ABCD

"Mostly it means that I'm acutely aware that the kid one table over coughed as the server walked past with our food."

If only somebody had warned them that the world would roll them like this.

When Salvador Dalí died, it took months to get all the flagpoles sufficiently melted.

Psychology researchers say our 'flashbulb' memories of big events can be unreliable, but I clearly remember watching live on CNN as Challenger crashed into and destroyed the Berlin Wall.

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

The Antikythera mechanism had a whole set of gears specifically to track the cyclic popularity of skinny jeans and low-rise waists.

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

40 digits: You are optimistic about our understanding of the nature of distance itself.

WE WILL ARREST THE REVOLUTION MEMBERS [AT THE JULY 28TH MEETING][tab] "Cancel the meeting! Our cover is blown."

The articles are much shorter, but I assume that's because this version predates the merger with the Hawaiian text that created the modern Hawaiian-Greek hybrid wiki-pedia.

[later] I can't believe how bad corruption has become, especially given that our league split off from the statewide one a month ago SPECIFICALLY to protest this kind of flagrantly biased judging.

Gotta feel kind of bad for nation-state hackers who spend years implanting and cultivating some hardware exploit, only to discover the entire target database is already exposed to anyone with a web browser.

Ironically, I've been having these same arguments for at least a decade now. I thought we would have moved on by now, but somehow the snide complaints about millennials continue.

The Norwegian adaptation of The Sword in the Stone takes things in a weird direction.

You know when you can't hear your speakers, and you keep turning various volume controls up higher and higher in confusion, and then someone hits the mute button and there's a deafening blast of sound? That's basically what happened at Chernobyl.

If I really focus, I can distinguish between John Steinbeck and John Updike, or between Gore Vidal and Vidal Sassoon, but not both at once.

Even the powerful, tart Granny Smith cultivar is proving ineffective against new Gran-negative doctors.

Some of the KBCU ancillary works try a little too hard to tie everything together. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the sports journalist featured in "Baseball," was somehow ALSO a famous historian who wrote bestselling biographies of Lincoln AND Johnson? Unrealistic.

NPR encourages you to add comments to their stories using the page inspector in your browser's developer tools. Note: Your comments are visible only to you, and will be lost when you refresh the page.

[20 minutes later] ", hi."

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

"It's a little low for a weather balloon; it might be some other kind." "Yeah. Besides, I know I'm the alien conspiracy guy, but come on--the idea that the government would care about hiding something so mundane as atmospheric temperature measurement is too ridiculous even for me."

"You don't know how high above you the sky goes, but you're not freaking out about that." "Well, NOW I am!"

What's even worse is, a month ago they transferred me to work on the game I was already playing, and suddenly I found myself procrastinating by playing the one I'd been assigned before. It's possible they're onto me and this is all part of the plan.

If she'd lived in Flagstaff (elevation 6,903 feet), Cruella de Vil would only have needed 89 dalmatians for her coat.

Sitting here idly trying to figure out how the population of the Old West in the late 1800s compares to the number of Red Dead Redemption 2 players.

We wrote our site in Linear A rather than Aksara Kawi because browser testing showed that Crete script rendered faster than Java script.

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

"So their universe wouldn't have the iconic photo of a screaming Truman being hoisted aloft by the newspaper-printing machinery..."

Luckily, the damages were partly offset by the prize money we got from accidentally winning the nearby water skiing championship tournament.

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

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

The interactive experience is built on a single theological framework that unites Dante, George R. R. Martin, every major heist movie, and Erin Gloria Ryan's "Kevin is dead" Home Alone theory.

When I was looking at the box, I should have thought more about what "360 degrees of freedom" meant.

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

Eventually, every epidemiologist becomes another statistic, a dedication to record-keeping which their colleagues sincerely appreciate.

U[unprintable glyph]: The elements a higher power uses to bend that moral arc. U[even more unprintable glyph]: The higher power's overall experience bending that moral arc.

Right now it's a bicycle wheel, so we've had to move to lighter vehicles, but the reduced overhead is worth it. There was one week when a wheel of cheese got dangerously close to the first page, though.

What are all these less-than signs? What's an HREF? Look, we know you live in a fancy futuristic tech world, but not all of us have upgraded to the latest from Sun Microsystems.

And because if you just leave it there, it's going to start contaminating things downstream even if no one touches it directly.

I like to think that somewhere out there, there's someone whose personal quest is lobbying TV providers to add an option to switch their on-screen keyboards to Dvorak.

This really validates Jones's strategy of getting several thousand more votes than Smith. In retrospect, that was a smart move; those votes were crucial.

I think Voyager 1 would be just past the event horizon, but slightly less than halfway to the bright ring.

Next time I go, I'm going to prepare a whole bunch of opinions that I'm sure are good, and make everyone sit quietly while I run through them.

[five years later] Ok, it seems we were accidentally zoomed in slightly too far. But imagine there's a cool-looking twisted accretion disc just outside this black square!

In a tribute to classical Latin, I started pronouncing it 'per-kent.' Eventually my friends had to resort to spritzing me with a water bottle like a cat to train me out of it.

Thank you to the xkcd April 1st volunteers/commentators, including @Chromakode, Kevin, @Aiiane, Patrick, Kat, Reuven, @cotrone, @bstaffin, @zigdon, schwal, Stereo, and everyone who voted!

As far as "being in the pocket of Big Egg" goes, I think the real threat is Chansey.

POLITIFACT SAYS: MOSTLY WHATEVER

"Some worry that we'll soon have a surplus of search and rescue robots, compared to the number of actual people in situations requiring search and rescue. That's where our other robot project comes in..."

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.