ABCD

Maybe if I spin it back and forth really fast I can do some kind of pulse-width modulation.

After my absent-mindedness resulted in a bad posterboard-related stomachache, I learned to do the sign-making place last.

Billy Joel briefly detained

The key is portion control, which is why I've switched to eating smaller cans of frosting instead of full bottles.

You can apply special translucent films to your windows to help keep birds/Superman from accidentally flying into them.

On the other hand, the refractor's limited light-gathering means it's unable to make out shadow people or the dark god Chernabog.

With the right 90-degree rotation, any effect is a side effect.

Texting should work. Unless the message is too long, in which case it gets converted to voicemails, and I think I'm locked out of my voicemail.

My life goal is to launch a barge into the air and have it land on one of Elon Musk's rockets.

Dvorak words may sound hard to pronounce, but studies show they actually put less stress on the vocal cords.

Plus, time's all weird in there, so most of it probably broke down and decomposed hundreds of years ago. Which reminds me, I've been meaning to get in touch with Yucca Mountain to see if they're interested in a partnership.

Further out to the right, it works correctly, but the reason it works still involves the word 'firmware.'

This map preserves the shapes of Tissot's indicatrices pretty well, as long as you draw them in before running the resize.

Hey Rob, sorry it took me a while to get back to you! Sure, I'd love to see WALL-E opening weekend! Are you still doing that, or...?

2078: He announces that he's finally making the jump from screen+irssi to tmux+weechat.

I didn't even realize you could HAVE a data set made up entirely of outliers.

[holding up a three-phase motor] As you can see here, the problem is that the humidifier I took this from is broken.

Things are looking good for the eclipse--Nate Silver says Earth will almost definitely still have a moon in August.

Sometimes, parts of a slowly-rising mountain suddenly rise REALLY fast, which is extra interesting.

Dear Diary: UNSUBSCRIBE

And then in a twinkling, a sound gave me pause / From the roof came the scratching of eight tarsal claws.

Guess who has two thumbs and spent the night in an ER after trying to rescue a kitten that ran under his car at a stoplight and climbed up into the engine compartment? And, thanks to antibiotics, will continue having two thumbs? THIS GUY. (P.S. kitten is safe!)

Contains 100% of your recommended daily allowance!

[Google search] how do I block my lawn

While there's no formal regulation, it turns out their industry group is NOT one you want mad at you.

It me, your father.

I know they said this change is permanent, but surely when they hear how much we're complaining someone will find a way to change things back.

If anyone calls you on any weird detail, just say it's from the Jedi Prince book series, which contains so much random incongruous stuff that even most Expanded Universe/Legends fans collectively agreed to forget about it decades ago.

Of course, "Number of times I've gotten to make a decision twice to know for sure how it would have turned out" is still at 0.

Technically DC isn't a state, but no one is too pedantic about it because they don't want to disturb the snakes.

If I were trapped on a desert island, and could have an unlimited supply of any one type of apple, I'd be like, "How did this situation happen?"

[bzzzt] "REMEMBER TO CHECK IN FOR YOUR FLIGHT TO LONDON." "My wha-" [bzzzt] "YOUR UBER WILL ARRIVE IN FOUR MINUTES."

4. They unplug the root machine but the thousands of leaf VMs scatter in the wind and start spinning up new instances wherever they land

Effect strength => [unstoppable] | Effect range => [2 miles] | Effect duration => [1 year]

Later, when I remember that I'm calling movers, I frantically scribble over the labels and write 'NORMAL HOUSE STUFF' on all of them, which actually makes things worse.

I bet if I yell at my scared friends I will feel better.

Certified skydiving instructors know way more about safely falling from planes than I do, and are way more likely to die that way.

West Norsussex is east of East Norwessex, but they're both far north of Middlesex and West Norwex.

DEPARTMENT OF NEUROSCIENCE / Motto: "If I hear the phrase 'mirror neurons' I swear to God I will flip this table."

Once you've done this, make a note of how old they were. Then, when their age reaches double that, show them this chart again.

We can do this.

Lot of drama in those days, including constant efforts to force the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" guy into retirement so we could stop being so paranoid about compilers.

It's a myth that you can never cross mountains safely, but be sure you understand how the climatic situation there will affect your parent thunderstorm.

"Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty--" / "Can't we just read Pat the Bunny?"

But instead of hitting the ocean, you should land in an overheating hot tub on a sinking cruise ship, sending it crashing through the floor into the burning engine room as the ship goes under.

That's actually the original Japanese version of A Million Random Digits, which is much better than the American remake the book was based on.

I got to check off 'Make something called xkcd' early.

Evolutionarily speaking, mushrooms are technically a type of ghost.

"The only link we've found between the two documents is that a fragment of the Noah one mentions Aaron's brother Moses parting an ocean. Is that right?" "... yes. Yes, exactly."

Whenever you see a video of birds doing something weird, remember: Birds are a small subset of dinosaurs, so the weirdness of birds is a small subset of the weirdness of dinosaurs.

"This seems more like a way to attract turkey vultures." "My mom always told me a turkey vulture is just a friend you haven't met yet, usually because you don't smell enough like decaying meat."

The 78-rpm era was closer to the Civil War than to today.

I have this weird thing where if I don't drink enough water, I start feeling bad and then die of dehydration.

Remind me to order another pack of coffee filters from Dyson. Man, these things are EXPENSIVE.

'Copy and paste from a random thread on a website' is the hardest to predict, and depends on the specific website, programming language, tone of the description, and current phase of the moon.

Despite it being imaginary, I already have SUCH a strong opinion on the cord-switch firing incident.

I WONDERED why he kept asking whether we thought the impact speed was too low.

'What was the original problem you were trying to fix?' 'Well, I noticed one of the tools I was using had an inefficiency that was wasting my time.'

Whenever I see a picture of the moon where the points go more than halfway around, I assume it's being eclipsed by one of those Independence Day ships and interpret the rest of the image in light of that.

Asimov's Cosmic AC was created by linking all datacenters through hyperspace, which explains a lot. It didn't reverse entropy--it just discarded the universe when it reached end-of-life and ordered a new one.

On the plus side, we definitely killed that cancer over there, even if we caused a bunch more everywhere else.

* Mad about jorts

"I've noticed you physics people can be a little on the reductionist side." "That's ridiculous. Name ONE reductionist word I've ever said."

I still don't understand why the Sun paid the extra money for Transitions lenses.

[After setting your car on fire] Listen, your car's temperature has changed before.

Hang on, I just remembered another thing I'm right about. See...

The New Worlds Mission is already trying to get funding for this, but NASA sponsored their proposal, so it will be hard to catch the telescope people by surprise with it.

"Hey guys! I have a great idea for a migration!" "Dammit, Kevin."

Take THAT, piece of 1980s-era infrastructure I've inexplicably maintained on my systems for 15 years despite never really learning how it works.

They try to pad their numbers in the annual reports by counting Galileo's redundant systems as multiple computers, but they're falling behind badly either way.

I'm excited about the proposal to add a "brontosaurus" emoji codepoint because it has the potential to bring together a half-dozen different groups of pedantic people into a single glorious internet argument.

The 95% confidence interval suggests Rexthor's dog could also be a cat, or possibly a teapot.

Next, let's assume the decision of whether to take the Axiom of Choice is made by a deterministic process ...

Click for an actual flowchart for identifying a meteorite. My favorite part is how 'Did someone see it fall? -> Yes' points to 'NOT A METEORITE.' This is not a mistake.

When you Google an error message and it gets no results, you can be pretty sure you've found a clue to the location of Martin's sword.

Then we move to phase two. Gas stations store fuel in underground tanks. Normally, these are inaccessible except via the pump. However, with hydraulic fracturing, we-- Wait! Come back!

This car has 240% of a horse's decision-making ability and produces only 30% as much poop.

*click* Let him know he's got a stain on his shirt, though.

Maybe you should keep FEWER backups; it sounds like throwing away everything you've done and starting from scratch might not be the worst idea.

They CLAIM honey was found in the chambers under the pyramids, but this conspiracy goes all the way to the TOP, where the GIANT EYE is!

'Hey, what are those futuristic goggles for, anyway?' 'Oh, this is just a broken Google Glass. It was 2010's night at the club.'

To make your shoes feel more comfortable, smell better, and last longer, try taking them off before you shower.

It's hard living somewhere with antlions, because every time you find one of their traps, you feel compelled to spend all day constructing a tiny model of Jabba's sail barge next to it.

There's been a raccoon accident at an accordion bacchanalia! Double doses!

"Ok, I lit the smoke bomb and rolled it under the bed. Let's see if it--" ::FWOOOSH:: "Politifact says: PANTS ON FIRE!"

For obvious reasons, the prize is awarded at a different time of year from the others, while it's still fresh in the committee's memory.

A childhood spent walking while reading books has prepared me unexpectedly well for today's world.

"Or maybe, because we're suddenly having so many conversations through written text, we'll start relying MORE on altered spelling to indicate meaning!" "Wat."

I don't care what the research says. Everybody knows you should drink 3,000 glasses of water a day and change your oil every 8 miles.

The SpaceX system carefully guides falling phones down to the surface, a process which the phones increasingly often survive without exploding.

Plus, now I know that I have risk factors for elbow dysplasia, heartworm, parvo, and mange.

Still waiting for the Pokémon Go update that lets you capture strangers' pets.

President Andrew Johnson once said, "If I am to be shot at, I want Gnome Ann to be in the way of the bullet."

"The name wasn't a tip-off?" "Honestly, at first I thought you were saying 'Juneau'. A gravity assist seemed like a weird way to get to Alaska, but I figured it must be more efficient or something."

In my experience, mosquitos and poison ivy are bad, but the very worst itch comes from bites from chiggers (Trombicula alfreddugesi). They're found across the American south and great plains, so the best home remedy is to move to Iceland.

NASCAR removed the passenger seats because drivers hated how astronauts kept riding along with them and loudly announcing "Ahh, what a nice and relaxing drive."

There's also a unicode-handling bug in the URL request library, and we're storing the passwords unsalted ... so if we salt them with emoji, we can close three issues at once!

Will there ever be a physics term greater than 'tachyonic antitelephone?' According to this message from the future, the answer is 'no.'

TinyURL was the most popular link shortener for long enough that it made it into a lot of printed publications. I wonder what year the domain will finally lapse and get picked up by a porn site.

These pranks happen all the time. English doesn't allow one-syllable words to end in a lax vowel, so writers on The Simpsons decided to mess with future linguists by introducing the word "meh."