ABCD

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"

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."