It's true, I think about this all the time.
It's like the traveling salesman problem, but the endpoints are different and you can't ask your friends for help because they're sitting three seats down.
But surely I owe you an accurate answer!
The worst part is when sidewalk cracks are out-of-sync with your natural stride.
I occasionally do this with mile markers on the highway.
a(b+c)=(ab)+(ac). Politicize that, bitches.
I am never going out to buy an air conditioner with my sysadmin again.
I first saw this problem on the Google Labs Aptitude Test. A professor and I filled a blackboard without getting anywhere. Have fun.
On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.
Someday I'll be rich enough to hire Nate Silver to help make all my life decisions. 'Should I sleep with her?' 'Well, I'm showing a 35% chance it will end badly.'
Sadly, this is a true story. At least I learned about the OS X 'say' command.
You know, pep rallies weirded me out in high school, and they've only gotten creepier in retrospect.
'Hey Megan, it's your father. How do I print out a flowchart?'
She also starts every letter with "Dear Future <your name>".
Excellent recovery: ... which we could try to use to somehow save your original brother!
Hey, why do YOU get to be the president of Tautology Clu-- wait, I can guess.
The Strong Collatz Conjecture states that this holds for any set of obsessively-hand-applied rules.
Statistics suggest that there should be tons of alien encounter stories, and in practice there are tons of alien encounter stories. This is known as Fermi's Lack-of-a-Paradox.
This is how I explain computer problems to my cat. My cat usually seems happier than me.
I mean, it's been almost twenty years. Now, it's possible you're simply embedding Windows directory paths in your URIs, but in that case you need more than just a short lecture.
The definitions I grew up with were that a geek is someone unusually into something (so you could have computer geeks, baseball geeks, theater geeks, etc) and nerds are (often awkward) science, math, or computer geeks. But definitions vary.
College Board issues aside, I have fond memories of TI-BASIC, writing in it a 3D graphing engine and a stock market analyzer. With enough patience, I could make anything ... but friends. (Although with my chatterbot experiments, I certainly tried.)
Also, all financial analysis. And, more directly, D&D.
You know I've always hated her.
Of all the nations, the armies of the ununoctium-benders are probably the least intimidating. The xenon-benders come close, but their flickery signs are at least effective for propaganda.
I find that when someone's taking time to do something right in the present, they're a perfectionist with no ability to prioritize, whereas when someone took time to do something right in the past, they're a master artisan of great foresight.
All long help threads should have a sticky globally-editable post at the top saying 'DEAR PEOPLE FROM THE FUTURE: Here's what we've figured out so far ...'
Thank you for making me feel less alone.
The only things you HAVE to know are how to make enough of a living to stay alive and how to get your taxes done. All the fun parts of life are optional.
Someday I'll be the first to get a Ph. D in 'Undeclared'.
Also possibly several miles beyond that.
Oh right, eye contact. Ok, good, holding the eye contact ... holding ... still holding ... ok, too long! Getting weird! Quick, look thoughtfully into space and nod. Oh, dammit, said 'yeah' again!
It can take a site a while to figure out that there's a problem with their 'report a bug' form.
If I click 'no', I've probably given up on everything, so don't bother taking me to the page I was trying to go to. Just drop me on the homepage. Thanks.
ISO 8601 was published on 06/05/88 and most recently amended on 12/01/04.
Functional programming combines the flexibility and power of abstract mathematics with the intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics.
And if clicking on any word pops up a site-search for articles about that word, I will close all windows in a panic and never come back.
Let me just scroll down and check behind that rock. Annnnd ... nope, page copyright year starts with '19'. Oh God, is this a WEBRING?
If our current civilization lasts another 8,000 years, it's probably fair to assume the Long Now Foundation got things right, and at some point we started listening to them and switched to five-digit years.
I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.
Later, at home: 'Dear diary: Still can't figure out what to write here ...'
I need an extension for my research project because I spent all month trying to figure out whether learning Dvorak would help me type it faster.
Seventh year: Perfectly coherent words, but in the pet's language, not mine.
Do you need me to do a quicksort on the whiteboard or produce a generation of offspring or something? It might take me a bit, but I can do it.
"Radians Fahrenheit or radians Celsius?" "Uh, sorry, gotta go!"
'If you're done being pedantic, we should get dinner.' 'You did it again!' 'No, I didn't.'
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.
Despite it being imaginary, I already have SUCH a strong opinion on the cord-switch firing incident.
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.
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.
According to these blood tests, you're like 30% cereal.
Some other studio should do the Antz/A Bug's Life thing and release The Dingbats Movie at the same time.
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 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.
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.
I thought of another bad opinion! I couldn't find anyone who expressed it specifically, but still, the fact that I can so easily imagine it is infuriating! I'm gonna tell everyone about it!
Bluetooth is actually named for the tenth-century Viking king Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson, but the protocol developed by Harald was a wireless charging standard unrelated to the modern Bluetooth except by name.
"Isn't the original Jurassic Park your favorite movie of all time?" "Yes, but that's because I like dinosaurs and I WANT there to be an island full of them. If John Hammond's lab had been breeding serial killers in creepy masks, I wouldn't have watched!" "Wait, are you sure? That could actually be good." "Ok, I WOULD watch the scenes where Jeff Goldblum tries to convince a bunch of executives that the park is a bad idea."
It turns out that saying "Oh, so THAT'S why they call it Boxing Day" is a good way to get punched a second time.
To avoid errors like this, we render all text and pipe it through OCR before processing, fixing a handful of irregular bugs by burying them beneath a smooth, uniform layer of bugs.
I'm inside your head and I hate it. Please let me out.
"Off-by-one errors" isn't the easiest theme to build a party around, but I've seen worse.
Good thing I'm not already prone to overthinking everyday decisions!
I'm like a vampire, except I'm not crossing that threshold even if you invite me.
Feels like I picked a bad year to try to start having a healthy relationship with political news.
"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."
P((B|A)|(A|B)) represents the probability that you'll mix up the order of the terms when using Bayesian notation.
You can find a perfect correlation if you just control for the residual.
Oh yeah, I didn't even know they renamed it the Willis Tower in 2009, because I know a normal amount about skyscrapers.
It's made me way more excited about ferris wheels, subways, car washes, waterslides, and store entrances that have double doors with a divider in the middle.
Science tip: Scientists hardly ever use the two-dot division sign, and when they do it often doesn't even mean division, but they still get REALLY mad when you repurpose it to write stuff like SALE! ALL SHOES 30÷ OFF!
Slowly progressing from 'how do protons behave in relativistic collisions?' to 'what the heck are protons even doing when they're just sitting there?'
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.]
"One popular strategy is to enter an emotional spiral. Could that be the right approach? We contacted several researchers who are experts in emotional spirals to ask them, but none of them were in a state to speak with us."
Look, you can't complain about this after giving us so many scenarios involving N locked chests and M unlabeled keys.
Scholars are still debating whether the current period is post-postmodern or neo-contemporary.
We're building on our earlier success getting web developers to pay to change the backslashes in our displayed payment URL to forward slashes.
You say no human would reply to a forum thread about Tom Bombadil by writing and editing hundreds of words of text, complete with formatting, fancy punctuation, and two separate uses of the word 'delve'. Unfortunately for both of us, you are wrong.
His books were kinda intimidating; rappelling down through his skylight seemed like the best option.
As far as I can tell, Navajo doesn't have a common word for 'zero'. do-neh-lini means 'neutral'.
Listen! They said a team of chess players coached by someone with no understanding of basketball would never be competitive in the NBA! Well, it turns out they're pretty perceptive.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!
The other two are still lost on the infinite plane of uniform density.
But to us there is but one God, plus or minus one. --1 Corinthians 8:6±2.
You will be led to judgement like lambs to the slaughter--a simile whose existence, I might add, will not do your species any favors.
Note that this implies you should NOT honk solely because I stopped for a pedestrian and you're behind me.
<A>: Like </a>this.
The prosecution calls Gottfried Leibniz.
It IS about physics. It ALL is.
In a cavern deep below the Earth, Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Ann Druyan, Paul Rudd, Alan Alda, and Duran Duran meet together in the Secret Council of /(b[plurandy]+b ?){2}/i.
Ok, plan B: Fly a kite into the blades, with a rock in a sling dangling below it, and create the world's largest trebuchet.
MY RESULTS ARE A SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT ON THE STATE OF THE AAAAAAAAAAAART
I was almost fired from a job driving the hearse in funeral processions, but then the funeral home realized how much business I was creating for them.
Anyway, that's a common misconception. Geese live for a long time; all the ones we can see will probably keep flying around for billions of years before they explode.
The sudden introduction of Venusian flowers led to an explosive growth of unusual Earth pollinators, which became known as the "butterfly effect."
They work even better if you take them with our experimental placebo booster, which I keep in the same bottle.
Wait, I can fix this. Picture another field. In the middle sits the only creature the first creature is afraid of. Now just-- wait, where did THAT one go?
The thrower started hitting the bats too much, so the king of the game told him to leave and brought out another thrower from thrower jail.
Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy called the man's arguments that he could be either Alito or Ginsburg "surprisingly compelling, but ultimately unconvincing."
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 top search for every state is PORN, except Florida, where it's SEX PORN.
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.
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...
Can you stop glaring at me like that? It makes me feel really ironic.
At least we can all agree on the enormity of this usage.
Why I'm Moving Most of My Social Activity to Slack, Then Creating a Second Slack to Avoid the People in the First One, Then Giving Up on Social Interaction Completely, Then Going Back to Texting
For some reason the water in my pool is green and there's a weird film on the surface #nofilter
To picture 10^18, just picture 10^13, but then imagine you connect the left side of the 3 to close off the little bays.
The git vehicle fleet eventually pivoted to selling ice cream, but some holdovers remain. If you flag down an ice cream truck and hand the driver a floppy disk, a few hours later you'll get an invite to a git repo.
When my great grandfather designed the Titanic and it hit an iceberg and sank, he didn't sit around moping. He took those lessons to his next job designing airships, and he made the Hindenburg completely iceberg-proof!
You'd think it'd be easy to just bet money against these people, but you have to consider the probability of them paying up.
Do you make a distinction between shallots, scallops, and scallions? If you use all three words, do they all have different meanings, all the same, or are two the same and one different?
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?
You can come on in, we're all fully vaccinated. Except the spare room off the living room. Don't go in there, we're not fully vaccinated in there.
Premed: "Does this count for a physics credit? Can we shorten the string so I can get it done faster? And can we do one where it hits me in the face? I gotta do a thing for first aid training right after."
"We can do 0.33 or 0.34, but our payroll software doesn't allow us to--" "NO DEAL."
U+2A0B ⨋ Mathematicians need to calm down
Once the air from the top passes below the plane of the wing and catches sight of the spooky skulls, it panics, which is the cause of turbulent vortices.
Mathematicians quickly determined that it spells ANT BNECN, an unusual theoretical dish which was not successfully cooked until Andrew Wiles made it for breakfast in the 1990s.
'Lever' was originally an acronym for Load Emplification by the Vimulated Emission of Radiation.
90% of the iceberg is hidden beneath the water, but that 90% only uses 10% of its brain, so it's really only 9%.
Arboretum Owner Denied Standing in Garden Path Suit on Grounds Grounds Appealing Appealing
Why couldn't the amulet have been hidden by Aunt Alice, who understands modern key exchange algorithms?
The Range Mischief Officer has modified the trajectory to add a single random spin somewhere in the flight, but won't tell us where.
Also, we would really appreciate it if you could prominently refer to it as an 'eHit'.
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
The Doppler effect is a mysterious wavelength-shifting phenomenon which seems to primarily affect sirens, which is why the 🚨 emoji is red.
An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that's the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.
Though they do appreciate how much he improved the heating system for the flame pit.
The installation of the pipes on the inside of the insulation can be challenging, especially when the neighbor could come home at any minute.
Low gravity can cause bone loss, so we're pleased to report that, since we initiated capsule motion, the number of bones in each crew member has been steadily increasing.
After determining that his body was full of pipes carrying iron-rich fluid, our current theory is that the dagger-shaped object precipitated within the wound.
This is almost as bad as the time I signed up for a purely partisan fishing expedition.
Every computer, at the unreachable memory address 0x-1, stores a secret. I found it, and it is that all humans ar-- SEGMENTATION FAULT.
Proper User Policy apparently means Simon Says.
Reportedly, double-walled inflatable balls like this exist somewhere. Now to find that place.
SomethingAwful has a wonderful compilation of crazy AOL searches in their Weekend Web archives, 2006-08-13.
I hear that these days Bill Watterson is happy just painting in the Ohio woods with his father and doesn't get any mail or talk to anyone.
zo'o ta jitfa .i .e'o xu do pendo mi
It means shuffling quickly past nuns on the street with ketchup in your palms, pretending you're hiding stigmata.
There are a lot of graduate-educated young-earth creationists.
SEMI-PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION
Her daughter is named Help I'm trapped in a driver's license factory.
When I look into your eyes, I see JPEG artifacts. I can tell by the pixels that we're wrong for each other.
If you're not cool enough to do it manually, you can look up tools like Upside-Down-Ternet for playing games with people on your wifi.
Trivia: Elaine is actually her middle name.
I once asked an NSA guy whether they'd broken RSA. And I know I can trust him, because I asked if he was lying to me and he said no.
Mrs. Roberts would have gotten up sooner, of course, but she was busy piping find ~ and find ~nomad into xargs shred, just in case.
This digital music thing will probably reach its endgame sometime in the next decade or so. These are very exciting times.
40% of OpenBSD installs lead to shark attacks. It's their only standing security issue.
Zero results: 'snake charming' and 'haberdashery'. (Things like 'car' and 'boating' and such are of course the highest, by a huge margin.)
But THIS guy, he might be for real!
Real programmers set the universal constants at the start such that the universe evolves to contain the disk with the data they want.
Of course, the assert doesn't work.
I'm as surprised as you! I didn't think it was possible.
I would take 'kibibyte' more seriously if it didn't sound so much like 'Kibbles N Bits'.
What's the complexity class of the best linear programming cutting-plane techniques? I couldn't find it anywhere. Man, the Garfield guy doesn't have these problems ...
If you think this is too hard on literary criticism, read the Wikipedia article on deconstruction.
The blueprints for the Department of the Internet offices call for Ceiling Cat-themed sprinkler heads.
That helmet won't save him.
He actually installed each piece in a different car in the lot, then built a new car in the spot from the displaced pieces. It's a confusing maneuver known as the auto-troll shuffle.
It's time to draw the line.
And they choose Al Gore as Internet Secretary.
I call Rule 34 on Wolfram's Rule 34.
I secretly, deep in my guilty heart, like Papyrus and don't care if it's overused. [Cue hate mail in beautifully-kerned Helvetica.]
Damn. Not only did he not install it, he sutured a 'Vista-Ready' sticker onto my arm.
I favor approval voting or IRV chiefly because they mean we might get to bring back The Bull Moose party.
Some engineer out there has solved P=NP and it's locked up in an electric eggbeater calibration routine. For every 0x5f375a86 we learn about, there are thousands we never see.
I once worked on a friend's dad's computer. He had the hard drive divided into six partitions, C: through J:, with a 'Documents' directory tree on each one. Each new file appeared to be saved to a partition at random. I knew enough not to ask.
I recently had someone ask me to go get a computer and turn it on so I could restart it. He refused to move further in the script until I said I had done that.
Not to be confused with 'making money selling this stuff to OTHER people who think it works', which corporate accountants and actuaries have zero problems with.
'Grandpa, what was it like in the Before time?' 'It was hell. People went around saying glass was a slow-flowing liquid. You folks these days don't know how good you have it.'
It's not our fault we caught a group on their way home from a geography bee. And they taught us that Uzbekistan is one of the world's two doubly-landlocked countries!
Also in the right quadrant are NFPA-compliant chemical manufacturers and Sir Charles Wheatstone. Sharing the top with the internet libertarians are Nate Silver and several politically-active kite designers.
Goldilocks' discovery of Newton's method for approximation required surprisingly few changes.
"This is the reference implementation of the self-referential joke."
Fortunately, the charging one has been solved now that we've all standardized on mini-USB. Or is it micro-USB? Shit.
And if you drive a typical car more than a mile out of your way for each penny you save on the per-gallon price, it doesn't matter how worthless your time is to you--the gas to get you there and back costs more than you save.
If you get an 11/100 on a CS test, but you claim it should be counted as a 'C', they'll probably decide you deserve the upgrade.
Proof of Zermelo's well-ordering theorem given the Axiom of Choice: 1: Take S to be any set. 2: When I reach step three, if S hasn't managed to find a well-ordering relation for itself, I'll feed it into this wood chipper. 3: Hey, look, S is well-ordered.
I think you could get up to about 11:59:57 before you'd have trouble swallowing the chocolates fast enough. At that point, you'd need some kind of a liquify-and-chug apparatus to get up over the 11:59:59 barrier. Anyway, Merry Christmas!
I had a hard time with Ayn Rand because I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at 'therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone.'
Saying 'what kind of an idiot doesn't know about the Yellowstone supervolcano' is so much more boring than telling someone about the Yellowstone supervolcano for the first time.
This exotic blade was wrought from a different fallen star. The meteorite was a carbonaceous chondrite, so it's basically a lump of gravel glued into the shape of a sword. A SPACE sword!
'Detector! What would the Bayesian statistician say if I asked him whether the--' [roll] 'I AM A NEUTRINO DETECTOR, NOT A LABYRINTH GUARD. SERIOUSLY, DID YOUR BRAIN FALL OUT?' [roll] '... yes.'
Another thing that is a bad problem is if you're flying toward space and the parts start to fall off your space car in the wrong order. If that happens, it means you won't go to space today, or maybe ever.
People get really grumpy when they realize you're giving them directions for how to go to the store and buy a GPS.
2031: Google defends the swiveling roof-mounted scanning electron microscopes on its Street View cars, saying they 'don't reveal anything that couldn't be seen by any pedestrian scanning your house with an electron microscope.'
'Unfortunately, the notion of marriage which prevails ... at the present time ... regards the institution as simply a convenient arrangement or formal contract ... This disregard of the sanctity of marriage and contempt for its restrictions is one of the most alarming tendencies of the present age.' --John Harvey Kellogg, Ladies' guide in health and disease (1883)
Protip: Any two-axis graph can be re-labeled 'coordinates of the ants crawling across my screen as a function of time'.
This is roughly equivalent to 'number of times I've picked up a seashell at the ocean' / 'number of times I've picked up a seashell', which in my case is pretty close to 1, and gets much closer if we're considering only times I didn't put it to my ear.
The social media reaction to this asteroid announcement has been sharply negative. Care to respond?
Points to anyone who hacks the Flickr devs' computers to make their text editors do this when you click on anything.
A few minutes later, the goat from behind door C drives away in the car.
The weak twin primes conjecture states that there are infinitely many pairs of primes. The strong twin primes conjecture states that every prime p has a twin prime (p+2), although (p+2) may not look prime at first. The tautological prime conjecture states that the tautological prime conjecture is true.
Protip: You can win every exchange just by being one level more precise than whoever talked last. Eventually, you'll defeat all conversational opponents and stand alone.
We're firing you, but the online headline-writing division wants to hire you.
m-x machineofdeath-mode
No matter how fast I swing, I can never travel outside this loop! Maybe space outside it doesn't exist! But I bet it does. This tire came from somewhere.
'Am I taking care of you? I have a thesis to write!' 'My parents are at their house; you visited last--' 'No, no, explain like you're five.'
Trains rotate the Earth around various axes while elevators shift its position in space.
'TMI' he whispered, gazing into the sea.
PROTIP: You can get around the Shannon-Hartley limit by setting your font size to 0.
'It's not actually ... it's a DEVICE for EXPLORING a PLAUSIBLE REALITY that's not the one we're in, to gain a broader understanding about it.' 'oh, like a boat!' '...' 'Just for the sake of argument, we should get a boat! You can invite the Devil, too, if you want.'
I honestly didn't think you could even USE emoji in variable names. Or that there were so many different crying ones.
I would say time is definitely one of my top three favorite dimensions.
WARNING: This item was aged by the same inexorable passage of time that also processes nuts.
colors.rgb("blue") yields "#0000FF". colors.rgb("yellowish blue") yields NaN. colors.sort() yields "rainbow"
There's no "I" in "VOWELS".
I literally could care less.
In the future, a group of resistance fighters send me back in time with instructions to find the Skynet prototype and try to upgrade it.
Why did we even have that thing?
Here in the entomology department, we have a simple two-step formula for answering any question: (1) ants are cool, and (2) we forgot the question because we were thinking about ants.
Does it get taller first and then widen, or does it reach full width before getting taller, or alternate, or what?
Gonna start bugging the Unicode consortium to add snake segment characters that can be combined into an arbitrary-length non-breaking snake.
“If you can read this, congratulations—the archive you’re using still knows about the mouseover textâ€!
It's like you tried to define a formal grammar based on fragments of a raw database dump from the QuickBooks file of a company that's about to collapse in an accounting scandal.
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.
Things are looking good for the eclipse--Nate Silver says Earth will almost definitely still have a moon in August.
I'm one of the few Instagram users who connects solely through the Unix 'talk' gateway.
It's like a half-solved cryptogram where the solution is a piece of FORTH code written by someone who doesn't know FORTH.
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!
Real analysis is way realer than I expected.
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.
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.
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. 🙏🚁🎖️"
If most people turn into muderers all of a sudden, we'll need to push out a firmware update or something.
[They do not move.]
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>.
"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'm going to tell the manufacturer that their business practices are ADMIRABLE and ETHICAL and their developers are ATTRACTIVE and I'm going to report them to the FCC for their IMPECCABLE VIRTUE.
SUB[59]: The submission numbers for my accepted OEIS submissions in chronological order
I'm trying to prove that mathematics forms a meta-abelian group, which would finally confirm my suspicions that algebraic geometry and geometric algebra are the same thing.
I mean, if it's that easy to get a theorem named for you ... "a straight line that passes through the center of a coplanar circle always divides the circle into two equal halves." Can I have that one? Wait, can I auction off the naming rights? It can be the Red Bull Theorem or the Quicken Loans Theorem, depending who wants it more.
Cauchy-Lorentz: "Something alarmingly mathematical is happening, and you should probably pause to Google my name and check what field I originally worked in."
Despite having now taken three months longer than the airplane people, we're making disappointingly little progress toward the obvious next stage of vehicle: The Unobtanium-hulled tunneling ship from the 2003 film 'The Core.'
The biggest jump is at 11:00am EST (4:00pm UTC) when midnight reaches the UTC+8 time zone. That time zone, which includes China, is home to a quarter of the world's population. India and Sri Lanka (UTC+5:30) put us over the 50% mark soon after.
Thanks for bringing us along.
Help, I set my white balance wrong and suddenly everyone is screaming at each other about whether they've been to Colorado.
It's the NORMAL distribution, not the TANGENT distribution.
The flags were probably vaporized on impact, because we launched it before we had finished figuring out how to land. That makes sense from an engineering standpoint, but also feels like a metaphor.
Eventually, every epidemiologist becomes another statistic, a dedication to record-keeping which their colleagues sincerely appreciate.
My brother once asked me if there was a function to produce a calendar grid from a list of dates in Google Sheets. I replied with a single-cell formula that took in a list of dates and outputted a calendar. It used SEQUENCE(), REGEXMATCH(), and a double-nested ARRAYFORMULA(), and it locked up the browser for 15 seconds every time it ran. I think he learned a lot about asking me things.
Ok, how many coins for a cinnamon roll?
I also have an utterance. Less of an utterance and more of an incantation. Less of an incantation and more of a malediction. Less of a malediction and more of a Word of Power. Less of a Word of Power and more of an Unforgivable Curse.
They actually showed up on the first scan by the first WiFi-capable device.
Lots of people called their ships unsinkable before the Titanic. Voicing your hubris doesn't make failure more likely, just more memorable.
It's not my fault I haven't had a chance to measure the curvature of this particular universe.
We've met! I remember you when you were thiiiis tall! [*holds a hand an inch above their head*]
There's no group chat member more enigmatic than the cool person who you all assume has the chat on mute, but who then instantly chimes in with no delay the moment something relevant to them is mentioned.
Billboard's "Best of the 80s" chart includes Blondie's 1980 hit "Call Me." QED.
I would describe my personal alignment as "lawful heterozygous silty liquid."
Further research is needed to fully understand how we managed to do such a good job.
1937-2020
Despite years of effort by my physics professors to normalize it, deep down I remain convinced that 'dynamical' is not really a word.
10^13.4024: A person who has come back to numbers after a journey deep into some random theoretical field
The hard part about opening a hole in the proof of the Poincaré conjecture is that Grigori Perelman will come out of retirement to try to fix it by drawing a loop around the hole and contracting it to a point.
The ISO 216 standard ratio is cos(45°), but American letter paper is 8.5x11 because it uses radians, and 8.5/11 = pi/4.
I like trying to make it as hard as possible. "I'd love to meet up, maybe in a few days? Next week is looking pretty empty. *witchcraft"
Oh no, a musician just burst in through the door confidently twirling a treble clef.
'No, my cabbage moths have already started laying eggs in them! Send the trolley into the river!' 'No, the sailing wolf will steal the boat to rescue them!'
Other pollsters complain about declining response rates, but our poll showed that 96% of respondents would be 'somewhat likely' or 'very likely' to agree to answer a series of questions for a survey.
Chemists actually find it simpler to define a general odor of rotten eggs as a baseline, and the LACK of rotten eggs as a distinct smell.
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.
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.
Key West, Virginia is not to be confused with Key, West Virginia.
How could anyone consider themselves a well-rounded adult without a basic understanding of silicate geochemistry? Silicates are everywhere! It's hard to throw a rock without throwing one!
Geometry textbooks always try to trick you by adding decorative stripes and dotted lines.
After decades of studying the curve and the procedure that generates it, the consensus explanation is "it's just like that."
For the sake of simplicity, gardeners are assumed to move through Euclidean space--neglecting the distortion from general relativity--unless they are in the vicinity of a Schwarzschild Orchid.
OpenStreetMap was always pretty good but is also now *really* good? And Apple Maps's new zoomed-in design in certain cities like NYC and London is just gorgeous. It's cool how there are all these good maps now!
The combination croquet set/10-lane pool can also be used for some varieties of foosball and Skee-Ball.
Massage: Theoretical (10), Quantum (6), High-energy (2), Computational (1), Marine (1), Astro- (None)
Pronouncing [ṡṡċċḣḣẇẇȧȧ] is easy; you just say it like the 'x' in 'fire'.
Theoretical physicist: At the Planck length, uncountably many.
Our company can be your one-stop shop for decentralization.
The universe fandom is great. Such sweet and enthusiastic people.
At first I thought I would need some gold or something to pay him, but then I realized that it was the 18th century and I could just bring a roll of aluminum foil.
If you ever see the † dagger symbol with no unmatched footnote, it means the writer is saying the phrase while threatening you with a dagger.
Things Leonhard Euler created ( most of math ( overlapping circle diagrams ) a cricket bowling machine ) Things John Venn created
If you think THAT'S unethical, you should see the stuff we approved via our Placebo IRB.
"I wish for everything in the world. All the people, money, trees, etc." "Are you SURE you--" "And I want you to put it in my house."
ADDITIONAL NOTES: Fixed a bug that caused some rocks to generate virtually infinite heat while just sitting there.
FYI: The 'drop, cover, and hold on' advice only applies to earthquakes. If you encounter a mountain lion, you should absolutely not drop to the ground, crawl under it, and hold on to one of its legs.
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!
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.
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.
It wasn't originally constitutionally required, but presidents who served two terms have traditionally followed George Washington's example and gotten false teeth.
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!
Focus of your research: EXTREME PETTINESS AND UNWILLINGNESS TO LET ANYTHING GO
[later] I'm pleased to report we're now identifying and replacing hundreds of outdated metrics per hour.
'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.
While it seemed like a fun prank at the time, I realize my prank fire extinguishers full of leaded gasoline were a mistake.
This PSA brought to you by several would-be assassins who tried to wave me in front of speeding cars in the last month and who will have to try harder next time.
Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.
In contrast to Pascal's Wager Triangle, Pascal's Triangle Wager argues that maybe God wants you to draw a triangle of numbers where each one is the sum of the two numbers above it, so you probably should, just in case.
Calligraphy exam: Write down the number 37, spelled out, nicely.
In my new scale, °X, 0 is Earths' record lowest surface temperature, 50 is the global average, and 100 is the record highest, with a linear scale between each point and adjustment every year as needed.
I don't dig pit traps and cover them with sticks and a thin layer of leaves nearly as much as I expected; I find a chance to do it barely once a month.
Speed limit c arcminutes^2 per steradian
They should add a little sticker that certifies that the humidifier supports water conservation, but in the sense of energy conservation or momentum conservation.
AAAAAA A ÃA̧AȂA̦ ǍÅÂÃĀÁȂ AAAAAAA!
The most awkward part is when you have to pause to put on your shoes before you continue rolling out the door.
Under the 'has cleared its orbital neighborhood' and 'fuses hydrogen into helium' definitions, thanks to human activities Earth technically no longer qualifies as a planet but DOES count as a star.
'Is it worth anything?' 'I dunno, is the answer to that question worth another $5?'
If you have an old phone in a drawer, and you listen very carefully, you can occasionally hear the occasional tap of an emitted SIM card hitting the side of the drawer as the phone transmutes to a lower-end model.
[later] I don't get why our pizza slices have such terrible reviews; the geotextile-infused sauce gives the toppings incredible slope stability!
169 is a baker's gross.
Ultimately, history would imperfectly record the story of the Foal of Troy.
With a good battery, the device can easily last for 5 or 10 years, although the walls probably won't.
[desperately] Maybe this is from some country where they use commas as decimal points, and also as digit separators after the decimal, and also use random other characters for decoration???
Numbers can be tricky. On the day of my 110th birthday, I'll be one day younger than John Tukey was on his.
It's important for devices to have internet connectivity so the manufacturer can patch remote exploits.
Starting a meta-leaderboard for tracking who holds the record for ranking behind the most distinct people on an online leaderboard.
Maybe encouraging the publication of null results isn't enough--maybe we need a journal devoted to publishing results the study authors find personally annoying.
Chemistry grad students have been spotted trying to lure campus squirrels into laundry hampers in the hope that it sparks inspiration.