ABCD
Alphabetical Cartogram

Poor Weeoming.
Doppler Effect

The Doppler effect is a mysterious wavelength-shifting phenomenon which seems to primarily affect sirens, which is why the 🚨 emoji is red.
Earth Formation Site

It's not far from the sign marking the exact latitude and longitude of the Earth's core.
Pendulum Types

The creepy fingers that grow from a vibrating cornstarch-water mix can be modeled as a chain of inverted vertical pendulums (DOI:10.1039/c4sm00265b) and are believed to be the fingers of Maxwell's Demon trying to push through into our universe.
Scary Triangles

Concealed mostly beneath the surface, sharks are the icebergs of the sea.
Pub Trivia

Bonus question: Where is London located? (a) The British Isles (b) Great Britain and Northern Ireland (c) The UK (d) Europe (or 'the EU') (e) Greater London
Eclipse Path Maps

Okay, this eclipse will only be visible from the Arctic in February 2063, when the sun is below the horizon, BUT if we get lucky and a gigantic chasm opens in the Earth in just the right spot...
Survey Marker

Fun fact: The standard North American NAD83 coordinate system is misaligned from the actual Earth, off-center by about 7 feet. Someone knows where I am, and I'm in the wrong place.
Sitting in a Tree

First comes blood / Then we perish / Then comes Death in his Eternity Carriage.
Tick Marks

If you're really savvy, you can hide an entire set of illicit transactions by timing them to draw what looks like a graph inset.
Types of Eclipse Photo

The most rare, top-tier eclipse photo would be the Solar Earth Eclipse, but the Apollo 12 crew's attempt to capture it was marred by camera shake. They said it looked spectacular, though.
Machine

The Credible Machine
Eclipse Clouds

The rare compound solar-lunar-nephelogical eclipse
Eclipse Coolness

A partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like someone broke the sky.
Periodic Table Regions

Cesium-133, let it be. Cesium-134, let it be even more.
Cursive Letters

𝓘 𝓽𝓱𝓲𝓷𝓴 𝓬𝓪𝓹𝓲𝓽𝓪𝓵 𝓛 𝓲𝓼 𝓹𝓻𝓸𝓫𝓪𝓫𝓵𝔂 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓶𝓸𝓼𝓽 𝓯𝓾𝓷 𝓽𝓸 𝔀𝓻𝓲𝓽𝓮, 𝓽𝓱𝓸𝓾𝓰𝓱 𝓵𝓸𝔀𝓮𝓻𝓬𝓪𝓼𝓮 𝓺 𝓲𝓼 𝓪𝓵𝓼𝓸 𝓪 𝓼𝓽𝓻𝓸𝓷𝓰 𝓬𝓸𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓷𝓭𝓮𝓻.
Greenland Size

The Mercator projection drastically distorts the size of almost every area of land except a small ring around the North and South Poles.
The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

You know that asteroid that almost destroyed Earth in the 90s? Turns out the whole thing was secretly created by Michael Bay, who then PAID Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck to look heroic while blowing it up!
Moon Landing Mission Profiles

If you pick a low enough orbit, it gives you a lot of freedom to use a lightweight launch vehicle such as a stepladder.
Moon Armor Index

Astronomers are a little unsure of the applicability of this index, but NASA's Planetary Protection Officer is all in favor.
Schwa

Doug's cousin, the one from London, runs a Bumble love cult.
Earth

Just think of all the countless petty squabbles and misunderstandings, of all the fervent hatreds, over so insignificant a thing as the direction and duration of a rocket engine firing.
Supergroup

I love their cover of 1,200 Balloons, Dalmatians, and Miles.
Physics vs. Magic

'At the stroke of midnight, your brother will be hurtling sideways at an altitude of 150 meters' is a regular physics prediction about your nonmagical trebuchet, whereas 'you are cursed to build a brother-launching trebuchet' falls out of the Lagrangian.
Earth/Venus Venn Diagram

Actually, the fact that Mars is still orbiting safely over here means that it was technically an *Euler* apocalypse, not a Venn one.
Ice Core

If you find an ash deposition layer from a year in which an eruption destroyed an island that had Camellia sinensis growing on it, you can make a Gone Island Ice_τ.
Geographic Qualifiers
!['Thank you for the loveliest evening I've ever had...' [normal] '...east of the Mississippi.' [instant intrigue!]](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/geographic_qualifiers.png)
'Thank you for the loveliest evening I've ever had...' [normal] '...east of the Mississippi.' [instant intrigue!]
Call My Cell

'Hey, can you call my cell?' '...I'm trying, but it says this number is blocked?' 'Ok, thanks, just checking.'
Goodhart's Law
![[later] I'm pleased to report we're now identifying and replacing hundreds of outdated metrics per hour.](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/goodharts_law.png)
[later] I'm pleased to report we're now identifying and replacing hundreds of outdated metrics per hour.
Orbital Argument

"Some people say light is waves, and some say it's particles, so I bet light is some in-between thing that's both wave and particle depending on how you look at it. Am I right?" "YES, BUT YOU SHOULDN'T BE!"
Light Leap Years

When Pope Gregory XIII briefly shortened the light-year in 1582, it led to navigational chaos and the loss of several Papal starships.
Crossword Constructors

Also, we would really appreciate it if you could prominently refer to it as an 'eHit'.
Treasure Chests
![[earlier] "Your vintage-style handmade chest business is struggling. But I have a plan."](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/treasure_chests.png)
[earlier] "Your vintage-style handmade chest business is struggling. But I have a plan."
Research Account

Focus of your research: EXTREME PETTINESS AND UNWILLINGNESS TO LET ANYTHING GO
Sphere Tastiness

Baseballs do present a challenge to this theory, but I'm convinced we just haven't found the right seasoning.
Banana Prices

It's a linear extrapolation, Michael. How big could the error be? 10%?
Log Cabin

I'm sure the building inspectors will approve my design once they finally manage to escape.
Relationship Advice

Good to be a little wary of advice that sounds too much like a self pep talk.
Greenhouse Effect

Once he had the answer, Arrhenius complained to his friends that he'd "wasted over a full year" doing tedious calculations by hand about "so trifling a matter" as hypothetical CO2 concentrations in far-off eras (quoted in Crawford, 1997).
US Survey Foot

Subway refuses to answer my questions about whether it's an International Footlong or a US Survey Footlong. A milligram of sandwich is at stake!
Minnesota

In addition to 'squishy', after reviewing my submitted intraplate ground motion data, the National Geodetic Survey has politely asked me to stop using the word 'supple' so often when describing Midwestern states.
Fast Radio Bursts

Dr. Petroff has also shown that the Higgs boson signal was actually sparks from someone microwaving grapes, the EHT black hole photo was a frozen bagel someone left in too long, and the LIGO detection was just someone slamming the microwave door too hard.
Spelling

Any time I misspell a word it's just because I have too much integrity to copy answers from the dictionary.
Log Alignment

A video can have a log scale that's misaligned with both the time AND space axes.
Astronaut Guests

They didn't bring us a gift, but considering the kinetic energy of a bottle of wine at orbital speed, that's probably for the best.
Net Rotations

For decades I've been working off the accumulated rotation from one long afternoon on a merry-go-round when I was eight.
Bug Thread

After some account issues, we've added 6 new people from the beach house rental website support forum.
Sheet Bend

A left-handed sheet bend creates a much weaker connection, especially under moderate loads.
Like This One

A lot of sentences undergo startling shifts in mood if you add 'like this one' to the end, but high on the list is 'I'm a neurologist studying dreams.'
Supernova

They're a little cagey about exactly where the crossover point lies relative to the likelihood of devastating effects on the planet.
Fever

Hypothermia of below 98.6 K should be treated by leaving the giant molecular cloud and moving to the vicinity of a star.
Range Safety

The Range Mischief Officer has modified the trajectory to add a single random spin somewhere in the flight, but won't tell us where.
2024

It wasn't originally constitutionally required, but presidents who served two terms have traditionally followed George Washington's example and gotten false teeth.
Iceland

The HVAC bill for installing the Gulf Stream was enormous.
Supersymmetry

High-speed collisions at the Baby Park track may support the hypothesis that Daisy is her own evil twin, a theory first suggested by Nintendo in the game Majorana's Mask.
Hydrothermal Vents

Benthic Santas weren't even discovered until the 1970s, but many scientists now believe Christmas may have originally developed around hydrothermal vents and only later migrated to the surface.
Definitely

A really mean prank you can play on someone who's picky about words is to add a 'definitely->definitively' autocorrect rule to their keyboard.
Love Songs

The Piña Colada song carves a trajectory across the chart over the course of the song.
Puzzles

Why couldn't the amulet have been hidden by Aunt Alice, who understands modern key exchange algorithms?
Label the States

Even with a blank map, a lot of people can only name 45-50 of the 64 states.
DateTime
![It's not just time zones and leap seconds. SI seconds on Earth are slower because of relativity, so there are time standards for space stuff (TCB, TGC) that use faster SI seconds than UTC/Unix time. T2 - T1 = [God doesn't know and the Devil isn't telling.]](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/datetime.png)
It's not just time zones and leap seconds. SI seconds on Earth are slower because of relativity, so there are time standards for space stuff (TCB, TGC) that use faster SI seconds than UTC/Unix time. T2 - T1 = [God doesn't know and the Devil isn't telling.]
Snow

For someone who has ostensibly outgrown staying up late waiting for Santa, I do spend an awful lot of time refreshing websites to see if packages are here yet.
The Wrong Stuff

The phantom found Edward Everett Hale a century too early; by the time we invented satellites, the specifics of his 'brick moon' proposal were dismissed as science fiction.
Compact Graphs

People may complain about readability, but even with jpeg compression, extracting the data points is usually computationally feasible if there aren't too many of them.
Space Typography
![And over heeee[...]eeeere (i)s Saturn.](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/space_typography.png)
And over heeee[...]eeeere (i)s Saturn.
Typical Seating Chart

Now that airlines have started adding wheel locks to their drink carts, less than half of flights have one accidentally fall out through the hole.
X Value

The value of n is still unknown, but new results constrain it to fall between 8 and 10^500, ruling out popular 'n=1' and 'n=2' theories.
Decay Modes

Unlike an Iron Age collapse, a Bronze Age collapse releases energy, since copper and tin are past the iron peak on the curve of binding energy.
Oceanography Gift

Shipping times vary. Same-ocean delivery may only take a few years, but delivery from the Weddell Sea in Antarctica may take multiple decades, and molecules meant for inland seas like the Mediterranean may be returned as undeliverable by surface currents.
Thanksgiving Arguments

An occasional source of mild Thanksgiving tension in my family is that my mother is a die-hard fan of The Core (2003), and various family members sometimes have differing levels of enthusiasm for her annual tradition of watching it.
Rebuttals

The mainstream dogma sparked a wave of dogmatic revisionism, and this revisionist mainstream dogmatism has now given way to a more rematic mainvisionist dogstream.
Materials Scientists

If a materials scientist gives you a present, always ask whether regifting will incur any requirements for Federal paperwork.
Empiricism

The problems started with my resolution next year to reject temporal causality.
Date Line

They estimate the rocket should be free by approximately ... uh ... well, in about two hours.
Redshift

So do you have any plans for z=-0.000000000000045?
Parameterball

The ball's density also varies, but players don't learn the value until after choosing their raquets. The infamous 'bowling ball table tennis' region of the parameter space often leads to equipment damage.
Messier Objects

The debate over the correct Messier number for the Ship of Theseus is ongoing.
Doctor's Office

"The police told me I can't be a doctor, but whenever they show up I just go into the Google Maps settings page I found and change the house to 'Police Headquarters' and then they have to do what I say."
Under the Stars

If you live in Los Angeles (around 33°52'N, roughly the latitude of Hermosa Beach) the black hole in V404 Cygni passes over you each day. On Christmas Day it will be directly overhead around 2pm.
Breaker Box

Any electrician will warn you to first locate and flip the house's CAUSALITY circuit breaker before touching the CIRCUIT BREAKERS one.
Dendrochronology

These anomalies are known as Miyake events, named for the pioneering scientist who discovered them and was tragically devoured by a carnivorous tree.
Daylight Saving Choice

I average out the spring and fall changes and just set my clocks 39 minutes ahead year-round.
Extinction Mechanisms

The Late Heavy Bombardment was followed a few billion years later by the Comparatively Light but Oddly Specific Bombardment.
Black Holes vs Regular Holes
![Created by the collapse of: [massive stars] [Florida limestone bedrock]](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/black_holes_vs_regular_holes.png)
Created by the collapse of: [massive stars] [Florida limestone bedrock]
Professional Oaths

Interpretations of the Hermeneutic Oath differ.
Inspiraling Roundabout

Look, I just think we need to stop coddling those hedonistic roundabout hogs who get into the inner lane and circle for hours, wasting valuable capacity.
Sign Combo

Speed Limit: 45 MPH / Minimum: 65 MPH
Earth Layers

The Earth's magnetic field is primarily generated by currents in the liquid outer core, though some geophysicists argue that an unexplained mismatch with models suggests that the Kinder toy contains a magnet.
Language Acquisition

My first words were 'These were my first words; what were yours?'
Dubious Islands

Running for office in Minnesota on the single-issue platform 'dig a permanent channel through the Traverse Gap because it will make this map more satisfying.'
Odyssey

Ugh, it says they attempted delivery but "Nobody was home."
A Halloween Carol
![[after a minute] "Okay, I think I've got it, thanks. Can I--" "oOOOooOOooo!"](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/a_halloween_carol.png)
[after a minute] "Okay, I think I've got it, thanks. Can I--" "oOOOooOOooo!"
Factorial Numbers

So what do we do when we get to base 10? Do we use A, B, C, etc? No: Numbers larger than about 3.6 million are simply illegal.
Book Podcasts

I've been working my way through this 1950s podcast by someone named John Tolkien called 'Lord of the Rings'--it's a deep dive into this fictional world he created. Good stuff, really bingeable!
Lying

I was, at least at the start of this disastrous game night, your friend.
Urban Planning Opinion Progression

If they're going to make people ride bikes and scooters in traffic, then it should at LEAST be legal to do the Snow Crash thing where you use a hook-shot-style harpoon to catch free rides from cars.
xkcd Phone Flip

Theranos partnership: Sorry, we know, but we signed the contract back before all the stuff and the lawyers say we can't back out, so just try to keep your finger away from the bottom of the phone.
Haunted House

You can leave at any time through the door over there. It's a Louisville door, so you'll need to find a compatible knob. No, don't be silly, that one is a Lexington knob! Of course it won't fit.
Iceberg Efficiency

Our experimental aerogel iceberg with helium pockets manages true 100% efficiency, barely touching the water, and it can even lift off of the surface and fly to more efficiently pursue fleeing hubristic liners.
Exoplanet Observation

NASA prefers to say that their rovers are 'looking for signs of past life on Mars' and not 'ghost hunting.'