ABCD

People keep telling me to use the radio but I really hate making voice calls.

"Oh my God, why did you scotch-tape a bunch of hammers together?" "It's ok! Nothing depends on this wall being destroyed efficiently."

I'm working on a car capable of evaluating arbitrarily complex boolean expressions on "honk if [...]" bumper stickers and responding accordingly.

This works for a surprising range of sunlit things, including rooftops (sure), highway surfaces (probably not), sailboats (maybe), and jets, cars, and wild deer (haha good luck).

The symbol for degrees Felsius is an average of the Euro symbol (€) and the Greek lunate epsilon (ϵ).

It's important to note that while the effective size of the dog can be arbitrarily large, it's not any more of a good dog than the two original dogs.

And arguably sunspots, on rare occasions. But even if they count, it takes ideal conditions and you might hurt your eyes.

No horse has yet managed the elusive Quadruple Crown—winning the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont Stakes, and the Missouri Horse Hole.

Every time we detect an asteroid from outside the Solar System, we should immediately launch a mission to fling one of our asteroids back in the direction it came from.

You also refuse to buy Cisco products because you hate the Thong Song, O. Henry, Deep Space Nine, freshwater whitefish, teenaged Incan emperors, Brak's brother, and vegetable-based shortening.

No, wait, come back! I want to be friends at you!

There's a supposed Mark Twain quote, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." It isn't really by Mark Twain, but I don't know who said it—I just know they've never been to McMurdo Station.

"...just got back and didn't see your message until just now. Sorry! -- TIME THIS MESSAGE SAT HALF-FINISHED IN DRAFTS FOLDER: 3 days, 2 hours, 45 minutes."

When we started distributing special status tokens that signify which people are important enough to join an elite group, we never could have imagined we might be creating some problems down the line.

If you want in on the fun, map a key on your keyboard to the sequence U+0041 U+0020 U+FFFD (or U+0021 U+0020 U+FFFD for the exclamation point version), and then no update can never take this away from you.

Your problem is so terrible, I worry that, if I help you, I risk drawing the attention of whatever god of technology inflicted it on you.

NO DRAMA ZONE -> If I've made you sad, you'd better not tell me, because I am TERRIFIED of that situation and have NO IDEA how to handle it.

Where I live, one of the most common categories of sky object without a weird obsessive spotting community is "lost birthday party balloons," so that might be a good choice—although you risk angering the marine wildlife people, and they have sharks.

I spent a long time thinking about how to design a system for long-term organization and storage of subject-specific informational resources without needing ongoing work from the experts who created them, only to realized I'd just reinvented libraries.

I should make a list of all the things I could be trying to optimize, prioritized by ... well, I guess there are a few different variables I could use. I'll create a spreadsheet ...

It also helps with negotiation. "Look, if it were up to me, *I'd* accept your offer, but my swarm of autonomous killer cells literally can't be reasoned with. It's out of my hands!"

I started off with countless problems. But now I know, thanks to COUNT(), that I have "#REF! ERROR: Circular dependency detected" problems.

If you want to evenly space them, it's easiest to alternate between the Arctic and Antarctic. Some people just go to the Arctic twice, near the equinoxes so the visits are almost 6 months apart, but it's not the same.

The 1919 Great Boston Molasses Flood remained the deadliest confectionery containment accident until the Canadian Space Agency's 2031 orbital maple syrup delivery disaster.

Our experts have characterized the ecological impact of this trend as "adorable."

A schism between the pro-panhandle and anti-panhandle factions eventually led to war, but both sides spent too much time working on their flag designs to actually do much fighting.

It's like I've always said--people just need more common sense. But not the kind of common sense that lets them figure out that they're being condescended to by someone who thinks they're stupid, because then I'll be in trouble.

I had some important research to do on proposed interstellar space missions, basketball statistics, canceled skyscrapers, and every article linked from "Women in warfare and the military in the 19th century."

My theory is that most humans have been colonized with alien mind-control slugs that hold the earbuds for them, and the ones who can't wear earbuds are the only surviving free ones.

And yet I have no trouble believing that the start of the 2016 election was several decades ago.

"Crowdsourced steering" doesn't sound quite as appealing as "self driving."

Contains the active ingredients from all competing cold medicines, plus the medicines for headaches, arthritis, insomnia, indigestion, and more, because who wants THOSE things?

They always try to explain that they're called 'solar physicists', but the reporters interrupt with "NEVER MIND THAT, TELL US WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE SUN!"

I tried converting the prices into pizzas, to put it in more familiar terms, and it just became a hard-to-think-about number of pizzas.

Since the current Twitter threadfall kicked off in early 2016, we can expect it to continue until the mid 2060s when the next Interval begins.

Tag yourself, I'm "frayed."

And I can't believe some places still use fax machines. The electrical signals waste so much time going AROUND the Earth when neutrino beams can go straight through!

I always figured you should never bring a gun to a gun fight because then you'll be part of a gun fight.

We understand your privacy concerns; be assured that our phones will never store or transmit images of your face.

'Which one?' 'I dunno, it's your house. Just check each object.' 'Check it for *what*?' 'Whether it looks like it might have touched a paper towel at some point and then forgotten to let go.' '...' 'You can also Google to learn how to check which things are using which resources.' 'You know, I'll just leave the towel there and try again tomorrow.'

The third row will probably have to wait until 2034, and maybe longer. If I see a daytime supernova, I'll replace the meteor storm with that and consider it 3/3.

Over the years I've decided I'd rather have them on than not, but I'm glad there aren't "has opened a blank note to compose a reply to you" notifications.

I'm in talks with Netflix to produce an alternate-universe crime drama about the world where sliced bread was never re-legalized, but it's going slowly because they keep changing their phone numbers and the door lock codes at their headquarters.

Our new video ad campaign has our product's name shouted in the first 500 milliseconds, so we can reach the people in adjacent rooms while the viewer is still turning down the volume.

Someday, some big historical event will happen during the DST changeover, and all the tick-tock articles chronicling how it unfolded will have to include a really annoying explanation next to their timelines.

What if what *I* see as blue, *you* see as a slightly different blue because you're using Chrome instead of Firefox and despite a decade of messing with profiles we STILL can't get this right somehow.

The joke will be on him in a few weeks when animal control shows up and takes custody of his Roomba.

I watched from a beautiful nature reserve in central Missouri, and it was--without exaggeration--the coolest thing I've ever seen.

'Hey! Put her down!' 'No, it's ok! The next chance for me to be carried to a blood cauldron isn't until 2024!'

You shouldn't look directly at a partial eclipse because of the damage that can be caused by improperly aligning the solar-lunar orbital plane with the orbital bones around your eye.

I was thinking of observing stars to verify Einstein's theory of relativity again, but I gotta say, that thing is looking pretty solid at this point.

There were traffic jams for the eclipses in 1970 and 1979, and that was *before* we had the potential for overnight viral social media frenzies.

It's hard to train deep learning algorithms when most of the positive feedback they get is sarcastic.

I live on a torn-bag-of-potato-chips-where-the-tear-is-rapidly-growing fault, which is terrifying.

I would be honored, but I know I don't belong in your network. The person you invited was someone who had not yet inflicted this two-year ordeal upon you. I'm no longer that person.

If it falls below 20% full, my bag turns red and I start to panic.

Since buns range from crepuscular to nocturnal, it's recommended that you enable the scheduled "Do Not Disturb" mode on your phone to avoid being woken by alerts about Night Buns.

There's this idea that emoji are bad for communication because they replace ambiguity and nuance with a limited set of preselected emotions, but it doesn't really survive a collision with real-world usage of the thinking face or upside-down smiley.

This restaurant is great! I was feeling really sick, but then I ate there and felt better!

The captain has turned on the 'fasten seat belt' sign.

"You know lightning, right? When electric charge builds up in a cloud and then discharges in a giant spark? Ask me why that happens." "Why does tha--" "No clue. We think it's related to the hair thing."

Unfortunately, NASA regulations state that Bertrand Russell-related payloads can only be launched within launch vehicles which do not launch themselves.

According to the cable company reps who keep calling me, it's because I haven't upgraded to the XTREME GIGABAND PANAMAX FLAVOR-BLASTED PRO PACKAGE WITH HBO, which is only $5 more per month for the first 6 months and five billion dollars per month after that.

This place has so many demonyms. Northlanders. Fair Folk. Honey Barons. Lake Dwellers. Treasurers. Swamp Watchers. Dream Farmers. Wellfolk. Rockeaters. Forgotten Royals. Remote Clients. Barrow-Clerks. The People of Land and Sky.

For the final exam, you take a screenshot showing off all the work you've done in the class, and it has to survive being uploaded, thumbnailed, and re-screenshotted through a chain of social media sites.

Each particle also has a password which allows its properties to be changed, but the cosmic censorship hypothesis suggests we can never observe the password itself—only its secure hash.

If you draw a diagonal line from lower left to upper right, that's the ICP 'Miracles' axis.

You're saying that the responsibility for avoiding miscommunication lies entirely with the listener, not the speaker, which explains why you haven't been able to convince anyone to help you down from that wall.

I heard they might make the wild card game, which would be cool. Do you know when that is? I have a wedding next weekend, but if it's after that we could try to go!

Strangely, they still celebrate by eating hot dogs. Since they don't have mouths, they just kinda toss them in the air and let them fall back down into their propeller blades. It's pretty messy.

Some other studio should do the Antz/A Bug's Life thing and release The Dingbats Movie at the same time.

Real analysis is way realer than I expected.

I was banned from the airliners.net photography forum by concerned moderators after the end of my lens started brushing against planes as they flew by.

The hardest refresh requires both a Mac keyboard and a Windows keyboard as a security measure, like how missile launch systems require two keys to be turned at once.

I'm not totally locked into my routine—twice a year, I take a break to change the batteries in my smoke detectors.

Luckily for my interpretation, no precincts were won by the Green Party.

Magnetohydrodynamics combines the intuitive nature of Maxwell's equations with the easy solvability of the Navier-Stokes equations. It's so straightforward physicists add "relativistic" or "quantum" just to keep it from getting boring.

I had fun visiting the museum at Dover Air Force Base, unless they don't have a museum, in which case I've never been to Delaware in my life.

In the 90s, our variety radio station used the tagline "the best music of the 70s, 80s, and 90s." After 2000, they switched to "the best music of the 80s, 90s, and today." I figured they'd change again in 2010, but it's 2017 and they're still saying "80s, 90s, and today." I hope radio survives long enough for us to find out how they deal with the 2020s.

"This will take a while, which sucks, because I'm already so busy chiseling out igneous intrusions from rock formations and watching Youtube loops of the Superman fault-sealing scene over and over."

Sounds fine. I looked up the Academy, and it says on their MySpace page that their journal is peer-viewed and downloaded biannually.

On the other hand, as far as they know, my system is working perfectly.

The top search for every state is PORN, except Florida, where it's SEX PORN.

Kenneth Arrow hated me because the ordering of my preferences changes based on which voting systems have what level of support. But it tells me a lot about the people I'm going to be voting with!

Using a classic Timothy Zahn EU/Legends novel is bad enough, but at least the style and setting aren't too far off. If you really want to mess with people, try using Splinter of the Mind's Eye.

It's cool, it's totally ethical--they're all programmed to hunt whichever bird of prey is most numerous at the moment, so they leave the endangered ones alone until near the end.

Gonna feel even dumber when I realize that all this time he's been talking into a bluetooth thingy and we're not actually friends.

That's very exciting! The bad news is that it's a risk factor for a lot of things.

According to these blood tests, you're like 30% cereal.

The pile gets soaked with data and starts to get mushy over time, so it's technically recurrent.

Technically, both cars are haunted, but the murder ghosts can't stand listening to the broken GPS for more than a few minutes.

WHEN I WAS ON A BOAT I DROPPED MY PHONE CAN U LOOK FOR IT

I take the view that "open-faced sandwiches" are not sandwiches, but all other physical objects are.

GO FOR LUNCH, REPEAT, GO FOR LUNCH.

It's like a half-solved cryptogram where the solution is a piece of FORTH code written by someone who doesn't know FORTH.

A good lifehack is to use messy and unstable systems to organize your photos. That way, every five years or so it becomes obsolete and/or collapses, and you have to open it up and pick only your favorite pictures to salvage.

"We TOLD you it was hard." "Yeah, but now that I'VE tried, we KNOW it's hard."

Most people don't realize it, but they actually launch a new space station every few weeks because this keeps happening.

'The mountains near here formed when the ... Newfoundland ... microplate collided with, uhh ... Labrador.' 'Ok, now you're definitely just naming dogs.' 'Wait, no, that's actually almost correct.'

I guess it's also the right setting for pictures of the Moon at night.