ABCD

Once they selected the other proposal, we could have kept shopping ours around, but we would had to modify it include an aqueduct over their canal, which would be totally unreasonable.

It's early 2020. The entire country is gripped with Marco Rubio fever except for Alaska, which is freaking out. You're frantically studying up on etiquette and/or sexting.

The flags were probably vaporized on impact, because we launched it before we had finished figuring out how to land. That makes sense from an engineering standpoint, but also feels like a metaphor.

Our grant application contains one of those little greeting card speakers that plays spaceship noises when you open it.

I'm trying to get the page locked because some jerk keeps adding "Yachts".

Terms I'm going to start using: The Large Dipper, great potatoes, the Big Hadron Collider, and Large Orphan Annie.

It's so sad how almost no one alive today can remember seeing the galactic rainbow, the insanity nebula, or the skull and glowing eyes of the Destroyer of Sagittarius.

Neurologically speaking, the LEFT hand is actually the one at the end of the RIGHT arm.

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

It's the NORMAL distribution, not the TANGENT distribution.

"Symbolic integration" is when you theatrically go through the motions of finding integrals, but the actual result you get doesn't matter because it's purely symbolic.

At some point, compression becomes an aesthetic design choice. Luckily, SVG is a really flexible format, so there's no reason it can't support vector JPEG artifacts.

It's like someone briefly joined the team running the universe, introduced their idea for a cool mechanic, then left, and now everyone is stuck pretending that this wildly unbalanced dynamic makes sense.

Though I do think the tiny vent on one of the boosters labeled "O-RING" is in poor taste.

If physics had a mafia, I'm pretty sure the BICEP2 mess would have ended in bloodshed.

Help, I set my white balance wrong and suddenly everyone is screaming at each other about whether they've been to Colorado.

Thanks for bringing us along.

...an effect size of 1.68 (95% CI: 1.56 (95% CI: 1.52 (95% CI: 1.504 (95% CI: 1.494 (95% CI: 1.488 (95% CI: 1.485 (95% CI: 1.482 (95% CI: 1.481 (95% CI: 1.4799 (95% CI: 1.4791 (95% CI: 1.4784...

To avoid errors like this, we render all text and pipe it through OCR before processing, fixing a handful of irregular bugs by burying them beneath a smooth, uniform layer of bugs.

There's one person in Missouri who says "carbo bev" who the entire rest of the country HATES.

Don't worry--you're less likely to die from a space launch than from a shark attack. The survival rate is pretty high for both!

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

In retrospect, I shouldn't have used each layer of the OSI model as one of my horcruxes.

I can't help myself; now I want to read a bunch of thinkpieces from newspapers in Biff's 1985 arguing over whether the growth of the region into a corporate dystopia was inevitable.

The best wedge issue is an actual wedge.

The fact that things like the npm left-pad incident are so rare is oddly reassuring.

"I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this 'paper economy', not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges." --James Tobin, July 1984

J.J. Thompson won a Nobel Prize for his work in electricity in gases, but was unfairly passed over for his "An atom is plum pudding, and plum pudding is MADE of atoms! Duuuuude." theory.

Welcome to Wyoming, motto "We'd like to clarify that Cheyenne Mountain is in Colorado."

People keep trying to come up with reasons that we should worry about the magnetic field collapsing or reversing, but honestly I think it's fine. Whatever minor problems it causes will be made up for by the mid-latitude auroras.

CORRECTION: After careful evaluation, we have determined that the axis label on this chart was printed backward.

After reading that "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare" article, I've decided it's safer and less complicated to just sleep on the floor. DISCLOSURE: THE AUTHOR OF THIS MOUSEOVER TEXT RECEIVED FINANCIAL COMPENSATION FROM THE FLOOR INDUSTRY FOR THIS MESSAGE.

It has so many advantages--it preserves Martian life, requires fewer interplanetary launches, and makes it much easier to field-test Mars rovers.

"I'm selling all my analogies at auction tomorrow, and that witch over there will give you 20 beans if you promise on pain of death to win them for her." "What if SEVERAL people promised witches they'd win, creating some kind of a ... squeeze? Gosh, you could make a lot of–" "Don't be silly! That probably never happens."

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

The biggest jump is at 11:00am EST (4:00pm UTC) when midnight reaches the UTC+8 time zone. That time zone, which includes China, is home to a quarter of the world's population. India and Sri Lanka (UTC+5:30) put us over the 50% mark soon after.

You can tell most people don’t really assign an absolute meaning to these numbers because in some places and time periods, “billion” has meant 1,000x what it's meant in others, and a lot of us never even noticed.

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

It turns out that saying "Oh, so THAT'S why they call it Boxing Day" is a good way to get punched a second time.

Cats can be smaller than the critical limit, but they're unobservable. If one shrinks enough that it crosses the limit, it just appears to get cuter and cuter as it slowly fades from view.

NASA tries to coordinate launch timing with the Care Bears' cloud castle, but unfortunately sometimes collisions with stray Care Bears are unavoidable, so they just try to make the fairings sturdy and hope for a glancing impact.

When we take into account the recent discovery of previously-unstudied history in the 1750s, this year may have been an outright loss.

Both arXiv and archive.org are invaluable projects which, if they didn't exist, we would dismiss as obviously ridiculous and unworkable.

June 21st, 365, the date of the big Mediterranean earthquake and tsunami, lived in infamy for a few centuries before fading. Maybe the trick is a catchy rhyme; the '5th of November' thing is still going strong over 400 years later.

Hang on, we got a call from the feds. They say we can do whatever with him, but the EPA doesn't want that laptop in the ocean. They're sending a team.

The other great lakes are just water on the far side of Canada Island. If you drive north from the Pacific northwest you actually cross directly into Alaska, although a few officials--confused by the Mercator distortion--have put up border signs.

Snowy blizzards are fun, but so are warm sunny beaches, so we split the difference by having lots of icy wet slush!

Younger people get very few joint replacements, yet they're also getting more than older people did at the same age. This means you can choose between 'Why are millennials getting so (many/few) joint replacements?' depending on which trend fits your current argument better.

And let's be honest, it's more like two and a half stars. Proxima is barely a star and barely bound to the system.

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

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

When I was a kid, someone told me the end of The Giver was ambiguous, which surprised me. I had just assumed Jonah died--because the book had a medal on the cover, and I knew grown-ups liked stories where sad stuff happens at the end for no reason.

This is my four-digit PIN. It was passed down to me by my father, and someday I will pass it on to you. Unless we figure out how to update it, but that sounds complicated.

Despite having now taken three months longer than the airplane people, we're making disappointingly little progress toward the obvious next stage of vehicle: The Unobtanium-hulled tunneling ship from the 2003 film 'The Core.'

I'm glad to hear they're finally redefining the meter to be exactly three feet.

Also known as the Black Mirror-Mythbusters scale.

I'm like a prisoner in Plato's Cave, seeing only the shade you throw on the wall.

ARCTANGENT THETA = ENCHANT AT TARGET

Disappointed that they caved to fan pressure and went with Ruth Bader Ginsburg over Elena Kagan.

"Even the blind—those who are anxious to hear, but are not able to see—will be taken care of. Immense megaphones have been constructed and will be in use at The Tribune office and in the Coliseum. The one at the Coliseum will be operated by a gentleman who draws $60 a week from Barnum & Bailey's circus for the use of his voice."

Use your mouse or fingers to pan + zoom. To edit the map, submit your ballot on November 6th.

There were actually some good reasons for those laws, but IMO they now do more harm than good. Which raises a question: If there's a ballot measure to strike them down, how can I resist the urge to take a picture of my "yes" vote?

I sort of wish my texting app showed the percentage next to each person, but also sort of don't want to know.

I'm the proud parent of an honor student, and the person driving me is proud, too!

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

"Ok, team. We have a little under 10,000 years before closest approach to figure out how to destroy Barnard's Star." "Why, does it pose a threat to the Solar System?" "No. It's just an asshole."

They're limiting the playtesters to type A3 V stars, so the games will all end before the Sun consumes the Earth.

I'm working on assembling a combination declinometer, sclerometer, viscometer, aleurometer, stalagmometer, and hypsometer. I'm making good progress according to my ometerometer, a device which shows the rate at which I'm acquiring measurement devices.

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

I don't trust mantle/core geologists because I suspect that, if they ever get a chance to peel away the Earth's crust, they'll do it in a heartbeat.

Haha, just kidding, everyone's already been hacked. I wonder if today's the day we find out about it.

"Isn't the original Jurassic Park your favorite movie of all time?" "Yes, but that's because I like dinosaurs and I WANT there to be an island full of them. If John Hammond's lab had been breeding serial killers in creepy masks, I wouldn't have watched!" "Wait, are you sure? That could actually be good." "Ok, I WOULD watch the scenes where Jeff Goldblum tries to convince a bunch of executives that the park is a bad idea."

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

"Is the pipeline literally running from your laptop?" "Don't be silly, my laptop disconnects far too often to host a service we rely on. It's running on my phone."

I wonder if that friendly lady ever fixed the problem she was having with her headset.

I was going to get you an alarm clock that occasionally goes off randomly in the middle of the night, but you can ignore it and go back to sleep and it's fine.

I thought of another bad opinion! I couldn't find anyone who expressed it specifically, but still, the fact that I can so easily imagine it is infuriating! I'm gonna tell everyone about it!

You know how Einstein figured out that the speed of light was constant, and everything else had to change for consistency? My theory is like his, except not smart or good.

We were going to do a falling-apart Rubik's cube that was just 27 independent blocks stuck together with magnets, but then we realized it was actually really cool and even kind of worked, so we cut that one.

Cauchy-Lorentz: "Something alarmingly mathematical is happening, and you should probably pause to Google my name and check what field I originally worked in."

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

Excited to vote for future presidents Bill Eisenhamper, Amy Forb, Ethan Obample, and Abigail Washingtoast.

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

All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that so much to ask?

The <x> that is held by <y> is also a <y><x>, so if you go to a food truck, the stuff you buy is truck food. A phone that's in your car is a carphone, and a car equipped with a phone is a phonecar. When you play a mobile racing game, you're in your phonecar using your carphone to drive a different phonecar. I'm still not sure about bananaphones.

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

Star Trek V is a small part of the space frontier, but it's been a while since that movie came out so I assume we've finished exploring it by now.

FYI, it turns out "...because I haven't figured out whether he would be my brother-in-law or not" does NOT qualify as a "reason why these two should not be wed."

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

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

My bracket was busted in the first round; I had Massachusetts v. Connecticut in the final, probably in a case over who gets to annex Rhode Island.

If you study graphs in which edges can link more than two nodes, you're more properly called a hyperedgelord.

My theory is that dark matter is actually just a thin patina of grime covering the whole universe, and we don't notice it because we haven't thoroughly cleaned the place in eons.

All electromagnetic equations: The same as all fluid dynamics equations, but with the 8 and 23 replaced with the permittivity and permeability of free space, respectively.

Just make sure all your friends and family are out of the car, or that you've made backup friends and family at home.

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

If you can't get your graphing tool to do the shading, just add some clip art of cosmologists discussing the unusual curvature of space in the area.

There are lots of very smart people doing fascinating work on cryptographic voting protocols. We should be funding and encouraging them, and doing all our elections with paper ballots until everyone currently working in that field has retired.

Really, they'd be rushing around collecting revisions to go into the next scheduled quarterly public data update, not publishing them immediately, but you have to embellish things a little for Hollywood.

I'm trying to prove that mathematics forms a meta-abelian group, which would finally confirm my suspicions that algebraic geometry and geometric algebra are the same thing.