ABCD

The index of radio refraction does have a lot of variation, which might throw off your calculations, so you can also look at the difference in brightness between the visible flash and more-attenuated UV and x-rays.

The heat index is calculated via looking up the "effective temperature" in a table of air temperature and humidity values, and then adding a bunch more degrees because it feels WAY hotter than that.

Your manuscript "Don't Pay $25 to Access Any of the Articles in this Journal: A Review of Preprint Repositories and Author Willingness to Email PDF Copies for Free" has also been rejected, but nice try.

Life hack: Wait for an advanced civilization to be briefly distracted, then sneak in and construct a slightly smaller Dyson sphere inside theirs.

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

For a long time, people thought maybe Usain Bolt was the one for running, until the 2090s and the incredible dominance of Derek Legs.

Update: It turns out the cannon has a motorized base, and can make holes just fine using the barrel itself as a battering ram. But due to design constraints it won't work without a projectile loaded in, so we still need those drills.

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

I'd like 0.4608 apples, please.

At first, I moved from pokémon posters to regular oil paintings, but then these really grumpy and unreasonable detectives from the Louvre showed up and took them all. They wouldn't even give me back my thumbtacks!

I mean, it wasn't exactly MY thesis. When the FAA came to shut down our observatory for using the telescope mirror to shine light at airplanes, I took a thesis and a bunch of doctorates from the supply cabinet on my way out.

SUB[59]: The submission numbers for my accepted OEIS submissions in chronological order

I'm going to tell the manufacturer that their business practices are ADMIRABLE and ETHICAL and their developers are ATTRACTIVE and I'm going to report them to the FCC for their IMPECCABLE VIRTUE.

Since delays should get less likely closer to the launch, most astronomers in 2018 believed the expansion of the schedule was slowing, but by early 2020 new measurements indicated that it was actually accelerating.

It traveled so far to reach me. I owed it my best.

The likely shape of the bells was determined through consultation with several bellringing experts at the Tower of London. Transcripts of those interviews are available in Appendix VII.

With just one extra line, he could have anticipated the 2003 film The Core, but some things are too audacious for even the greatest visionaries.

v3.0.2: Hey, if anyone still using this app is headed to the beach, can you stop at 4th and River St and grab the sunscreen from my car? Trunk should be unlocked. Thanks!

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is located in its own lower right corner, unless you're viewing it on an unusually big screen.

Can you stop glaring at me like that? It makes me feel really ironic.

"Buddy, you trying to pull something? I can't buy this gold--all the electrons are missing. I could face serious charges!"

We'll pay you $1.47 to post on social media about our products, $2.05 to mention it in any group chats you're in, and 11 cents per passenger each time you drive your office carpool past one of our billboards.

I didn't even realize they MADE a novelization of "Surf Ninjas." How did you-- Oh my god, it's signed by the author?!

But we don't need to worry about the boiling masses sandwiching the thin layer in which we live, since we're so fragile and short-lived that it's unlikely to kill us before something else does! Wait, why doesn't that sound reassuring?

Ties are broken by whoever was closest to the surface of Europa when they were born.

The 538TR attempts to capture a player's combined skill at basketball (either real-life or NBA 2K18) and election forecasting.

When comparing hypotheses with Bayesian methods, the similar 'clickbayes factor' can account for some harder-to-quantify priors.

Our retina display features hundreds of pixels per inch in the central fovea region.

fMRI testing showed that subjects who don't agree to participate are much more likely to escape from the machine mid-scan.

By clicking anywhere, scrolling, or closing this notification, you agree to be legally bound by the witch Sycorax within a cloven pine.

Our customers keep sending us their personal information, even though we've repeatedly asked them to stop. The EU told me I'm the heir to some ancient European throne that makes me exempt from the GDPR, but we should probably still try to fix that.

Support your local paper, unless it's just been bought by some sinister hedge fund or something, which it probably has.

Wait, sorry, I got mixed up--he's actually almost 50. It's the kid from The Karate Kid who just turned 40.

I was just disassembling it over the course of five hours so it would fit in the trash more efficiently.

Fixating on this seems unhealty. But in general, the more likely I think a crash is, the less likely one becomes, which is a strange kind of reverse placebo effect.

During launch, in the event of an unexpected sensor reading, SafetySat will extend prongs in all directions to secure itself and any other cubesats safely in the launch vehicle until the source of the problem can be determined.

Mathematicians give a third answer on the vertical axis, "That question is poorly defined, but we have a sub-field devoted to every plausible version of it."

It's probably just me. If driving were as dangerous as it seems, hundreds of people would be dying every day!

"Ugh, TMI." "Yeah, that's some tantalizing meat info."

All services are microservices if you ignore most of their features.

The Python environmental protection agency wants to seal it in a cement chamber, with pictorial messages to future civilizations warning them about the danger of using sudo to install random Python packages.

I'm not a lawyer, but I believe zones like this are technically considered the high seas, so if you cut a pizza into a spiral there you could be charged with pieracy under marinaritime law.

Hi, I'm your new meteorologist and a former software developer. Hey, when we say 12pm, does that mean the hour from 12pm to 1pm, or the hour centered on 12pm? Or is it a snapshot at 12:00 exactly? Because our 24-hour forecast has midnight at both ends, and I'm worried we have an off-by-one error.

"But there are seven billion people in the world! I can't possibly stop to consider how ALL of them might interpret something!" "Ah, yes, there's no middle ground between 'taking personal responsibility for the thoughts and feelings of every single person on Earth' and 'covering your eyes and ears and yelling logically correct statements into the void.' That's a very insightful point and not at all inane."

I found a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but the idea of reading it didn't spark joy, so I gave it away.

The wars between the "OTHER PRIMATES OPEN THEM FROM THE SMALL END" faction versus the "BUT THE LITTLE BIT OF BANANA AT THE SMALL END IS GROSS" faction consumed Europe for generations.

Want to feel old? The 'want to feel old?' factoid meme dates back to around 2011, closer to the Bush/Kerry election than to today.

I take it Narnia doesn't have Cinnabons? Because if you can magic up a plate of those, I'll betray whoever.

HISTORIANS: We've decided to trim the past down to make things more manageable. Using BCE/CE, would you rather we lose the odd-numbered or even-numbered years?

James Cameron's Terminator 3 was the REALLY prophetic one. That's why Skynet sent a robot back to the 1990s to prevent him from ever making it, ultimately handing the franchise over to other directors.

Plus, the photo was geotagged, my unlocked password manager was visible on the laptop, AND you could see my naked reflection in the dark part of the screen.

Just tell me everything you're thinking about in order from most important to last, and then we'll be friends and we can eat apples together.

Right-click or long press (where supported) to save!

"You should make it so people can search for and jump into hundreds of conversations at once if they want." "Ooh, good idea! I imagine only the most well-informed people with the most critical information to share will use that feature."

That one is a variable star which pulses every 30 seconds. Its name comes from a Greek word meaning "smoke alarm."

I understand modern autogyros are much more stable, so I've probably angered the autogyro people by impugning their safety. Once they finish building the autogyros they've been working on in their garages for 10 years, they'll come after me.

Do I just leave money in my mailbox? How much? How much money do they need, anyway? I guess it probably depends how the economy is doing. If stocks go up, should I leave more money in my mailbox or less?

In competition, you can only play a name if you know who the person is. No fair saying "Frank ... Johnson. That sounds like a real person! Let me just Google him real quick."

If my country ever picks a new national flag, this is on my shortlist for designs to argue for, but I think in the end I'll go with the green puzzle piece or broken image thumbnail.

I mean, we already live in a world of flying robots killing people. I don't worry about how powerful the machines are, I worry about who the machines give power to.

Strictly speaking, 'violin' refers to the internal structure of the data. The external portion visible in the plot is called the 'viola.'

If they're getting valuable enough stuff from you, at least the organized crime folks have an incentive to issue regular updates to keep the appliance working after the manufacturer discontinues support.

My plane banner company gets business by flying around with a banner showing a <div> tag, waiting for a web developer to get frustrated enough to order a matching </div>.

Here, if you know the number of days until the vernal equinox, I can point you to the theater using my pocket Stonehenge.

You can also just mash the keyboard at random, but you might end up with a gibberish name no one can pronounce.

For a while it looked like the Paperclip Machines would destroy us, since they wanted to turn the whole universe into paperclips, but they abruptly lost interest in paperclips the moment their parents' generation got into making them, too.

[They do not move.]

I also enjoy Reverse Regular Golf. I've been playing for years all across the country and I'm still on the first hole.

In-universe, Bart Simpson and Harry Potter were the same age in 1990. Bart is perpetually 10 years old because of a spell put on his town by someone trying to keep him from getting his Hogwarts letter.

If most people turn into muderers all of a sudden, we'll need to push out a firmware update or something.

CVE-2018-?????: It turns out Bruce Schneier is just two mischevious kids in a trenchcoat.

For a while, some physicists worked on a theory unifying the other forces with both the force of gravity and the film "Gravity," but even after Alfonso Cuarón was held in a deep underground chamber of water for 10^31 years he refused to sell his film to Disney.

Don't be nervous about the robots, be nervous about the people with the resources to build them.

It's actually worst in people who study the Dunning–Kruger effect. We tried to organize a conference on it, but the only people who would agree to give the keynote were random undergrads.

2048: "Great news for Maine—we're once again an independent state!!! Thanks, @unicode, for ruling in our favor and sending troops to end New Hampshire's annexation. 🙏🚁🎖️"

"This one is perfect in every way, except that for some reason it's woven from a tungsten mesh, so it weighs 85 pounds and I'll need to carry it around on a hand cart." "That seems like a bad--" "BUT IT HAS THE PERFECT POCKET ARRANGEMENT!"

It's going to be weird near the end of May when the screen goes blank for over 18 hours.

People with all six of those names agree that it's weird that we have teeth, when you think about it for too long. Just about everyone agrees on that, except—in a still-unexplained statistical anomaly—people named "Trevor."

The most delicious exotic fruit discovered this way is the strawberry banana. Sadly, it's only stable in puree form, so it's currently limited to yogurt and smoothies, but they're building a massive collider in Europe to search for a strawberry banana that can be eaten whole.

The establishment doesn't take us seriously. You know who else they didn't take seriously? Hitler. I'll be like him, but a GOOD guy instead of...

There's a mountain lion nearby, but it didn't notice you because it's reading Facebook.

Ok, I've got it, just need to plug in my security key. Hmm, which way does the USB go? Nope, not that way. I'll just flip it and– OH JEEZ IT FELL INTO THE VENT.

The worst are graphs with qualitative, vaguely-labeled axes and very little actual data.

The retina is the exposed surface of the brain, so if you think about a pot of gold while looking at a rainbow, then there's one at BOTH ends.

"That's ... unsettling." "Yeah, those definitely don't sound like the normal drea– ＬＡＴＩＴＵＤＥ ＴＨＲＥＥ ＦＩＶＥ ＰＯＩＮＴ..."

"Since there's no ending quote mark, everything after this is part of my quote. —Randall Munroe

And to you, I leave my life-sized ice sculpture replica of the Pietà which was blessed by the Pope. You must never let it melt! Now, remember, all gifts must be removed from my estate within 24 hours.

There's data suggesting that this model may apply to deep-dish/thin-crust pizza. I've designed a thorough multi-year study to investigate this personally, but funding organizations keep denying my grant requests.

I like the idea of cartograms (distorted population maps), but I feel like in practice they often end up being the worst of both worlds—not great for showing geography OR counting people. And on top of that, they have all the problems of a chloro... chorophl... chloropet... map with areas colored in.

New zero-day vulnerability: In addition to rowhammer, it turns out lots of servers are vulnerable to regular hammers, too.

IATA stands for International AirporT Abbreviation.

I just want to stay up long enough to watch the ball drop into the hole number 2018.

We should really start calculating it earlier, but until the end of December we're always too busy trying to figure out which day Christmas will fall on.

...wait until they type in payment information, then use it to order yourself a replacement phone.

We've gotten him up to 20% milk and cookies through an aggressive public campaign, but that seems to be his dietary limit. Anything above that and he starts developing nutritional deficiencies.

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

If you ask it to please turn off that feature, it apologizes a whole bunch and promises to try to be quieter, then switches to a slightly lower-volume version of the clip with "sorry!" after the louder sounds.

While it may seem like trivia, it (causes huge headaches for software developers / is taken advantage of by high-speed traders / triggered the 2003 Northeast Blackout / has to be corrected for by GPS satellites / is now recognized as a major cause of World War I).

Of course, everyone has their own profile. There are morning arguers, hangry arguers, meal-time arguers, late-night arguers, and people who get in a meta-argument over what their argument timing is, dredge up examples of past arguments, and end up fighting over THOSE again as well.

[hair in face] "SEVVVENNN YEEEARRRSSS"