ABCD

Stay right there, we'll be back in a minute. We've just gotta brainstorm some new wonders. Have you all figured out gears yet? Yes? Crap.

Sure, you can talk about per-capita adjustment, but if you want to solve the problem, it's obvious that this is the group you need to focus on.

You'd need to keep track of so many people! Would you use, like, Excel or something? Far too fancy for a simple country nanoenzyme developer like me.

Gotten the Ferris wheel operator's attention

"Okay, that was weird, but the product reveal was normal. I think the danger is pas--" "One more thing." "Oh no."

If there's no dome, how do you explain the irregularities the board discovered in the zoning permits issued in that area!?

It's cool how, when there's a number lots of people are curious about, but which isn't easy to measure, some random guess will get cited everywhere and become the universally quoted value. Unrelatedly, did you know there are 850 trillion waves in the ocean?

"I have nothing to offer but blood--next slide, please--toil--next slide, please--tears, and--next slide, please--sweat."

Junior astronomers hate getting put on board update duty, but someone's gotta make sure that stuff is still up there.

People ask me whether I feel any moral qualms about the source of the points, but if he hadn't introduced factory farming to Agricola, someone else would have.

Oh no, they set up a roadblock which is just a sign with the entire 'Czech hedgehog' article printed on it.

Ontology is way off to the left and geography is way off to the right.

In Dimensional Chess, every move is annotated '?!'.

Who knew you could learn so much about sexual reproduction from looking at pictures on the internet!

[One hill over, a competing astrophotographer does a backflip over a commercial airliner while throwing a tray of plastic space stations into the air, through which a falcon swoops to 'grab' the real one.]

The key to discovering life on Mars is to find someone who built a camera and landed it on Mars. Then you just look through the pictures for plants and dogs and stuff.

NASA may not want to admit it, but at this point they ARE the 90's Kid Space Program.

I built a model that combines local case rates and vaccination stats to estimate when it's reasonable to attend various types of party, but I forgot to include anything about where to find them.

"I've traveled here from the year 2020 to bring you this vaccine!"

I think of myself as the David Attenborough of factory mailing equipment.

I'm looking forward to having to worry a lot less about covid, but wouldn't mind if we worried a little more about giving each other colds. Colds are bad!

Others include "We've incrementally improved the estimate of this coefficient," "Maybe all these categories are wrong," and "We found a way to make student volunteers worse at tasks."

All our teams make an effort to stay optimistic, but I will say that once our virus division saw the vaccine efficacy data, they started asking for payment up front.

"You still can't walk into someone's house without being invited!" "What? Oh, I see your confusion. No, this vaccine is for a bat VIRUS. I'm fine with doorways and garlic and stuff."

Extremely rude how Turing's later formulations of the halting problem called me out by name specifically.

Mile High Club membership [✓] [ ] Discovery of parts of Amelia Earhart's skeleton [ ] [ ] Mid-flight incident that results in safe landing on the Hudson River [✓] [ ]

We've learned that weird spacing and diacritics in the methodology description are apparently the key to good research; luckily, we've developed an AI tool to help us figure out where to add them.

As if these problems weren't NP-hard enough.

Because they orbit the Earth every 90 minutes, some astronauts should try to argue that, due to CDC regulations and time zone technicalities, they should be able to get their second dose just 30 or 40 hours after their first.

When you get to hell, tell smallpox we say hello.

I still think the Cold Stone Creamery partnership was a good idea, but I should have asked before doing the first market trials during the cryogenic mirror tests.

Ugh, it's stuck to my laptop. It must have bound to the ACER-2 receptor.

Check check check ... chhecck chhecck chhecck ... check check check

Plot twist: Thanks to [mumble mumble] second-order [mumble] Rayleigh-Taylor [mumble] turbulent [mumble] shear, it turns out powered flight is way EASIER on Mars!

I don't care whether you win or lose, as long as you have-- ...okay, sorry, I'm being reminded I very much care whether you win or lose. I need you to win, that's very important.

Although regardless of how everything else shakes out, I definitely won't mind if the norm "wear a mask if you're feeling sick" sticks around after this.

I'm actually not sure if Vader and the Emperor count as a household or if Vader lives in that weird black egg thing or what.

Luckily, unlike in our previous study, we have no reason to believe Evangeline the Adulterator gained access to our stored doses.

For sentimental reasons, every active Mars rover is counted as one person, although that's not enough to make Mars more than a dot.

Alexa defeated her in a battle hinging on the ability to set multiple timers.

[Future update] Well, someone accidentally dropped an M&M in their cup of ice water, and we all panicked and scattered.

( MSTE ( AR ) CD )

Pythagorean means are nice and all, but throwing the median in the pot is really what turns this into random forest statistics: applying every function you can think of, and then gradually dropping the ones that make the result worse.

I can't wait until I'm fully vaccinated and can safely send chat messages in all caps again.

I just Googled 'roomba sojourner mod' and was sorely disappointed. Be the change, I guess!

Manage cookies related to essential site functions, such as keeping Atrus and his sons imprisoned within the page.

I've lived in the present for my whole life and I'm not about to move now.

Plus a shirt that says "it feels like you're making eye contact."

"Cumulative number of coronavirus spreadsheets created over time" is a spreadsheet I am coming dangerously close to creating.

The best part of crashing a Mars briefing is you can get in a full 11 minutes of questions before they can start to respond.

If the first audio they downlink is from the descent, we probably won't be able to hear anything over the sound of the rover screaming.

Dr. Fauci is not permitted to have a cat, because as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, his petting one would be considered giving aid and comfort to an allergen.

To ensure lasting immunity, doctors recommend destroying a second Death Star some time after the first.

"I think I'll pass. These days I have a hard time feeling comfortable in crowded bars with loud music and lots of shouting." --me, after the pandemic, but now for a second reason

If you tune out again, when you tune back in you'll be hearing about dusty plasma fission fragment rockets.

You know what they say: mRNA-1273 before tozinameran, you'll have to slay a banshee in a catamaran.

Soon, linguists will be wandering around everywhere, saying things like "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" and "more people have been to Russia than I have," and speech will become unintelligible.

If you had an oven bag and a dryer that runs unusually hot, I guess you could in theory make tumbled eggs.

I've never been that big of a hug person, but it turns out I'm not quite this small of a hug person either.

Scientists still don't know how marine biologists manage to so consistently bring up whalefall ecosystems, when relevant conversational openings are so few and far between.

We're worried that a regular whale will get into a 30-foot-deep ocean trench section and filter-feed on all the tiny whales.

What an incredible smell you've discovered.

To prove you're human, please click all the number pairs that appear together in your Social Security number.

Most of our universe consists of dark matter rendered completely undetectable by our spacetime codec's dynamic range issues.

The #2 cause of astronomer hand injuries is trying to do vector math when the second axis points off to the right.

The floor should be slightly curved, but we haven't figured out artificial gravity yet, so for now we just added a trace intoxicating gas to the air that messes with your inner ear and gives you a sense that the ground is tilting away from you.

OCEAN PLAY AREA RULES: No running, no horseplay, no megatsunamis, and no trying to pry the wreck of the Titanic off the bottom.

Hopefully in a couple of weeks we'll be able to resume our apple-focused updates, because we have SO MUCH to say about Cosmic Crisp.

1. Flatten the curve. 2. Steepen the curve. 3. Hang out.

Neutral Evil is for people who like keeping the weight nicely centered in the carton, but also hate everyone else who wants that.

A death-first search is when you lose your keys and travel to the depths of hell to find them, and then if they're not there you start checking your coat pockets.

We've secretly replaced this customer's instant coffee with our patented substitute. Let's see what she ... uh oh, I think she spotted us through the window. Now she's getting something from the closet ... oh jeez, she has a sword! Run!!

Protip: At midnight your excuse for not having read The Great Gatsby can switch from "I'm worried about violating copyright" to "I think my copy requires Flash."

Then I'm going to go on a weeks-long somatic hypermutation bender, producing ever-more targeted antibodies, while I continue to remain distanced and follow guidance from public health authorities.

Wow, rude of you to regift literally every gift that you or anyone else has ever received.

"Okay, for the last time, the shot is free, so we can't--" "Shut up and take my money!"

The IAU is sad to announce that at 00:39 UTC on December 22nd, Jupiter and Saturn did unfortunately come into contact, and appear to have blooped together.

We reject the null hypothesis based on the 'hot damn, check out this chart' test.

There are more Trump voters in California than Texas, more Biden voters in Texas than New York, more Trump voters in New York than Ohio, more Biden voters in Ohio than Massachusetts, more Trump voters in Massachusetts than Mississippi, and more Biden voters in Mississippi than Vermont.

*refresh* Aww, still in Kalamazoo. *refresh* Aww, still in Kalamazoo.

I believe in getting immunity the old-fashioned way: By letting a bat virus take control of my lungs and turn my face into a disgusting plague fountain while my immune system desperately Googles 'how to make spike protein antibodies'.

'Wait, why would you think a movie set in 1984 would do drive-ins as a retro promotion?' 'You know, 80s stuff. Drive-in movies. Britney Spears doing the hustle. Elvis going on Ed Sullivan and showing off his pog collection.' 'What year were you born, again?'

It's frustrating to calibrate your precautions when there's only one kind of really definitive feedback you can get, you can only get it once, and when you do it's too late.

Linguists, settling some inscrutable grudge, have been steadily sneaking more backdated synonyms for 'sharing borders' into the dictionary. They've added 'contiguous,' 'coterminous,' 'conterminous,' and next year they're adding 'conterguous.'

The bottom of the list remains unchanged. Poor Rutherford Birchard Hayes.

Since we haven't really settled on a name for those online hangout/work spaces that try to recreate the experience of cafes, and I love confusion, I'm going to start calling them 'cyber cafes' or 'internet cafes.'

I can't wait until this is all over and I can go back to riding my horse through the mall.

"Do you feel like the answer depends on whether you're currently in the hole, versus when you refer to the events later after you get out? Assuming you get out."

I'll never install a smart home smoke detector. It's not that I don't trust the software--it's that all software eventually becomes email, and I know how I am with email.

[scrolling through a giant spreadsheet of transcribed data] 'Wow, a surprising number of users grew up at 420 69th St.' 'Yeah, must be a high-rise or something.'

"Are you concerned the witches won't breed in captivity?" "Honestly, we're more concerned that they WILL. We don't know what it involves, but our biologists theorize that it's 'harrowing.'"

The ten-year cancerversary is traditionally the Cursed Artifact Granting Immortality anniversary.

For those of you also taking Game Theory, your grade in that class will be based on how close your grade on this exam is to 80% of the average.

She referenced Billie Eilish, so this must be getting pretty close to the pandemic. But we've seen the last two years in-universe, so if it's set in the future, they must be in at least 2023 by now. [*adds thumbtacks and string to wall*]

He also broke the streak that incumbents with websites are unbeatable and Delawareans can't win, creating a new precedent: Only someone from Delaware can defeat an incumbent with a website.

Good luck to Democrats in the upcoming Georgia runoff elections, and to the Google Sheets SREs in the current run-on elections.

Thank you to Gretchen McCulloch for fielding this question, and sorry that as a result the world's foremost internet linguist has been devoured by the brown one. She will be missed.

You might think most people you know are reliable voters, or that your nudge won't convince them, and you will usually be right. But some small but significant percentage of the time, you'll be wrong, and that's why this works.

Call me, MAYBE.

Doing great here in the sixth and hopefully final year of the 2016 election.