ABCD

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

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

It's important to keep the spider from touching your face.

If we can destroy enough of the lights in our region, we may see more comets, but that's a risk we'll have to take.

See also: Farm animals and dinosaurs. I am so confident that there exists children's media that involves dinosaurs driving trucks on a farm that I'm writing this without even Googling to check.

No one likes my novelty ringtone, an audio recording of a phone on vibrate sitting on a hard surface.

The AARP puts the average age of a first-time grandparent close to 50, and the CDC has some data. But I don't have first-parent age distributions for specific names, or generational first-child age correlations, so the dotted line is just a guess. Still, let's be honest: No further research is really *needed.*

On the news a few days later: "Buzz is building around the so-called 'camping Roomba' after a big investment. Preorders have spiked, and..."

And I was kicked out of my March Madness pool because I wouldn't shut up about the evidence for NBA/ABA endosymbiosis.

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

Blockchains are like grappling hooks, in that it's extremely cool when you encounter a problem for which they're the right solution, but it happens way too rarely in real life.

Some people suspect that it started as a "No, I didn't forget Valentine's Day" excuse that got out of hand.

I ended up getting my tax return prepared at a local place by a really friendly pretrained neural net named Greg.

If you're going to let it burn up, make sure it happens over the deep end of the bathtub and not any populated parts of the house!

After a while you adjust to the new cicadian rhythm.

It will get within 9 or 10 Sun-diameters of the "bottom" (the Sun's surface) which seems pretty far when you put it that way, but from up here on Earth it's practically all the way down.

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

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

LOOK, THE LATENCY FALLS EVERY TIME YOU CLAP YOUR HANDS AND SAY YOU BELIEVE

"Actually, Jupiter already has a very impressive ring system!" --someone who knows Jupiter is within earshot

A mix of the two is even worse: 'Thanks for unsubscribing and helping us pare this list down to reliable supporters.'

The projection does a good job preserving both distance and azimuth, at the cost of really exaggerating how many South Americas there are.

The text ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US with a lengthy footnote explaining that I got this tattoo in 2020 and not, as you may assume, 2001, but offering no further clarification.

I was actually a little relieved when I learned that JPEG2000 was used in the DCI digital cinema standard. I was feeling so bad for it!

There's some flexibility depending on your standards for measuring runtime and the various special editions. If you still want to have a party, I'm sure you can find some combination that works.

I never got around to seeing that movie about the battle (of Midway).

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

After changing it back and forth several times and consulting with internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch, I settled on "ok" in my book How To, but I'm still on the fence. Maybe I should just switch to "oK."

Billboard's "Best of the 80s" chart includes Blondie's 1980 hit "Call Me." QED.

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

I'm compromising by picking a weird hill to lie on.

"The parasitism might be mediated by a fungus!" exclaimed the biologist who was trying to ruin Christmas again.

Any arrangement is an edible arrangement if you're hungry enough.

A tattoo of a tattoo parlor receipt

The heroes seem to be gaining the upper hand until Darth Juul manages to flip the switch on the car wash control panel from 'REGULAR' to 'PREMIUM.'

Water is thinner than both, and fire is *definitely* thicker.

I love Brussels Sprouts Mandela Effect; I saw them open for Correct Horse Battery Staple.

Not actual size, except technically at one spot near the left.

Cyanobacteria wiped out nearly all life on Earth once before, and they can do it again!

"Wait, how often are you getting bitten by snakes? And why are you boiling water?" "Dunno, the CDC people keep showing up with complicated questions about the 'history of the property' and 'possible curses' but I kinda tune them out. At least one of them offered me the flu shot."

So glad Kate over in R&D pushed for using the AlgoMaxAnalyzer to look into this. Hiring her was a great decisio- waaaait.

We've tested it on 30 different days and it hasn't gotten one wrong yet.

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

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

The astro-ph.SR arXiv servers are simultaneously being overwhelmed by electronic requests and actual electricity.

[proudly greeting the hotel manager at the door] "Did I do a good job?"

According to Google, "the time for Beeland" is apparently whenever you're looking for delicious honey in Spillimacheen, British Columbia or a hexagonal chalet in the Savinja valley in Slovenia.

Some works didn't make the cut; in "Ecks vs. Sever" vs. the passage of time, the latter seems to have won pretty decisively.

We're like 10+ movies in and the focus has been almost entirely on the WARS half.

More likely: Click on all the pictures of people who appear disloyal to [name of company or government]

For some reason the water in my pool is green and there's a weird film on the surface #nofilter

These signals seem to be pre-star-formation but post-Malone.

The weirdest quirk of the Borda count is that Jean-Charles de Borda automatically gets one point; luckily this has no consequences except in cases of extremely low turnout.

Everything is a cloud application; the ping times just vary a lot.

These new Bluetooth socks are great, but it's troubling to learn that I average almost 14 hours of Shoe Time a day.

I was sent here to stop the robot that was sent here to protect the human who was sent here to protect the human who was sent here to destroy the robot that was sent here to vacuum the floor.

I laugh at the software as if I'm 100% confident that it's 2019.

I wonder what the trendy adults in 2019 who are too cool for Pokemon will be into. Probably Digimon!

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

If you'd just agree to hold your meetings in here, you'd have PLENTY of time to figure things out before the deadline.

Well, there's one right here at the bottom, where it says "53."

"So what's dark energy?" "Cosmologists and the FDA are both trying very hard to find out."

They managed to briefly hit the top of the rankings when they rejected everyone except one applicant, published 5 billion research papers that just said "Hi," and hired one of their graduates for $50 trillion/year (then fired them after 10 microseconds.)

Most chemists thought the lanthanides and actinides could be inserted in the sixth and seventh rows, but no, they're just floating down at the bottom with lots more undiscovered elements all around them.

We've met! I remember you when you were thiiiis tall! [*holds a hand an inch above their head*]

... tazer ... fire extinguisher ... bird feeder ... toilet paper ...

They could afford to cut it close because they all had Global Entry.

Their signature play is the three-point combinator, a recursive offense which is guaranteed not to halt and continues accumulating points until the buzzer.

I want to sell apples but I'm still working on getting the machine to do the cutting and grafting.

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

I could type this into a solver, which MIGHT help, but would also mean I have to get a lot of parentheses right...

There are actually lowercase-like 'oldstyle' forms of normal numbers with more pronounced ascenders and descenders, which is why some numbers like '5' in books sometimes dangle below the line. But the true capital numbers remain the domain of number maven Mavis Beacon.

It's not my fault I haven't had a chance to measure the curvature of this particular universe.

"The committee appreciates that your 2020 launch is on track, but the 'human capital/personnel retention' budget includes a lot more unmarked cash payments than usual. What are th--" "Public outreach."

Lots of people called their ships unsinkable before the Titanic. Voicing your hubris doesn't make failure more likely, just more memorable.

Fire is actually a potential biosignature, since it means something is filling the atmosphere with an unstable gas like oxygen. If we find a planet covered in flames, it might be an indicator that it supports life. Or used to, anyway, before the fire.

Trust me, you don't want to get on the wrong side of the paramilitary enforcement arm of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service.

ERROR: We've reached an unreachable state. Anything is possible. The limits were in our heads all along. Follow your dreams.

They actually showed up on the first scan by the first WiFi-capable device.

this calculator implements the simple throwing distance estimation model from the how to throw things chapter of the book how to

Eventually they agreed to "an auto-retracting dog leash with one end clipped to your house, so you can press the button on the handle and water-ski home."

I'm inside your head and I hate it. Please let me out.

The company started out exploiting a loophole in the law banning scooters. The city was mad at first, but then they noticed how much they were saving on street cleaning.

Note: How To will teach you lots of cool stuff about technology, data storage, butterfly migration, and more. Also you will never see your files again.

We could organize a nationwide old-photo-album search, but the real Worst McFly is probably lost to time.

Controls are a little hard to figure out.

I also have an utterance. Less of an utterance and more of an incantation. Less of an incantation and more of a malediction. Less of a malediction and more of a Word of Power. Less of a Word of Power and more of an Unforgivable Curse.

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

Ok, how many coins for a cinnamon roll?

Obviously battery technology and prices have driven a lot of the scooter explosion, but I feel like Dean Kamen must be at least a little grumpy about how much people laughed at the idea of the Segway.

Ok, well, we'll be sure to pay you sometime soon, geologically speaking.

To detect dark matter, we just need to build a bird feeder that spins two squirrels around the rim in opposite directions at relativistic speeds and collides them together.

The rarest of all clouds is the altocumulenticulostratonimbulocirruslenticulomammanoctilucent cloud, caused by an interaction between warm moist air, cool dry air, cold slippery air, cursed air, and a cloud of nanobots.

I wasn't a big fan of 3 or Salvation, so I'm trying to resist getting my hopes up too much for Dark Fate, but it's hard. I'm just a sucker for humans and robots traveling through time to try to drive trucks into each other, apparently.

Someone's probably working on an eBook app where, if you stop reading right before some plot twist happens, the app will wait a while and then send you a breaking news alert about what's happening, prompting you to open it and read the next few pages to learn more.

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

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

My brother once asked me if there was a function to produce a calendar grid from a list of dates in Google Sheets. I replied with a single-cell formula that took in a list of dates and outputted a calendar. It used SEQUENCE(), REGEXMATCH(), and a double-nested ARRAYFORMULA(), and it locked up the browser for 15 seconds every time it ran. I think he learned a lot about asking me things.

Kind of rude of them to simultaneously issue an EVACUATION - IMMEDIATE alert, a SHELTER IN PLACE alert, and a 911 TELEPHONE OUTAGE alert.

"Wait, we've MOVED since 2010. How on Earth did--" "Look, some of us were just born to be champions."