~xkcd | Bookmarks (51)

Sometimes, you have to sacrifice pieces to gain the advantage. Sometimes, to advance ... you have to fall back.

"10 minutes ago we were down to only 2 0s!" "How many do we have now?" "I ... don't know!!"

These rocks are from a time before eyes, brains, and bones, pieces of a land warmed by an unseen sun.

"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."

We were disappointed that the rocket didn't make a THOOOONK noise when it went into the tube, but we're setting up big loudspeakers for future launches to add the sound effect.

You do have to be careful, though--sometimes, instead of water, you hit this free fuel that you can sell for a lot of money instead.

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.

Our experiment will be expensive, but we believe it will produce important spin-offs, especially if we manage to hit the sun from the right angle.

It's a real accomplishment to mess up a ravioli recipe badly enough that the resulting incident touches all four quadrants of the NFPA hazard diamond.

There's a heated debate over whether the big island of Tierra del Fuego should qualify for membership.

The distinctive 'UCLA comma' and 'Michigan comma' are a long string of commas at the start and end of the sentence respectively.

The Watership Down rabbits removed an additional 0.1 nanometers constructing their warren, although that was mostly soil. British rabbits have historically mined very little coal; the sole rabbit-run coal plant was shut down in the 1990s.

Under quantum tax law, photons sent through a beamsplitter don't actually choose which path they took, or incur a tax burden, until their wavefunction collapses when the power is sold.