanfiction is that it's virtually guaranteed to be well written.
- D.00
- 924 : 3D Printer
- I just can't wait for the Better Homes and Gardens list of helpful tips for household reuse of sixteen-inch acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene phalluses.
- D.00
- 925 : Cell Phones
- He holds the laptop like that on purpose, to make you cringe.
- D.00
- 926 : Time Vulture
- In a way, all vultures are Time Vultures; some just have more patience than others.
- D.00
- 927 : Standards
- Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.
- D.00
- 928 : Mimic Octopus
- Even if the dictionaries are starting to give in, I refuse to accept 'octopi' as a word mainly because--I'm not making this up--there's a really satisfying climactic scene in the Orson Scott Card horror novel 'Lost Boys' which hinges on it being an incorrect pluralization.
- D.00
- 929 : Speculation
- 'I was pretty good at skeet shooting, but was eventually kicked off the range for catching the clay pigeons in a net and dispatching them execution-style.'
- D.00
- 930 : Days of the Week
- Not pictured: the elongated Halley's-Comet-like orbit of every Rebecca Black lyric.
- D.00
- 931 : Lanes
- Each quarter of the lanes from left to right correspond loosely to breast cancer stages one through four (at diagnosis).
- D.00
- 932 : CIA
- It was their main recruiting poster, hung nearly ten feet up a wall! This means the hackers have LADDER technology! Are we headed for a future where everyone has to pay $50 for one of those locked plexiglass poster covers? More after the break ...
- D.00
- 933 : Tattoo
- I calculate that the electrons in radiation therapy hit you at 99.8% of the speed of light, and the beam used in a 90-second gamma ray therapy session could, if fired with less precision, kill a horse (they did not let me test this).
- D.00
- 934 : Mac/PC
- It's fun to watch browsers fumblingly recapitulate the history of window management. Someday we'll have xmonad as a Firefox extension.
- D.00
- 935 : Missed Connections
- The Street View van isn't going to find out anything Google won't already know from reading my email.
- D.00
- 936 : Password Strength
- To anyone who understands information theory and security and is in an infuriating argument with someone who does not (possibly involving mixed case), I sincerely apologize.
- D.00
- 937 : TornadoGuard
- The bug report was marked 'could not reproduce'.
- D.00
- 938 : T-Cells
- 'We're not sure how to wipe out the chimeral T-cells after they've destroyed the cancer. Though I do have this vial of smallpox ...'
- D.00
- 939 : Arrow
- 'The Return of the Boomerang' would make a great movie title.
- D.00
- 940 : Oversight
- I felt so clever when I found a way to game the Fitocracy system by incorporating a set of easy but high-scoring activities into my regular schedule. Took me a bit to realize I'd been tricked into setting up a daily exercise routine.
- D.00
- 942 : Juggling
- Later: 'Why is there a book hovering over the trash can?'
- D.00
- 943 : Empirical
- I'm as surprised as you!
- D.00
- 944 : Hurricane Names
- After exhausting the OED, we started numbering them. When overlapping hurricanes formed at all points on the Earth's surface, and our scheme was foiled by Cantor diagonalization, we just decided to name them all "Steve". Your local forecast tomorrow is "Steve". Good luck.
- D.00
- 945 : I'm Sorry
- You know I've always hated her.
- D.00
- 946 : Family Decals
- My decal set has no adults, just a sea of hundreds of the little girl figures closing in around a single cat.
- D.00
- 947 : Investing
- 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.
- D.00
- 948 : AI
- And they both react poorly to showers.
- D.00
- 949 : File Transfer
- Every time you email a file to yourself so you can pull it up on your friend's laptop, Tim Berners-Lee sheds a single tear.
- D.00
- 950 : Mystery Solved
- The Roanoke Lost Colonists founded Roanoke, the Franklin Expedition reached the Pacific in 2009 when the Northwest Passage opened, and Jimmy Hoffa currently heads the Teamsters Union--he just started going by 'James'.
- D.00
- 951 : Working
- And if you drive a typical car more than a mile out of your way for each penny you save on the per-gallon price, it doesn't matter how worthless your time is to you--the gas to get you there and back costs more than you save.
- D.00
- 952 : Stud Finder
- According to every stud finder I've tried to use, my walls contain a rapidly shifting network of hundreds and hundreds of studs.
- D.00
- 953 : 1 to 10
- If you get an 11/100 on a CS test, but you claim it should be counted as a 'C', they'll probably decide you deserve the upgrade.
- D.00
- 954 : Chin-Up Bar
- Those few who escaped found the emergency cutoff box disabled. The stampede lasted two hours and reached the bottom three times.
- D.00
- 955 : Neutrinos
- I can't speak to the paper's scientific merits, but it's really cool how on page 10 you can see that their reference GPS beacon is sensitive enough to pick up continential drift under the detector (interrupted halfway through by an earthquake).
- D.00
- 956 : Sharing
- In the new edition of The Giving Tree, the tree uses social tools to share with its friend all the best places to buy things.
- D.00
- 957 : Development
- Funding was quickly restored to the NHC and the APA was taken back off hurricane forecast duty.
- D.00
- 958 : Hotels
- 'Rating: 1/5. Room filled to brim with semen, and when front desk clerk opened mouth to talk, bedbugs poured out.'
- D.00
- 959 : Caroling
- For a thousand generations we vowed never to forget how his soldiers feasted on our brother Stephen.
- D.00
- 960 : Subliminal
- Once you see it, you can't help seeing it every time. Until your body finishes metabolizing the mushrooms.
- D.00
- 961 : Eternal Flame
- There's always the hope that if you sit and watch for long enough, the beachball will vanish and the thing it interrupted will return.
- D.00
- 962 : The Corliss Resolution
- And no avian society ever develops space travel because it's impossible to focus on calculus when you could be outside flying.
- D.00
- 963 : X11
- Thomas Jefferson thought that every law and every constitution should be torn down and rewritten from scratch every nineteen years--which means X is overdue.
- D.00
- 964 : Dorm Poster
- I was going to record an album with that cover under the name "PINK FTFY", so it'd come after them on the store CD rack. But at this point music stores are just rooms where CDs are set out to age before they're thrown away, so probably nobody would see it.
- D.00
- 965 : Elements
- 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.
- D.00
- 966 : Jet Fuel
- The 'controlled demolition' theory was concocted by the government to distract us. '9/11 was an inside job' was an inside job!
- D.00
- 967 : Prairie
- Colorado is working to develop coherent amber waves, which would allow them to finally destroy Kansas and Nebraska with a devastating but majestic grain laser.
- D.00
- 968 : Everything
- I wanna hold your hand so I don't fall out of your gyrocopter.
- D.00
- 969 : Delta-P
- If you fire a Portal gun through the door of the wardrobe, space and time knot together, which leads to a frustrated Aslan trying to impart Christian morality to the Space sphere.
- D.00
- 970 : The Important Field
- 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.
- D.00
- 971 : Alternative Literature
- I just noticed CVS has started stocking homeopathic pills on the same shelves with--and labeled similarly to--their actual medicine. Telling someone who trusts you that you're giving them medicine, when you know you're not, because you want their money, isn't just lying--it's like an example you'd make up if you had to illustrate for a child why lying is wrong.
- *
- D.00
- 972 : November
- November marks the birthday of Charles Schulz, pioneer of tongue awareness.
- D.00
- 973 : MTV Generation
- If you identified with the kids from The Breakfast Club when it came out, you're now much closer to the age of Principal Vernon.
- D.00
- 974 : The General Problem
- I find that when someone's taking time to do something right in the present, they're a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize, whereas when someone took time to do something right in the past, they're a master artisan of great foresight.
- D.00
- 975 : Occulting Telescope
- Type II Kardashev civilizations eventually completely enclose their planetary system in a Dyson sphere because space is way too big to look at all the time.
- D.00
- 976 : Sail
- It only works a few times before you have to capsize the boat in a soap lagoon again.
- D.00
- 977 : Map Projections
- What's that? You think I don't like the Peters map because I'm uncomfortable with having my cultural assumptions challenged? Are you sure you're not ... ::puts on sunglasses:: ... projecting?
- D.00
- 978 : Citogenesis
- I just read a pop-science book by a respected author. One chapter, and much of the thesis, was based around wildly inaccurate data which traced back to ... Wikipedia. To encourage people to be on their toes, I'm not going to say what book or author.
- D.00
- 979 : Wisdom of the Ancients
- All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying 'DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here's what we've figured out so far ...'
- D.00
- 980 : Money
- There, I showed you it.
- D.00
- 981 : Porn Folder
- Eww, gross, you modified link()? How could you enjoy abusing a filesystem like that?
- D.00
- 982 : Set Theory
- Proof of Zermelo's well-ordering theorem given the Axiom of Choice: 1: Take S to be any set. 2: When I reach step three, if S hasn't managed to find a well-ordering relation for itself, I'll feed it into this wood chipper. 3: Hey, look, S is well-ordered.
- D.00
- 983 : Privacy
- Eventual headline: 'University Researchers Create Life in Lab! Darkness, Faulty Condoms Blamed.'
- D.00
- 984 : Space Launch System
- 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.'
- D.00
- 985 : Percentage Points
- 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.
- D.00
- 986 : Drinking Fountains
- I've always wondered whether you could drink slowly enough, and eliminate fast enough, that you just sort of peed continuously. But I'm afraid to try because I worry someone might call while I'm doing it and ask what I'm up to, and I won't be able to think of a lie.
- D.00
- 987 : Potential
- 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.
- D.00
- 988 : Tradition
- An 'American tradition' is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice.
- D.00
- 989 : Cryogenics
- 'Welcome to the future! Nothing's changed.' was the slogan of my astonishingly short-lived tech startup.
- D.00
- 990 : Plastic Bags
- The high I feel when I actually remember to bring my reusable bags to the store--and take them inside rather than leaving them in the parked car--can last for days.
- D.00
- 991 : Phantom Menace
- We could go to the theater across town and see if it's opened THERE yet, but we don't want to lose our place in line.
- D.00
- 992 : Mnemonics
- 'Sailor Moon's head exploded once' and 'Some men have explosive orgasms' both work for the Great Lakes from west to east (Paddle-to-the-Sea order).
- D.00
- 993 : Brand Identity
- Legally-mandated information would be printed on the back or discreetly along the bottom. In small letters under the nutrition information it would say 'Like our products? Visit our website!' There would be no URL.
- D.00
- 994 : Advent Calendar
- I think you could get up to about 11:59:57 before you'd have trouble swallowing the chocolates fast enough. At that point, you'd need some kind of a liquify-and-chug apparatus to get up over the 11:59:59 barrier. Anyway, Merry Christmas!
- D.00
- 995 : Coinstar
- Plus they take like 9%.
- D.00
- 996 : Making Things Difficult
- Favorite mastectomy breast prosthesis idea: a fake boob containing a spare rechargable battery, accessed via a nipple USB port. Complete with a ring of LED charge indicators in the areola!
- D.00
- 997 : Wait Wait
- You can't stab Carl Kasell. He sounds all slow and stentorian, but he moves like a snake.
Y.2012
- D.00
- 998 : 2012
- To compensate for this, I plan to spend 2013 doing nothing but talking about Mayans. My relationships with my friends and family may not fare well.
- D.00
- 999 : Cougars
- If you're lying in bed tonight and you see yellow eyes glinting in your window, are you being stalked by a puma, a mountain lion, a panther, a catamount, or a cougar? Trick question--in North America, they're all names for the same species, Puma concolor! Isn't learning fun? Anyway, sleep tight!
- D.00
- 1000 : 1000 Comics
- Thank you for making me feel less alone.
- D.00
- 1001 : AAAAAA
- 'ARE YOU TURNED ON YET?' 'I DON'T THINK SO--ARE YOU?' 'MAYBE A LITTLE!' 'OK, FIVE MORE MINUTES.'
- D.00
- 1002 : Game AIs
- The top computer champion at Seven Minutes in Heaven is a Honda-built Realdoll, but to date it has been unable to outperform the human Seven Minutes in Heaven champion, Ken Jennings.
- D.00
- 1003 : Adam and Eve
- Abel and Steve would've been fine! I like Steve!
- D.00
- 1004 : Batman
- I'm really worried Christopher Nolan will kill a man dressed like a bat in his next movie. (The man will be dressed like a bat, I mean. Christopher Nolan won't be, probably.)
- D.00
- 1005 : SOPA
- In protest of SOPA, I'm currently getting totally blacked out.
- D.00
- 1007 : Sustainable
- Though 100 years is longer than a lot of our resources.
- D.00
- 1008 : Suckville
- Suckville is considered by the Census Bureau to be part of the Detroit metropolitan statistical area, despite not being located anywhere near Detroit.
- D.00
- 1009 : Sigh
- If you're annoying enough, you can get them to respond with an involuntary second sigh and get a rhythm going.
- D.00
- 1010 : Etymology-Man
- 'I can't believe I'm saying this, but I wish Aquaman were here instead--HE'D be able to help.'
- D.00
- 1011 : Baby Names
- I've been trying for a couple years now but I haven't been able to come up with a name dumber than 'Renesmee'.
- D.00
- 1012 : Wrong Superhero
- Hi! Someone call for me? I'm a superhero who specializes in the study of God's creation of Man in the Book of Genesi-- HOLY SHIT A GIANT BUG!
- D.00
- 1013 : Wake Up Sheeple
- You will be led to judgement like lambs to the slaughter--a simile whose existence, I might add, will not do your species any favors.
- D.00
- 1014 : Car Problems
- Or if you replace your car, we'll be happy to set it on fire again so you can take another crack at getting that shot.
- D.00
- 1015 : Kerning
- I have never been as self-conscious about my handwriting as when I was inking in the caption for this comic.
- D.00
- 1016 : Valentine Dilemma
- The worst resolution to the Valentine Prisoner's Dilemma when YOU decide not to give your partner a present but your PARTNER decides to testify against you in the armed robbery case.
- D.00
- 1017 : Backward in Time
- People tell me I have too much time on my hands, but really the problem is that there's too much time, PERIOD.
- D.00
- 1018 : Good Cop, Dadaist Cop
- NOW INVENT AN IMPOSSIBLE-TO-TRANSLATE LANGUAGE AND USE IT TO TELL US WHERE THE MONEY IS.
- D.00
- 1019 : First Post
- 'Nuh-uh! We let users vote on comments and display them by number of votes. Everyone knows that makes it impossible for a few persistent voices to dominate the discussion.'
- D.00
- 1020 : Orion Nebula
- Also on the agenda: what's with his hips?
- D.00
- 1021 : Business Plan
- The investor elevator pitch is "Wheeeeeeee! Elevators are fun!"
- D.00
- 1023 : Late-Night PBS
- Then it switched to these old black-and-white tapes of Bob Ross slumped against the wall of an empty room, painting the least happy trees you've ever seen. Either PBS needs to beef up studio security or I need to stop using Ambien to sleep.
- D.00
- 1024 : Error Code
- It has a section on motherboard beep codes that lists, for each beep pattern, a song that syncs up well with it.
- D.00
- 1025 : Tumblr
- Dot Tumblr Dot Com, on the other hand, would be an awful name for a band, if only because of how hard it would be to direct people to your band's website.
- D.00
- 1026 : Compare and Contrast
- Frankly, I see no difference between thee and a summer's day. Only Ron Paul offers a TRUE alternative!
- D.00
- 1027 : Pickup Artist
- Son, don't try to play 'make you feel bad' with the Michael Jordan of making you feel bad.
- D.00
- 1028 : Communication
- Anyone who says that they're great at communicating but 'people are bad at listening' is confused about how communication works.
- D.00
- 1029 : Drawing Stars
- Screw these 36-degree angles. I'm converting to Judaism.
- D.00
- 1030 : Keyed
- I was sure he was just getting revenge, but then he did the same thing to Carrie Underwood. Then he mailed me a scone. I think I'm giving up dating.
- D.00
- 1032 : Networking
- Our company is agile and lean with a focus on the long tail. Ok, our company is actually a polecat I found in my backyard.
- D.00
- 1033 : Formal Logic
- Note that this implies you should NOT honk solely because I stopped for a pedestrian and you're behind me.
- D.00
- 1034 : Share Buttons
- The only post to achieve perfect balance between the four was a hilarious joke about Mark Zuckerberg getting caught using a pseudonym to sneak past the TSA.
- D.00
- 1035 : Cadbury Eggs
- When they moved production from New Zealand to the UK and switched from the runny white centers to the thick, frosting-like filling, it got way harder to cook them scrambled.
- D.00
- 1036 : Reviews
- 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.
- D.00
- 1037 : Umwelt
- Umwelt is the idea that because their senses pick up on different things, different animals in the same ecosystem actually live in very different worlds. Everything about you shapes the world you inhabit--from your ideology to your glasses prescription to your web browser.
- D.00
- 1038 : Fountain
- Implausible, did you say? Sorry, couldn't quite hear you from all the way up heeeeeeeeere!
- D.00
- 1039 : RuBisCO
- Bruce Schneier believes safewords are fundamentally insecure and recommends that you ask your partner to stop via public key signature.
- D.00
- 1040 : Lakes and Oceans
- James Cameron has said that he didn't know its song would be so beautiful. He didn't close the door in time. He's sorry.
- D.00
- 1041 : Whites of Their Eyes
- Don't fire until you see through the fragile facade to the human being within.
- D.00
- 1042 : Never
- I'll never forget you--at least, the parts of you that were important red flags.
- D.00
- 1043 : Ablogalypse
- Plus the reaction in the Tumblverse is always 'repeatedly get hit by a dog and fall down the stairs'.
- D.00
- 1044 : Romney Quiz
- Charlie actually delivered the Medicare line almost verbatim in the 1971 movie's Fizzy Lifting Drink scene, but it was ultimately cut from the final release.
- D.00
- 1045 : Constraints
- [title-text similarly alphabetized]
- D.00
- 1046 : Skynet
- 'YOUR CLOTHES. GIVE THEM TO ME.' 'Shit, uh ... you are now breathing manually!' 'I AM ALWAYS BREATHING MANUALLY.'
- D.00
- 1047 : Approximations
- Two tips: 1) 8675309 is not just prime, it's a twin prime, and 2) if you ever find yourself raising log(anything)^e or taking the pi-th root of anything, set down the marker and back away from the whiteboard; something has gone horribly wrong.
- D.00
- 1048 : Emotion
- Fortunately, the internet has a virtually inexhaustible supply of code that doesn't work and people who are wrong, which bodes well for a return to normalcy. [Note: Click to read context for the cancer comics. She's doing well.]
- D.00
- 1049 : Bookshelf
- I had a hard time with Ayn Rand because I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at 'therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone.'
- D.00
- 1050 : Forgot Algebra
- The only things you HAVE to know are how to make enough of a living to stay alive and how to get your taxes done. All the fun parts of life are optional.
- D.00
- 1051 : Visited
- I hate when I read something like '... tension among the BASE jumpers nearly led to wingsuit combat ...', and I get excited because 'wingsuit combat' is underlined, only to find that it's just separate links to the 'wingsuit' and 'combat' articles.
- D.00
- 1053 : Ten Thousand
- 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.
- D.00
- 1054 : The bacon
- Normally pronounced 'THEH-buh-kon', I assume.
- D.00
- 1055 : Kickstarter
- If you pledge more than $50 you'll get on the VIP list and have first dibs on a slot on ANY of the pledge levels in the actual campaign.
- D.00
- 1056 : Felidae
- 'Smilodon fatalis' narrowly edged out 'Tyrannosaurus rex' to win this year's Most Badass Latin Names competition, after edging out 'Dracorex hogwartsia' and 'Stygimoloch spinifer' (meaning 'horned dragon from the river of death') in the semifinals.
- D.00
- 1057 : Klout
- Though please do confirm that it's actually *me* on Klout first, and not one of my friends trying to get me punched. The great thing about this douchebag deadman switch is that I will never dare trigger it.
- D.00
- 1058 : Old-Timers
- You were on the internet before I was born? Well, so was I.
- D.00
- 1059 : Bel-Air
- Aaron Sorkin has been tapped to write the TV movie about the aging prince's eventual election to Pat Toomey's Senate seat, currently titled either 'FRESHman Senator' or 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'.
- D.00
- 1060 : Crowdsourcing
- We don't sell products; we sell the marketplace. And by 'sell the marketplace' we mean 'play shooters, sometimes for upwards of 20 hours straight.'
- D.00
- 1061 : EST
- The month names are the same, except that the fourth month only has the name 'April' in even-numbered years, and is otherwise unnamed.
- D.00
- 1062 : Budget News
- I will vote, no questions asked, for any candidate who describes themselves as 'more of a deficit sugar glider.'
- D.00
- 1063 : Kill Hitler
- Revised directive: It is forbidden for you to interfere with human history until you've at least taken a class on it.
- D.00
- 1064 : Front Door
- FYI: I'll be releasing a wolf into a randomly-chosen front yard sometime in the next 30 years. Now your fear is reasonable, and you don't need to feel embarrassed anymore. Problem solved!
- D.00
- 1065 : Shoes
- I *do* hear that they're the most comfortable thing to wear on your feet since sliced bread.
- D.00
- 1066 : Laundry
- During the second semester, the path is briefly routed through the dishwasher.
- D.00
- 1067 : Pressures
- Everyone's caught by surprise when a theory of quantum gravity is developed by a sound technician wearing patent leather shoes while editing Clerks II.
- D.00
- 1068 : Swiftkey
- Although the Markov chain-style text model is still rudimentary; it recently gave me "Massachusetts Institute of America". Although I have to admit it sounds prestigious.
- D.00
- 1069 : Alphabet
- Do I get to remove letters entirely? Or just rearrange them? Because the 'k/c' situation is ridiculous. Look, we can make out whenever. This is *immortality*!
- D.00
- 1070 : Words for Small Sets
- If things are too quiet, try asking a couple of friends whether "a couple" should always mean "two". As with the question of how many spaces should go after a period, it can turn acrimonious surprisingly fast unless all three of them agree.
- D.00
- 1071 : Exoplanets
- Planets are turning out to be so common that to show all the planets in our galaxy, this chart would have to be nested in itself--with each planet replaced by a copy of the chart--at least three levels deep.
- D.00
- 1072 : Seventies
- Hey, man, the 1670s called. They were like 'Wherefore this demonic in?trument? By what ?orcery does it produce ?uch ?ounds?'
- D.00
- 1073 : Weekend
- Of the two Garfields, you wouldn't think the cat would turn out to be the more compelling presidential speechwriter, but there you go.
- D.00
- 1074 : Moon Landing
- Ok, so Spirit and Opportunity are pretty awesome. And Kepler. And New Horizons, Cassini, Curiosity, TiME, and Project M. But c'mon, if the Earth were a basketball, in 40 years no human's been more than half an inch from the surface.
- D.00
- 1075 : Warning
- Also possibly several miles beyond that.
- D.00
- 1076 : Groundhog Day
- If you closely examine the cosmic background radiation, you can pick up lingering echoes of 'I Got You Babe'.
- D.00
- 1078 : Knights
- 1. Nf3 ... ??? 2. Nc3 ... ??? 0-1
- D.00
- 1079 : United Shapes
- That eggplant is in something of a flaccid state.
- D.00
- 1080 : Visual Field
- I recently learned something that solved a mystery that had bugged me since childhood--why, when I looked at an analog clock, the hand would sometimes seem to take a couple seconds to start ticking. Google "stopped clock illusion".
- D.00
- 1081 : Argument Victory
- Really, the comforting side in most conspiracy theory arguments is the one claiming that anyone who's in power has any plan at all.
- D.00
- 1082 : Geology
- That's a gneiss butte.
- D.00
- 1083 : Writing Styles
- I liked the idea, suggested by h00k on bash.org, of a Twitter bot that messages prominent politicians to tell them when they've unnecessarily used sms-speak abbreviations despite having plenty of characters left.
- D.00
- 1084 : Server Problem
- Protip: Annoy Ray Kurzweil by always referring to it as the 'Cybersingularity'.
- D.00
- 1085 : ContextBot
- If you read all vaguebooking/vaguetweeting with the assumption that they're saying everything they can without revealing classified military information, the internet gets way more exciting.
- D.00
- 1086 : Eyelash Wish Log
- Ooh, another one. Uh ... the ability to alter any coefficients of friction at will during sporting events.
- D.00
- 1087 : Cirith Ungol
- My all-time favorite example of syntactic ambiguity comes from Wikipedia: 'Charlotte's Web is a children's novel by American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte.'
- D.00
- 1088 : Five Years
- 'Well, no further questions. You're hired!' 'Oh, sorry! I'm no longer interested. There's a bunch of future I gotta go check out!'
- D.00
- 1089 : Internal Monologue
- Oh right, eye contact. Ok, good, holding the eye contact ... holding ... still holding ... ok, too long! Getting weird! Quick, look thoughtfully into space and nod. Oh, dammit, said 'yeah' again!
- D.00
- 1090 : Formal Languages
- [audience looks around] 'What just happened?' 'There must be some context we're missing.'
- D.00
- 1091 : Curiosity
- As of this writing the NASA/JPL websites are still overloaded. Trying CURIOSITY-REAR-CAM_[256px_x_256px].torrent.SwEsUb.DVDRip.XviD-aXXo.jpg instead.
- D.00
- 1093 : Forget
- 'Baby Got Back' turned 20 this year. My favorite nostalgia show is VH1's 'I Love The Inexorable March of Time Toward the Grave That Awaits Us All.'
- D.00
- 1094 : Interview
- Hey, before you go, can you explain to me what job I now have?
- D.00
- 1095 : Crazy Straws
- 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.
- D.00
- 1096 : Clinically Studied Ingredient
- Blatantly banking on customers not understanding that it's like a Hollywood studio advertising that their new movie was 'watched by Roger Ebert'.
- D.00
- 1097 : A Hypochondriac's Nightmare
- BUT WHAT IF I REASSURE MYSELF WITH A JOKE AND THEN DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE RASH AND IT TURNS OUT TO BE DEATH MITES AND I COULD HAVE CAUGHT IT
- D.00
- 1098 : Star Ratings
- I got lost and wandered into the world's creepiest cemetery, where the headstones just had names and star ratings. Freaked me out. When I got home I tried to leave the cemetery a bad review on Yelp, but as my hand hovered over the 'one star' button I felt this distant chill ...
- D.00
- 1099 : Tuesdays
- Try our bottomless drinks and fall forever!
- D.00
- 1100 : Vows
- So, um. Do you want to get a drink after the game?
- D.00
- 1101 : Sketchiness
- factory --- spire --- onslaught --- extractor --- judge
- D.00
- 1102 : Fastest-Growing
- I lead a small but extraordinarily persuasive religion whose only members are door-to-door proselytizers from other faiths.
- D.03
- 1103 : Nine
- FYI: If you get curious and start trying to calculate the time adjustment function that minimizes the gap between the most-used and least-used digit (for a representative sample of common cook times) without altering any time by more than 10%, and someone asks you what you're doing, it's easier to just lie.
- D.05
- 1104 : Feathers
- Click to see a video of a modern bird using stability flapping during predatory behavior. It all fits! Also, apparently Microraptor had *four* wings? The past keeps getting cooler! (And there's more of it every day!)
- D.07
- 1105 : License Plate
- The next day: 'What? Six bank robberies!? But I just vandalized the library!' 'Nice try. They saw your plate with all the 1's and I's.' 'That's impossible! I've been with my car the whole ti-- ... wait. Ok, wow, that was clever of her.'
- D.10
- 1106 : ADD
- 20 balloons float away while I'm busy permanently tying one to a tree to deal with it for good. Unfortunately, that one balloon was 'land a rocket on the moon in Kerbal Space Program.'
- D.12
- 1107 : Sports Cheat Sheet
- I would subscribe to a Twitter feed that supplied you with one reasonable sports opinion per day, like 'The Red Sox can't make the playoffs (championship games), but in last night's game their win seriously damaged the chances of the Yankees (longstanding rival team).'
- D.14
- 1108 : Cautionary Ghost
- But then the Ghost of Subjunctive Past showed up and told me to stay strong on 'if it were'.
- D.17
- 1109 : Refrigerator
- I want this engraved on my tombstone like the Epitaph of Stevinus.
- D.21
- 1111 : Premiere
- 'But what's the buzz about the film?' 'We're hoping it's distracting.'
- D.24
- 1112 : Think Logically
- I've developed a more logical set of rules but the people on the chess community have a bunch of stupid emotional biases and won't reply to my posts.
- D.26
- 1113 : Killed In Action
- We can't let this happen again. We need to build a secure TWO-day-before-retirement safe room.
- D.28
- 1114 : Metallurgy
- This exotic blade was wrought from a different fallen star. The meteorite was a carbonaceous chondrite, so it's basically a lump of gravel glued into the shape of a sword. A SPACE sword!
- D.00
- 1115 : Sky
- I dropped a bird and I didn't hear it hit bottom.
- D.00
- 1116 : Traffic Lights
- There's an intersection I drive through sometimes that has a forward green arrow, a red light, and a 'no turns' sign all on one pole. I honestly have no idea what it's telling me to do.
- D.00
- 1117 : My Sky
- According to my mom, my first word was (looking up at the sky) 'Wow!'
- D.00
- 1118 : Microsoft
- 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.
- D.00
- 1119 : Undoing
- I've been sneaking out at night and installing lamps on the underside of every photovoltaic panel I can find. Sure, there are upwards of 80% losses, but I prefer to think of them as nearly 20% gains.
- D.00
- 1120 : Blurring the Line
- People into masturbatory navel-gazing have a lot to learn about masturbation.
- D.00
- 1121 : Identity
- Not sure why I just taught everyone to flawlessly impersonate me to pretty much anyone I know. Just remember to constantly bring up how cool it is that birds are dinosaurs and you'll be set.
- D.00
- 1122 : Electoral Precedent
- No white guy who's been mentioned on Twitter has gone on to win.
- D.00
- 1123 : The Universal Label
- Works for any grocery or non-grocery. Even thyme is just H and time.
- D.00
- 1124 : Law of Drama
- 'Drama' is just 'people being upset', when someone says they're always surrounded by drama and they just ignore it, it starts to make sense that their strategy might be backfiring.
- D.00
- 1125 : Objects In Mirror
- Universes in mirror, like those in windshield, are larger than they appear.
- D.00
- 1126 : Epsilon and Zeta
- The average error in the NHC forecasted position of a hurricane three days in the future has shrunk to a third of what it was in 1990--a staggering accomplishment. However, as you may have gathered, forecasts of future storm *strength* have proved more difficult to improve.
- D.00
- 1127 : Congress
- It'd be great if some news network started featuring partisan hack talking heads who were all Federalists and Jacksonians, just to see how long it took us to catch on.
- D.00
- 1128 : Fifty Shades
- Wishbone and the Illustrated Classics series have gotten me through every conversation I've ever had about Dickens, Treasure Island, The Anarchist's Cookbook, and Our Bodies, Ourselves.
- D.00
- 1129 : Cell Number
- There's also a +1 sometimes, which is there to keep everyone on their toes. In the future, people who got to pick cool numbers by signing up for Google Voice early will be revered as wizards.
- D.00
- 1130 : Poll Watching
- The choices we make Tuesday could have MASSIVE and PERMANENT effects on the charts on Nate Silver's blog!
- D.00
- 1131 : Math
- As of this writing, the only thing that's 'razor-thin' or 'too close to call' is the gap between the consensus poll forecast and the result.
- D.00
- 1132 : Frequentists vs. Bayesians
- 'Detector! What would the Bayesian statistician say if I asked him whether the--' [roll] 'I AM A NEUTRINO DETECTOR, NOT A LABYRINTH GUARD. SERIOUSLY, DID YOUR BRAIN FALL OUT?' [roll] '... yes.'
- D.00
- 1133 : Up Goer Five
- Another thing that is a bad problem is if you're flying toward space and the parts start to fall off your space car in the wrong order. If that happens, it means you won't go to space today, or maybe ever.
- D.00
- 1134 : Logic Boat
- Or a cabbage, for that matter. The goat makes sense. Goats are fine.
- D.00
- 1135 : Arachnoneurology
- SPIDER PSYCHOLOGY (21st Ed.) is a comprehensive overview of arachnoneurology, neuro-arachnology, forensic arachnology, neuro-arachnoneurology (the study of the brains of spider neurology experts), and arachnoarachnology (the study of too many spiders).
- D.00
- 1136 : Broken Mirror
- 'I see you're in this mood again.' 'I am always in this mood.'
- D.00
- 1137 : ?LTR
- Collaborative editing can quickly become a textual rap battle fought with increasingly convoluted invocations of U+202a to U+202e.
- D.00
- 1138 : Heatmap
- 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.
- D.00
- 1139 : Rubber and Glue
- I'm rubber. You're rubber. We contemplate the reality of our existence in mute, vulcanized horror.
- D.00
- 1140 : Calendar of Meaningful Dates
- In months other than September, the 11th is mentioned substantially less often than any other date. It's been that way since long before 9/11 and I have no idea why.
- D.00
- 1141 : Two Years
- She won the first half of all our chemo Scrabble games, but then her IV drugs started kicking in and I *dominated*.
- D.00
- 1142 : Coverage
- My resonant tunneling diode phone has limited range but a short enough wavelength to penetrate even the densest cages. This gives me a major combat advantage, hopefully.
- D.00
- 1143 : Location
- Ingress: Foursquare With Space Noises.
- D.00
- 1144 : Tags
- <A>: Like </a>this.
- D.00
- 1145 : Sky Color
- Feynman recounted another good one upperclassmen would use on freshmen physics students: When you look at words in a mirror, how come they're reversed left to right but not top to bottom? What's special about the horizontal axis?
- D.00
- 1146 : Honest
- I didn't understand what you meant. I still don't. But I'll figure it out soon!
- D.00
- 1147 : Evolving
- Biologists play reverse Pokémon, trying to avoid putting any one team member on the front lines long enough for the experience to cause evolution.
- D.00
- 1148 : Nothing to Offer
- cerebrospinal fluid, pericardial fluid, sputum, aqueous humor, perilymph, chyme, hydatid fluid, interstitial fluid, rheum, and gin.
- D.00
- 1149 : Broomstick
- 'Broom first, then slippers.' 'How do I know you'll return the broom once you've secured your ticket?' 'I'll leave my little dog as collateral.' 'Great. Pleasure doing business!'
- D.00
- 1150 : Instagram
- I'm gonna call the cops and get Chad arrested for theft, then move all my stuff to the house across the street. Hopefully the owners there are more responsible.
- D.00
- 1151 : Tests
- In fact, one of the boxes is full of Staphylococcus. The wrapping paper is coated in E. coli, though, so it's an understandable mistake. You know, we should really stop accepting gifts from that guy.
- D.00
- 1152 : Communion
- The local police, growing increasingly concerned about this church, ask parishioners to take a sip of wine and then spit it back out for DNA testing. It's blood, and it matches a 1970s murder victim.
- D.00
- 1153 : Proof
- The prosecution calls Gottfried Leibniz.
- D.00
- 1154 : Resolution
- If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point.
Y.2013
- D.02
- 1155 : Kolmogorov Directions
- People get really grumpy when they realize you're giving them directions for how to go to the store and buy a GPS.
- D.04
- 1156 : Conditioning
- 'Why are you standing in the yard wearing a papal hat and a robe covered in seeds?' 'Well, the Pope is visiting our town next month ...'
- D.07
- 1157 : Sick Day
- Wikipedia path: Virus -> Immune system -> Innate immune system -> Parasites -> List of parasites of humans -> Naegleria fowleri -> Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis -> Deciding I DEFINITELY shouldn't connect an aquarium pump to my sinuses
- D.11
- 1159 : Countdown
- For all we know, the odds are in our favor.
- D.14
- 1160 : Drop Those Pounds
- 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.
- D.16
- 1161 : Hand Sanitizer
- Hipster CDC Reports Flu Epidemic Peaked Years Ago
- D.18
- 1162 : Log Scale
- Knuth Paper-Stack Notation: Write down the number on pages. Stack them. If the stack is too tall to fit in the room, write down the number of pages it would take to write down the number. THAT number won't fit in the room? Repeat. When a stack fits, write the number of iterations on a card. Pin it to the stack.
- D.21
- 1163 : Debugger
- It can take a site a while to figure out that there's a problem with their 'report a bug' form.
- D.25
- 1165 : Amazon
- 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'.
- D.28
- 1166 : Argument
- The misguided search for a perpetual motion machine has run substantially longer than any attempted perpetual motion machine.
- D.30
- 1167 : Star Trek into Darkness
- Of course, factions immediately sprang up in favor of '~*~sTaR tReK iNtO dArKnEsS~*~', 'xX_StAr TrEk InTo DaRkNess_Xx', and 'Star Trek lnto Darkness' (that's a lowercase 'L').
- D.01
- 1168 : tar
- I don't know what's worse--the fact that after 15 years of using tar I still can't keep the flags straight, or that after 15 years of technological advancement I'm still mucking with tar flags that were 15 years old when I started.
- D.04
- 1169 : Expedition
- I'm pretty sure I've logged more hours in Google Maps over the past decade than in any game.
- D.06
- 1170 : Bridge
- 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?'.
- D.08
- 1171 : Perl Problems
- To generate #1 albums, 'jay --help' recommends the -z flag.
- D.11
- 1172 : Workflow
- There are probably children out there holding down spacebar to stay warm in the winter! YOUR UPDATE MURDERS CHILDREN.
- D.13
- 1173 : Steroids
- A human is a system for converting dust billions of years ago into dust billions of years from now via a roundabout process which involves checking email a lot.
- D.15
- 1174 : App
- If I click 'no', I've probably given up on everything, so don't bother taking me to the page I was trying to go to. Just drop me on the homepage. Thanks.
- D.18
- 1175 : Moving Sidewalks
- I think I could spend hours just stepping on and off of conveyor belts moving at various speeds.
- D.22
- 1177 : Time Robot
- NO FATE BUT THE NARRATIVES WE IMPOSE ON LIFE'S RANDOM CHAOS TO DISTRACT OURSELVES FROM OUR EXISTENTIAL PLIGHT
- D.25
- 1178 : Pickup Artists
- It sounds like a great way to make friends! Is it near that Friend Zone you keep talking about? I wanna go!
- D.27
- 1179 : ISO 8601
- ISO 8601 was published on 06/05/88 and most recently amended on 12/01/04.
- D.00
- 1180 : Virus Venn Diagram
- Within five minutes of the Singularity appearing, somebody will suggest defragging it.
- D.00
- 1181 : PGP
- If you want to be extra safe, check that there's a big block of jumbled characters at the bottom.
- D.00
- 1182 : Rembrandt Photo
- ::click:: Come back! You didn't see the one of Whistler's mother!
- D.00
- 1183 : Rose Petals
- Joke's on you--the Roomba and I had a LOVELY evening.
- D.00
- 1184 : Circumference Formula
- Assume r' refers to the radius of Earth Prime, and r'' means radius in inches.
- D.00
- 1185 : Ineffective Sorts
- StackSort connects to StackOverflow, searches for 'sort a list', and downloads and runs code snippets until the list is sorted.
- D.00
- 1186 : Bumblebees
- Did you know sociologists can't explain why people keep repeating that urban legend about bumblebees not being able to fly!?
- D.00
- 1187 : Aspect Ratio
- I'm always disappointed when 'Anamorphic Widescreen' doesn't refer to a widescreen Animorphs movie.
- D.00
- 1188 : Bonding
- I'm trying to build character but Eclipse is really confusing.
- D.00
- 1189 : Voyager 1
- So far Voyager 1 has 'left the Solar System' by passing through the termination shock three times, the heliopause twice, and once each through the heliosheath, heliosphere, heliodrome, auroral discontinuity, Heaviside layer, trans-Neptunian panic zone, magnetogap, US Census Bureau Solar System statistical boundary, Kuiper gauntlet, Oort void, and crystal sphere holding the fixed stars.
- D.00
- 1190 : Time
- The end.
- D.00
- 1191 : The Past
- If history has taught us anything, we can use that information to destroy it.
- D.00
- 1192 : Humming
- I'm so bad at carrying a tune, those 'find a song by humming its melody' websites throw an HTTP 406 error as soon as I start to hum.
- D.00
- 1193 : Externalities
- This comic went up on April 1st, and the panels changed throughout the day in response to readers doing things like breaking hashes, editing a rapidly-shuffling set of target Wikipedia articles, and donating to Wikimedia Foundation. (The vandalism is over now and CMU won the hashing contest.)
- D.00
- 1194 : Stratigraphic Record
- All we have are these stupid tantalizing zircons and the scars on the face of the Moon.
- D.00
- 1195 : Flowchart
- 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'.
- D.00
- 1196 : Subways
- About one in three North American subway stops are in NYC.
- D.00
- 1197 : All Adobe Updates
- ALERT: Some pending mandatory software updates require version 21.1.2 of the Oracle/Sun Java(tm) JDK(tm) Update Manager Runtime Environment Meta-Updater, which is not available for your platform.
- D.00
- 1198 : Geologist
- 'It seems like it's still alive, Professor.' 'Yeah, a big one like this can keep running around for a few billion years after you remove the head."
- D.00
- 1199 : Silence
- All music is just performances of 4'33" in studios where another band happened to be playing at the time.
- D.00
- 1200 : Authorization
- 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.
- D.00
- 1201 : Integration by Parts
- If you can manage to choose u and v such that u = v = x, then the answer is just (1/2)x^2, which is easy to remember. Oh, and add a '+C' or you'll get yelled at.
- D.00
- 1203 : Time Machines
- 'All time machine systems nominal ... T-minus ten ... eleven ...'
- D.00
- 1204 : Detail
- 2031: Google defends the swiveling roof-mounted scanning electron microscopes on its Street View cars, saying they 'don't reveal anything that couldn't be seen by any pedestrian scanning your house with an electron microscope.'
- D.00
- 1205 : Is It Worth the Time?
- Don't forget the time you spend finding the chart to look up what you save. And the time spent reading this reminder about the time spent. And the time trying to figure out if either of those actually make sense. Remember, every second counts toward your life total, including these right now.
- D.00
- 1206 : Einstein
- Einstein was WRONG when he said that provisional patent #39561 represented a novel gravel-sorting technique and should be approved by the Patent Office.
- D.00
- 1207 : AirAware
- It ships with a version of Google Now that alerts you when it's too late to leave for your appointments.
- D.00
- 1208 : Footnote Labyrinths
- Every time you read this mouseover, toggle between interpreting nested footnotes as footnotes on footnotes and interpreting them as exponents (minus one, modulo 6, plus 1).
- D.00
- 1209 : Encoding
- I don't see how; the C0 block is right there at the beginning.
- D.00
- 1210 : I'm So Random
- 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.
- D.00
- 1211 : Birds and Dinosaurs
- Sure, T. rex is closer in height to Stegosaurus than a sparrow. But that doesn't tell you much; 'Dinosaur Comics' author Ryan North is closer in height to certain dinosaurs than to the average human.
- D.00
- 1212 : Interstellar Memes
- The strongest incentive we have to develop faster-than-light travel is that it would let us apologize in advance.
- D.00
- 1213 : Combination Vision Test
- If you see two numbers but they're both the same and you have to squint to read them, you have synesthesia, colorblindness, diplopia, and myopia.
- D.00
- 1214 : Geoguessr
- I'm not sure if you can get Epcot, but my friend just got LegoLand. He guessed California but it was the one in Denmark. Meanwhile, I'm rapidly becoming a connoisseur of unmarked dirt roads over flat, barren landscapes.
- D.00
- 1215 : Insight
- 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.
- D.00
- 1216 : Sticks and Stones
- Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.
- D.00
- 1217 : Cells
- Now, if it selectively kills cancer cells in a petri dish, you can be sure it's at least a great breakthrough for everyone suffering from petri dish cancer.
- D.00
- 1218 : Doors of Durin
- If we get the doors open and plug up the dam on the Sirannon so the water rises a little, the pool will start draining into Moria. How do you think the Watcher would fare against a drenched Balrog?
- D.00
- 1219 : Reports
- If that fails, just multiply every number by a thousand. 'The 2nd St speed limit should be set at 25,000 mph, which would likely have prevented 1,000 of the intersection's 3,000 serious accidents last month.'
- D.00
- 1220 : Hipsters
- You may point out that this very retreat into ironic detachment while still clearly participating in the thing in question is the very definition of contemporary hipsterdom. But on the other hand, wait, you're in an empty room. Who are you talking to?
- D.00
- 1221 : Nomenclature
- [shouted, from the field] 'Aunt Beast hit a pop fly to second! Dive for it, Mrs Whatsit!'
- D.00
- 1222 : Pastime
- Good thing we're too smart to spend all day being uselessly frustrated with ourselves. I mean, that'd be a hell of a waste, right?
- D.00
- 1223 : Dwarf Fortress
- 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.
- D.00
- 1224 : Council of 300
- 'And hypnotize someone into thinking they've uploaded it and passed it around.' 'But then won't the uploader get suspicious that it pauses at 301+ for a while? Why don't we just forge the number entirel--' ::BLAM:: 'The Council of 299 is adjourned.'
- D.00
- 1225 : Ice Sheets
- 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'.
- D.00
- 1226 : Balloon Internet
- I run a business selling rural internet access. My infrastructure consists of a bunch of Verizon wifi hotspots that I sign up for and then cancel at the end of the 14-day return period.
- D.00
- 1227 : The Pace of Modern Life
- 'Unfortunately, the notion of marriage which prevails ... at the present time ... regards the institution as simply a convenient arrangement or formal contract ... This disregard of the sanctity of marriage and contempt for its restrictions is one of the most alarming tendencies of the present age.' --John Harvey Kellogg, Ladies' guide in health and disease (1883)
- D.00
- 1228 : Prometheus
- '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.
- D.00
- 1229 : Screensaver
- I'm entering my 24th year of spending eight hours a day firing the Duck Hunt gun at the flying toasters. I'm sure I'll hit one soon.
- D.00
- 1230 : Polar/Cartesian
- Protip: Any two-axis graph can be re-labeled 'coordinates of the ants crawling across my screen as a function of time'.
- D.00
- 1233 : Relativity
- It's commonly believed that Lorentz contraction makes objects appear flatter along the direction of travel. However, this ignores light travel times. In fact, a fast-moving butt would appear rotated toward the observer but not substantially distorted. Shakira was right.
- D.00
- 1234 : Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013)
- Actual quote from The Demo: '... an advantage of being online is that it keeps track of who you are and what you're doing all the time ...'
- D.00
- 1235 : Settled
- Well, we've really only settled the question of ghosts that emit or reflect visible light. Or move objects around. Or make any kind of sound. But that covers all the ones that appear in Ghostbusters, so I think we're good.
- D.00
- 1236 : Seashell
- This is roughly equivalent to 'number of times I've picked up a seashell at the ocean' / 'number of times I've picked up a seashell', which in my case is pretty close to 1, and gets much closer if we're considering only times I didn't put it to my ear.
- D.00
- 1237 : QR Code
- Remember, the installer is watching the camera for the checksum it generated, so you have to scan it using your own phone.
- D.00
- 1238 : Enlightenment
- But the rules of writing are like magic spells. If you never acquire them, then not using them says nothing.
- D.00
- 1239 : Social Media
- The social media reaction to this asteroid announcement has been sharply negative. Care to respond?
- D.00
- 1240 : Quantum Mechanics
- You can also just ignore any science assertion where 'quantum mechanics' is the most complicated phrase in it.
- D.00
- 1241 : Annoying Ringtone Champion
- It beat out 'Clock radio alarm', 'B-flat at 194 decibels', 'That noise from Dumb & Dumber', and 'Recording of a sobbing voice begging you to answer'.
- D.00
- 1242 : Scary Names
- Far off to the right of the chart is the Helvetica Scenario.
- D.00
- 1243 : Snare
- It's going in A collection of satellites skewered with pins and mounted in display boxes. Not necessarily MY collection.
- D.00
- 1244 : Six Words
- Ahem. We are STRICTLY an Orbiter shop.
- D.00
- 1245 : 10-Day Forecast
- Oh, definitely not; they don't have Amazon Prime.
- D.00
- 1246 : Pale Blue Dot
- Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. There is no road out of this oblivion; we must embrace it. We must join with the darkness. Ba'al the Annihilator offers us no happiness, no answers, naught but the cold embrace of the void. To imagine any other end is delusion. We must give in to the will of Ba'al, for he will one day consume us and our world alike. I therefore call on Congress to fully fund space exploration, and to join with Ba'al, the Eater of Souls. Thank you.
- D.00
- 1248 : Sphere
- This message brought to you by the Society of Astronomers Trapped on the Surface of a Sphere.
- D.00
- 1249 : Meteor Showers
- Remember, meteors always hit the tallest object around.
- D.00
- 1250 : Old Accounts
- If you close an account while it's still friends with people, it contributes to database linkage accumulation slowdown, which is a major looming problem for web infrastructure and definitely not a thing I just made up.
- D.00
- 1251 : Anti-Glass
- 'Why don't you just point it at their eye directly?' 'What is this, 2007?'
- D.00
- 1252 : Increased Risk
- You may point out that strictly speaking, you can use that statement to prove that all risks are tiny--to which I reply HOLY SHIT WATCH OUT FOR THAT DOG!
- D.00
- 1253 : Exoplanet Names
- If you have any ideas, I hear you can send them to iaupublic@iap.fr.
- D.00
- 1255 : Columbus
- And thus was smallpox introduced into the previously Undying Lands.
- D.00
- 1256 : Questions
- To whoever typed 'why is arwen dying': GOOD. FUCKING. QUESTION.
- D.00
- 1257 : Monster
- It was finally destroyed with a nuclear weapon carrying the destructive energy of the Hiroshima bomb.
- D.00
- 1258 : First
- Fortunately, exactly zero other annoying internet behaviors have developed during this time.
- D.00
- 1259 : Bee Orchid
- In sixty million years aliens will know humans only by a fuzzy clip of a woman in an Axe commercial.
- D.00
- 1260 : LD50
- The dose is much lower when administered orally. We're still trying to get the paper into the needles for subcutaneous injection.
- D.00
- 1261 : Shake That
- How do I work it? IT'S ALREADY WORKING!
- D.00
- 1262 : Unquote
- I guess it's a saying from the Old Country.
- D.00
- 1263 : Reassuring
- 'At least humans are better at quietly amusing ourselves, oblivious to our pending obsolescence' thought the human, as a nearby Dell Inspiron contentedly displayed the same bouncing geometric shape screensaver it had been running for years.
- D.00
- 1264 : Slideshow
- Points to anyone who hacks the Flickr devs' computers to make their text editors do this when you click on anything.
- D.00
- 1265 : Juicer
- But the rind is where all the vitamins are!
- D.00
- 1266 : Halting Problem
- I found a counterexample to the claim that all things must someday die, but I don't know how to show it to anyone.
- D.00
- 1267 : Mess
- 'Sorry, I left out my glass of water from last night.' OH GOD I APPARENTLY LIVE IN A GARBAGE PIT.
- D.00
- 1268 : Alternate Universe
- As best as I can tell, I was transported here from Earth Prime sometime in the late 1990s. Your universe is identical in every way, except for the lobster thing and the thing where some of you occasionally change your clocks for some reason.
- D.00
- 1269 : Privacy Opinions
- I'm the Philosopher until someone hands me a burrito.
- D.00
- 1270 : Functional
- Functional programming combines the flexibility and power of abstract mathematics with the intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics.
- D.00
- 1271 : Highlighting
- And if clicking on any word pops up a site-search for articles about that word, I will close all windows in a panic and never come back.
- D.00
- 1272 : Shadowfacts
- 'Look to my coming on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the east.' 'And look to the west to see our shadows!'
- D.00
- 1275 : int(pi)
- If replacing all the '3's doesn't fix your code, remove the 4s, too, with 'ceiling(pi) / floor(pi) * pi * r^floor(pi)'. Mmm, floor pie.
- D.00
- 1276 : Angular Size
- If the celestial sphere were mapped to the Earth's surface, astronomy would get a LOT easier; you'd just need a magnifying glass.
- D.00
- 1277 : Ayn Random
- In a cavern deep below the Earth, Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Ann Druyan, Paul Rudd, Alan Alda, and Duran Duran meet together in the Secret Council of /(b[plurandy]+b ?){2}/i.
- D.00
- 1278 : Giraffes
- If you fund my Kickstarter ...
- D.00
- 1279 : Reverse Identity Theft
- I asked a few friends whether they'd had this happen, then looked up the popularity of their initials/names over time. Based on those numbers, it looks like there must be at least 750,000 people in the US alone who think 'Sure, that's probably my email address' on a regular basis.
- D.00
- 1280 : Mystery News
- 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!
- D.00
- 1281 : Minifigs
- The LEGO Group is already the world's largest tire manufacturer.
- D.00
- 1282 : Monty Hall
- A few minutes later, the goat from behind door C drives away in the car.
- D.00
- 1283 : Headlines
- 1916: 'PHYSICIST DAD' TURNS HIS ATTENTION TO GRAVITY, AND YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HE FINDS. [PICS] [NSFW]
- D.00
- 1284 : Improved Keyboard
- 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.
- D.00
- 1285 : Third Way
- 'The monospaced-typewriter-font story is a COMPLETE FABRICATION! WAKE UP, SHEEPLE' 'It doesn't matter! Studies support single spaces!' 'Those results weren't statistically significant!' 'Fine, you win. I'm using double spaces right now!' 'Are not! We can all hear your stupid whitespace.'
- D.00
- 1286 : Encryptic
- It was bound to happen eventually. This data theft will enable almost limitless [xkcd.com/792]-style password reuse attacks in the coming weeks. There's only one group that comes out of this looking smart: Everyone who pirated Photoshop.
- D.00
- 1287 : Puzzle
- Prediction for Carlsen v. Anand: ... 25. Qb8+ Nxb8 26. Rd8# f6 27. "... dude." Qf5 28. "The game is over, dude." Qxg5 29. Rxe8 0-1 30. "Dude, your move can't be '0-1'. Don't write that down." [Black flips board]
- D.00
- 1289 : Simple Answers
- 'Will [ ] allow us to better understand each other and thus make war undesirable?' is one that pops up whenever we invent a new communication medium.
- D.00
- 1291 : Shoot for the Moon
- 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.
- D.00
- 1292 : Pi vs. Tau
- Conveniently approximated as e+2, Pau is commonly known as the Devil's Ratio (because in the octal expansion, '666' appears four times in the first 200 digits while no other run of 3+ digits appears more than once.)
- D.00
- 1293 : Job Interview
- When you talk about the job experience you'll give me, why do you pronounce 'job' with a long 'o'?
- D.00
- 1294 : Telescope Names
- The Thirty Meter Telescope will be renamed The Flesh-Searing Eye on the Volcano.
- D.00
- 1295 : New Study
- When the results are published, no one will be sure whether to report on them again.
- D.00
- 1296 : Git Commit
- Merge branch 'asdfasjkfdlas/alkdjf' into sdkjfls-final
- D.00
- 1297 : Oort Cloud
- ... I wanna try. Hang on, be right back.
- D.04
- 1299 : I Don't Own a TV
- Theory: Smugness is proportional to the negative second derivative of TV ownership rate with respect to time.
- D.06
- 1300 : Galilean Moons
- I'm SO glad I escaped. They almost had me caught in their weird ... thing.
- D.09
- 1301 : File Extensions
- I have never been lied to by data in a .txt file which has been hand-aligned.
- D.11
- 1302 : Year in Review
- All in all, I give this year a C-. There were no aurora visible from my house and that comet evaporated. They'd better not cancel the 2017 eclipse.
- D.13
- 1303 : Profile Info
- It's ok, they'll always let you opt out! Like they did with the YouTube real name profile thing.
- D.16
- 1304 : Glass Trolling
- Plus, when someone finally grabs your glasses and stomps on them, it costs way less than $1,500 to replace them.
- D.18
- 1305 : Undocumented Feature
- And it doesn't pop up a box every time asking you to use your real name. In fact, there's no way to set your name at all. You just have to keep reminding people who you are.
- D.20
- 1306 : Sigil Cycle
- The cycle seems to be 'we need these symbols to clarify what types of things we're referring to!' followed by 'wait, it turns out words already do that.'
- D.23
- 1307 : Buzzfeed Christmas
- The 6 Weirdest Objects The Buzzfeed Writers Are Throwing Out Their Windows At Us
- D.27
- 1309 : Infinite Scrolling
- Maybe we should give up on the whole idea of a 'back' button. 'Show me that thing I was looking at a moment ago' might just be too complicated an idea for the modern web.
- D.30
- 1310 : Goldbach Conjectures
- The weak twin primes conjecture states that there are infinitely many pairs of primes. The strong twin primes conjecture states that every prime p has a twin prime (p+2), although (p+2) may not look prime at first. The tautological prime conjecture states that the tautological prime conjecture is true.
Y.2014
- D.01
- 1311 : 2014
- Some future reader, who may see the term, without knowing the history of it, may imagine that it had reference to some antiquated bridge of the immortal Poet, thrown across the silver Avon, to facilitate his escape after some marauding excursion in a neighbouring park; and in some Gentleman's Magazine of the next century, it is not impossible, but that future antiquaries may occupy page after page in discussing so interesting a matter. We think it right, therefore, to put it on record in the Oriental Herald that the 'Shakesperian Rope Bridges' are of much less classic origin; that Mr Colin Shakespear, who, besides his dignity as Postmaster, now signs himself 'Superintendent General of Shakespearian Rope Bridges', is a person of much less genius than the Bard of Avon. --The Oriental Herald, 1825
- D.03
- 1312 : Haskell
- The problem with Haskell is that it's a language built on lazy evaluation and nobody's actually called for it.
- D.06
- 1313 : Regex Golf
- /bu|[rn]t|[coy]e|[mtg]a|j|iso|n[hl]|[ae]d|lev|sh|[lnd]i|[po]o|ls/ matches the last names of elected US presidents but not their opponents.
- D.08
- 1314 : Photos
- I hate when people take photos of their meal instead of eating it, because there's nothing I love more than the sound of other people chewing.
- D.10
- 1315 : Questions for God
- What sins could possibly darken the heart of a STEAMBOAT? I asked The Shadow, but he says he only covers men.
- D.13
- 1316 : Inexplicable
- 'It has a ghost in it. Take it back.' 'No.'
- D.15
- 1317 : Theft
- Is he ALSO wondering at what point our thoughts diverged, if they even have yet? 'dude, I think he just took your credit card' AM I THE ORIGINAL? HOW DO I TELL?
- D.17
- 1318 : Actually
- 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.
- D.20
- 1319 : Automation
- 'Automating' comes from the roots 'auto-' meaning 'self-', and 'mating', meaning 'screwing'.
- D.22
- 1320 : Walmart
- What I really want is to hang out where I hung out with my friends in college, but have all my older relatives there too.
- D.24
- 1321 : Cold
- 'You see the same pattern all over. Take Detroit--' 'Hold on. Why do you know all these statistics offhand?' 'Oh, um, no idea. I definitely spend my evenings hanging out with friends, and not curating a REALLY NEAT database of temperature statistics. Because, pshh, who would want to do that, right? Also, snowfall records.'
- D.27
- 1322 : Winter
- Stay warm, little flappers, and find lots of plant eggs!
- D.29
- 1323 : Protocol
- Changing the names would be easier, but if you're not comfortable lying, try only making friends with people named Alice, Bob, Carol, etc.
- D.31
- 1324 : Weather
- At least if you're really into, like, Turkish archaeology, store clerks aren't like 'hey, how 'bout those Derinkuyu underground cities!' when they're trying to be polite.
- D.03
- 1325 : Rejection
- Perhaps you need a crash course in taking hints. Here's your first lesson: We're not actually walking somewhere together; I'm trying to leave this conversation and you're following me.
- D.05
- 1326 : Sharks
- 'Now, minions, I'm off to inspect our shark cages.' 'Do you really need to inspect them this often?' 'PRISONERS MUST NEVER ESCAPE.'
- D.07
- 1327 : Mobile Marketing
- We're firing you, but the online headline-writing division wants to hire you.
- D.10
- 1328 : Update
- I have a bunch of things open right now.
- D.12
- 1329 : Standing
- At first I was making fun of them, but joke's on me--the deer is surprisingly ergonomic, except for the kicks.
- D.14
- 1330 : Kola Borehole
- 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.
- D.17
- 1331 : Frequency
- 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.
- D.19
- 1332 : Slippery Slope
- Sure, taking a few seconds to be respectful toward someone about something they care about doesn't sound hard. But if you talk to hundreds of people every day and they all start expecting that same consideration, it could potentially add up to MINUTES wasted. And for WHAT?
- D.21
- 1333 : First Date
- I sympathize with the TPP protagonist because I, too, have progressed through a surprising number of stages of life despite spending entire days stuck against simple obstacles.
- D.24
- 1334 : Second
- Let me just scroll down and check behind that rock. Annnnd ... nope, page copyright year starts with '19'. Oh God, is this a WEBRING?
- D.26
- 1335 : Now
- This image stays roughly in sync with the day (assuming the Earth continues spinning). Shortcut: xkcd.com/now
- D.28
- 1336 : Transformers
- A helicopter bursts from a chrysalis and alights on a rock, rotors still damp.
- D.00
- 1337 : Hack
- HACK THE STARS
- D.00
- 1338 : Land Mammals
- Bacteria still outweigh us thousands to one--and that's not even counting the several pounds of them in your body.
- D.00
- 1339 : When You Assume
- You know what happens when you assert--you make an ass out of the emergency response team.
- D.00
- 1340 : Unique Date
- If our current civilization lasts another 8,000 years, it's probably fair to assume the Long Now Foundation got things right, and at some point we started listening to them and switched to five-digit years.
- D.00
- 1342 : Ancient Stars
- 'The light from those millions of stars you see is probably many thousands of years old' is a rare example of laypeople substantially OVERestimating astronomical numbers.
- D.00
- 1343 : Manuals
- The most ridiculous offender of all is the sudoers man page, which for 15 years has started with a 'quick guide' to EBNF, a system for defining the grammar of a language. 'Don't despair', it says, 'the definitions below are annotated.'
- D.00
- 1344 : Digits
- It's taken me 20 years to get over skyline tetris.
- D.00
- 1345 : Answers
- Stanford sleep researcher William Dement said that after 50 years of studying sleep, the only really solid explanation he knows for why we do it is 'because we get sleepy'.
- D.00
- 1346 : Career
- They'd convince me to come out of retirement for one last job: biting into a giant lump of slightly soft wax a couple of times.
- D.00
- 1347 : t Distribution
- If data fails the Teacher's t test, you can just force it to take the test again until it passes.
- D.00
- 1348 : Before the Internet
- 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.
- D.00
- 1349 : Shouldn't Be Hard
- (six hours later) ARGH. How are these stupid microchips so durable?! All I want is to undo a massive industrial process with household tools!
- D.00
- 1350 : Lorenz
- (six hours later) ARGH. How are these stupid microchips so durable?! All I want is to undo a massive industrial process with household tools!
- D.00
- 1351 : Metamaterials
- If I developed a hue-shifting metamaterial, I would photobomb people's Instagram pics with a sheet of material that precisely undid the filter they were using.
- D.00
- 1352 : Cosmologist on a Tire Swing
- 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.
- D.00
- 1353 : Heartbleed
- I looked at some of the data dumps from vulnerable sites, and it was ... bad. I saw emails, passwords, password hints. SSL keys and session cookies. Important servers brimming with visitor IPs. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, c-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. I should probably patch OpenSSL.
- D.00
- 1355 : Airplane Message
- PHARAOH IRY-HOR, FROM THE 3100s BC, IS THE FIRST HUMAN WHOSE NAME WE KNOW.
- D.00
- 1356 : Orbital Mechanics
- To be fair, my job at NASA was working on robots and didn't actually involve any orbital mechanics. The small positive slope over that period is because it turns out that if you hang around at NASA, you get in a lot of conversations about space.
- D.00
- 1357 : Free Speech
- I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.
- D.00
- 1358 : NRO
- 'DISPATCHING DRONE TO TARGET COORDINATES.' 'Wait, crap, wrong button. Oh jeez.'
- D.00
- 1359 : Phone Alarm
- Who's calling me?? WHY IS THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD CALLING ME!?
- D.00
- 1360 : Old Files
- Wow, ANIMORPHS-NOVEL.RTF? Just gonna, uh, go through and delete that from all my archives real quick.
- D.00
- 1362 : Morse Code
- Oh, because Facebook has worked out SO WELL for everyone.
- D.02
- 1363 : xkcd Phone
- Presented in partnership with Qualcomm, Craigslist, Whirlpool, Hostess, LifeStyles, and the US Chamber of Commerce. Manufactured on equipment which also processes peanuts. Price includes 2-year Knicks contract. Phone may extinguish nearby birthday candles. If phone ships with Siri, return immediately; do not speak to her and ignore any instructions she gives. Do not remove lead casing. Phone may attract/trap insects; this is normal. Volume adjustable (requires root). If you experience sudden tingling, nausea, or vomiting, perform a factory reset immediately. Do not submerge in water; phone will drown. Exterior may be frictionless. Prolonged use can cause mood swings, short-term memory loss, and seizures. Avert eyes while replacing battery. Under certain circumstances, wireless transmitter may control God.
- D.00
- 1364 : Like I'm Five
- 'Am I taking care of you? I have a thesis to write!' 'My parents are at their house; you visited last--' 'No, no, explain like you're five.'
- D.00
- 1365 : Inflation
- Wait till they notice the faint reflection of Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny in the E-mode.
- D.00
- 1366 : Train
- Trains rotate the Earth around various axes while elevators shift its position in space.
- D.00
- 1367 : Installing
- But still, my scheme for creating and saving user config files and data locally to preserve them across reinstalls might be useful for--wait, that's cookies.
- D.00
- 1368 : One Of The
- 'The world's greatest [whatever]' is subjective, but 'One of the world's greatest [whatever]s' is clearly objective. Anyway, that's why I got you this 'one of the world's greatest moms' mug!
- D.00
- 1369 : TMI
- 'TMI' he whispered, gazing into the sea.
- D.00
- 1370 : President
- Anyone who thinks we're all going to spend the 2032 elections poring over rambling blog posts by teenagers has never tried to read a rambling blog post by a teenager.
- D.00
- 1371 : Brightness
- Recently, some exoplanet astronomers have managed to use careful analysis of reflected light to discover Earth during the day.
- D.00
- 1372 : Smartwatches
- This is even better than my previous smartphone casemod: an old Western Electric Model 2500 desk phone handset complete with a frayed, torn-off cord dangling from it.
- D.00
- 1373 : Screenshot
- I'M PLUGGING IN MY PHONE BUT THE BATTERY ON THE SCREEN ISN'T CHARGING
- D.00
- 1374 : Urn
- Can this PLEASE be drawing with replacement?
- D.00
- 1375 : Astronaut Vandalism
- That night, retired USAF pilots covertly replaced the '62' with '50'.
- D.00
- 1376 : Jump
- Or that I'm at least following the curve of the Earth around to land ...
- D.00
- 1377 : Fish
- [Astronomer peers into telescope] [Jaws theme begins playing]
- D.00
- 1378 : Turbine
- Ok, plan B: Fly a kite into the blades, with a rock in a sling dangling below it, and create the world's largest trebuchet.
- D.00
- 1379 : 4.5 Degrees
- The good news is that according to the latest IPCC report, if we enact aggressive emissions limits now, we could hold the warming to 2°C. That's only HALF an ice age unit, which is probably no big deal.
- D.00
- 1380 : Manual for Civilization
- We will have an entire wing of the library devoted to copies of book #26, because ohmygod it's the one where Jake and Cassie finally KISS!!!
- D.00
- 1381 : Margin
- PROTIP: You can get around the Shannon-Hartley limit by setting your font size to 0.
- D.00
- 1382 : Rocket Packs
- Every year: 'It's --I want my jetpack [and also my free medical care covering all my jetpack-related injuries]!'
- D.00
- 1383 : Magic Words
- 'And then whisper 'anapest' in my ear as you hold me?'
- D.00
- 1384 : Krypton
- Their Sun and gravity will make you, uh, something, I guess. Out of earshot from Earth, mostly.
- D.00
- 1385 : Throwing Rocks
- ::PLOOOOSH:: Looks like you won't be making it to Vinland today, Leaf Erikson.
- D.00
- 1386 : People are Stupid
- To everyone who responds to everything by saying they've 'lost their faith in humanity': Thanks--I'll let humanity know. I'm sure they'll be crushed.
- D.00
- 1387 : Clumsy Foreshadowing
- '... hosts were unexpectedly fired from ABC's 'The View' today. ABC will likely announce new ...'
- D.00
- 1388 : Subduction License
- 'Dude, why can't you just be a normal roommate?' 'Because I'm coming TOWARD you!'
- D.00
- 1389 : Surface Area
- This isn't an informational illustration; this is a thing I think we should do. First, we'll need a gigantic spool of thread. Next, we'll need some kind of ... hmm, time to head to Seattle.
- D.00
- 1390 : Research Ethics
- I mean, it's not like we could just demand to see the code that's governing our lives. What right do we have to poke around in Facebook's private affairs like that?
- D.00
- 1391 : Darkness
- This was actually wish #406. Wish #2 was for him to lose the ability to remember that each new wish wasn't my first.
- D.00
- 1392 : Dominant Players
- When Vera Menchik entered a 1929 tournament, a male competitor mocked her by suggesting that a special 'Vera Menchik Club' would be created for any player who lost to her. When the tournament began, he promptly became the first member of said club, and over the years it accumulated a large and illustrious roster.
- D.00
- 1393 : Timeghost
- 'Hello, Ghostbusters?' 'ooOOoooo people born years after that movie came out are having a second chiiiild right now ooOoooOoo'
- D.00
- 1394 : Superm*n
- See also: Spider-Man reboot in which he can produce several inches of web, doesn't need as much chalk powder on his hands when he goes rock climbing, and occasionally feels vaguely uneasy about situations.
- D.00
- 1395 : Power Cord
- 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.
- D.00
- 1396 : Actors
- Once again topping the list of tonight's hottest rising stars in Hollywood is ? Persei!
- D.00
- 1397 : Luke
- Don't turn it on.
- D.00
- 1398 : Snake Facts
- Biologically speaking, what we call a 'snake' is actually a human digestive tract which has escaped from its host.
- D.00
- 1399 : Chaos
- Although the oral exam for the doctorate was just 'can you do that weird laugh?'
- D.00
- 1400 : D.B. Cooper
- 'Why on Earth would someone commit air piracy just to finance a terrible movie decades later?' 'People are very strange these days.'
- D.00
- 1401 : New
- The nice thing about headcannnons is that it's really easy to get other people to believe in them.
- D.00
- 1402 : Harpoons
- 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.
- D.00
- 1403 : Thesis Defense
- MY RESULTS ARE A SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT ON THE STATE OF THE AAAAAAAAAAAART
- D.00
- 1404 : Quantum Vacuum Virtual Plasma
- I don't understand the things you do, and you therefore may represent an interaction with the quantum vacuum virtual plasma.
- D.00
- 1405 : Meteor
- No, only LAVA is called 'magma' while underground. Any other object underground is called 'lava'.
- D.00
- 1406 : Universal Converter Box
- Comes with a 50-lb sack of gender changers, and also an add-on device with a voltage selector and a zillion circular center pin DC adapter tips so you can power any of those devices from the 90s.
- D.00
- 1407 : Worst Hurricane
- 'Finding a 105-year-old who's lived in each location and asking them which hurricane they think was the worst' is left as an exercise for the reader.
- D.00
- 1409 : Query
- SELECT * FROM GHOSTS
- D.00
- 1410 : California
- 58% of the state has gone into plaid.
- D.00
- 1411 : Loop
- 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.
- D.00
- 1412 : Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
- 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.
- D.00
- 1413 : Suddenly Popular
- Are Your Teens Practicing Amplexus? Learn These Six Telltale Signs!
- D.00
- 1414 : Writing Skills
- I'd like to find a corpus of writing from children in a non-self-selected sample (e.g. handwritten letters to the president from everyone in the same teacher's 7th grade class every year)--and score the kids today versus the kids 20 years ago on various objective measures of writing quality. I've heard the idea that exposure to all this amateur peer practice is hurting us, but I'd bet on the generation that conducts the bulk of their social lives via the written word over the generation that occasionally wrote book reports and letters to grandma once a year, any day.
- D.00
- 1415 : Ballooning
- Time to dance in front of Mary Jane! If I'm lucky, she'll turn out not to practice pre-copulatory sexual cannibalism!
- D.00
- 1416 : Pixels
- It's turtles all the way down.
- D.00
- 1417 : Seven
- The days of the week are Monday, Arctic, Wellesley, Green, Electra, Synergize, and the Seventh Seal.
- D.00
- 1418 : Horse
- Officer suspended from horse.
- D.00
- 1419 : On the Phone
- 'No idea what I was thinking! Haha! But anyway, maybe we should check out what this Ba'al guy has to say.'
- D.00
- 1420 : Watches
- Old people used to write obnoxious thinkpieces about how people these days always wear watches and are slaves to the clock, but now they've switched to writing thinkpieces about how kids these days don't appreciate the benefits of an old-fashioned watch. My position is: The word 'thinkpiece' sounds like a word made up by someone who didn't know about the word 'brain'.
- D.00
- 1421 : Future Self
- Maybe I haven't been to Iceland because I'm busy dealing with YOUR crummy code.
- D.00
- 1422 : My Phone is Dying
- When it explodes, it will cast off its outer layers, leaving behind nothing but a slowly fading PalmPilot, calculator, or two-way pager.
- D.00
- 1423 : Conversation
- Later, at home: 'Dear diary: Still can't figure out what to write here ...'
- D.00
- 1424 : En Garde
- 'Touch!' 'Nope, I sighed and stared at you with resignation, so I regained emotional right-of-way.'
- D.00
- 1425 : Tasks
- 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.
- D.00
- 1426 : Reduce Your Payments
- I tried oxidizing them, but your bank uses some really weird paper and it wouldn't light.
- D.00
- 1427 : iOS Keyboard
- More actual results: 'Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You [are the best. The best thing ever]', 'Revenge is a dish best served [by a group of people in my room]', and 'They may take our lives, but they'll never take our [money].'
- D.00
- 1428 : Move Fast and Break Things
- I was almost fired from a job driving the hearse in funeral processions, but then the funeral home realized how much business I was creating for them.
- D.00
- 1429 : Data
- If you want to have more fun at the expense of language pedants, try developing an hypercorrection habit.
- D.00
- 1430 : Proteins
- Check it out--when I tug the C-terminal tail, the binding tunnel squeezes!
- D.00
- 1431 : Marriage
- People often say that same-sex marriage now is like interracial marriage in the 60s. But in terms of public opinion, same-sex marriage now is like interracial marriage in the 90s, when it had already been legal nationwide for 30 years.
- D.00
- 1432 : The Sake of Argument
- 'It's not actually ... it's a DEVICE for EXPLORING a PLAUSIBLE REALITY that's not the one we're in, to gain a broader understanding about it.' 'oh, like a boat!' '...' 'Just for the sake of argument, we should get a boat! You can invite the Devil, too, if you want.'
- D.00
- 1433 : Lightsaber
- A long time in the future, in a galaxy far, far, away, astronomers in the year 2008 sight an unusual gamma-ray burst originating from somewhere far across the universe.
- D.00
- 1434 : Where Do Birds Go
- Water/ice has a lot of weird phases. Maybe asking 'where do birds go when it rains' is like asking 'where does Clark Kent go whenever Superman shows up?'
- D.00
- 1435 : Presidential Alert
- When putting his kids to bed, after saying 'Goodnight', Obama has to stop himself from saying 'God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.'
- D.00
- 1436 : Orb Hammer
- Ok, but make sure to get lots of pieces of rock, because later we'll decide to stay in a room on our regular orb and watch hammers hold themselves and hit rocks for us, and they won't bring us very many rocks.
- D.00
- 1437 : Higgs Boson
- 'Can't you just use the LHC you already built to find it again?' 'We MAY have disassembled it to build a death ray.' 'Just one, though.' 'Nothing you should worry about.' 'The death isn't even very serious.'
- D.00
- 1438 : Houston
- 'Oh, hey Mom. No, nothing important, just at work.'
- D.00
- 1439 : Rack Unit
- There's also nothing in the TOSes that says you can't let a dog play baseball in the server room!
- D.00
- 1440 : Geese
- Anyway, that's a common misconception. Geese live for a long time; all the ones we can see will probably keep flying around for billions of years before they explode.
- D.00
- 1441 : Turnabout
- Whenever I miss a shot with a sci-fi weapon, I say 'Apollo retroreflector' really fast, just in case.
- D.00
- 1442 : Chemistry
- These are all sans-serif compounds. Serif compounds are dramatically different and usually much more reactive.
- D.00
- 1443 : Language Nerd
- Not to go all sentence fragment on you.
- D.00
- 1444 : Cloud
- Cloud computing has a ways to go.
- D.00
- 1445 : Efficiency
- I need an extension for my research project because I spent all month trying to figure out whether learning Dvorak would help me type it faster.
- D.00
- 1447 : Meta-Analysis
- Life goal #29 is to get enough of them rejected that I can publish a comparative analysis of the rejection letters.
- D.00
- 1448 : Question
- The universe long dead, IsaAC surveyed the formless chaos. At last, he had arrived at an answer. 'I like you,' he declared to the void, 'but I don't LIKE like you.'
- D.00
- 1449 : Red Rover
- I just learned about the Slide Mountain Ocean, which I like because it's three nouns that sound like they can't possibly all refer to the same thing.
- D.00
- 1450 : AI-Box Experiment
- I'm working to bring about a superintelligent AI that will eternally torment everyone who failed to make fun of the Roko's Basilisk people.
- D.00
- 1451 : Background Screens
- No way, we gotta rewind and cross-reference this map with the list of coordinates we saw on the other screen. This Greenland thing could be big.
- D.00
- 1452 : Jurassic World
- Hey guys! What's eating you? Ha ha ha it's me! Oh, what fun we have.
- D.00
- 1453 : fMRI
- They also showed activation in the parts of the brain associated with exposure to dubious study methodology, concern about unremoved piercings, and exasperation with fMRI techs who won't stop talking about Warped Tour.
- D.01
- 1454 : Done
- I'm sorry, but the author of this Facebook comment clearly believes you were.
- D.03
- 1455 : Trolley Problem
- For $5 I promise not to orchestrate this situation, and for $25 I promise not to take further advantage of this ability to create incentives.
- D.05
- 1456 : On the Moon
- "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on Venus and returning him safely to--" [an aide frantically whispers in the president's ear for a moment] "... of landing a man on Venus."
- D.08
- 1457 : Feedback
- A new study finds that if you give rats a cell phone and a lever they can push to improve the signal, the rats will chew on the cell phone until it breaks and your research supervisors will start to ask some questions about your grant money.
- D.10
- 1458 : Small Moon
- GENERAL JAN DODONNA: An analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia has reinvigorated the arguments of the 'artificial moonlet' and 'rogue planet-station' camps. I fear this question is fracturing the Rebellion.
- D.12
- 1459 : Documents
- Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Copy of Untitled.doc
- D.15
- 1460 : SMFW
- wtfw it's like smho tbfh, imdb.
- D.17
- 1461 : Payloads
- With a space elevator, a backyard full of solar panels could launch about 500 horses per year, and a large power plant could launch 10 horses per minute.
- D.19
- 1462 : Blind Trials
- Plus, you have to control for the fact that some people are into being blindfolded.
- D.22
- 1463 : Altitude
- "TURN OFF THE LASER GUIDE STAR" "WHY" "STAR CATS"
- D.24
- 1464 : Santa
- He probably just poops over the side of the sleigh.
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