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xkcd.com: A webcomic of romance and math humor.

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Beamsplitters

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.

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Late Cenozoic

Our nucleic acid recovery techinques found a great deal of homo sapiens DNA incorporated into the fossils, particularly the ones containing high levels of resin, leading to the theory that these dinosaurs preyed on the once-dominant primates.

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Physics Lab Thermostat

Hopefully the HVAC people set it to only affect the AIR in the room.

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Maslow's Pyramid

The local police, building inspector, and fire marshal are all contesting my 'safety' assertion, or would be if they could reach me past all the traps.

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Tectonic Surfing

The worst is when you wipe out in the barrel and you're trapped for several million years until erosion frees you.

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Every Scientific Field

Conveniently for everyone, it turns out that dark energy is produced by subterranean parasitoid wasps.

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Craters

It's annoying that the Nastapoka Arc isn't a meteor impact crater, but I truly believe that--with enough time, effort, and determination--we could make it one.

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Asteroid News

Their calculations show it will 'pass within the distance of the moon' but that it 'will not hit the moon, so what's the point?'

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Monocaster

My competitors say the tiny single tiny caster is unsafe, unstable, and offers no advantages over traditional designs, to which I say: wow, why are you guys so mean? I thought we were friends!

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Water Filtration

You'd think the most expensive part would be the quark-gluon plasma chamber, but it's actually usually the tube to the top of the atmosphere to carry the cosmic rays down.

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Slingshots

In my reboot, Dennis the Menace was just trying to send Mr. Wilson a nice comet, but accidentally wiped out his dinosaur garden.

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Lava Lakes

Hey, golf balls float on lava, so this should make recovering them from the hazards easier.

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Sky Alarm

During the day it also activates for neat clouds and pretty sunsets.

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Stranded

At least they're not alone down there.

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Three Kinds of Research

The secret fourth kind is 'we applied a standard theory to their map of every tree and got some suspicious results.'

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Time Traveler Causes of Death

Many a hungry time traveler has Googled 'trilobites shellfish allergy' only to find their carrier had no coverage in the Ordovician.

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Classical Periodic Table

Personally I think mercury is more of a 'wet earth' hybrid element.

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Storage Tanks

We're considering installing a pressurization system to keep the tanks at constant pressure solely to deter them.

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Ferris Wheels

They left the belt drive in place but switched which wheel was powered, so people could choose between a regular ride, a long ride, and a REALLY long ride.

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Helium Synthesis

Our lawyers were worried because it turns out the company inherits its debt from the parent universe, but luckily cosmic inflation reduced it to nearly zero.

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Celestial Event

If we can get a brood of 13-year cicadas going, we might have a chance at making this happen before the oceans evaporate under the expanding sun.

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Meteor Shower PSA

If you hold the meteor too long, it may imprint on you and form a contact binary, making reintroduction to space difficult.

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Vice President First Names

[Political pundit on the ScrabbleTV News channel] "After four years of defying orthographic pressure, Joe ceded the top of the ticket to Kamala, who--after considering Josh, Mark, Andy, Roy, and Pete--picked Tim."

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University Age

This only makes it more urgent that we adopt my roadmap for the next 10 years, which should put us solidly in the lead.

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Matter

He was the first person to land a 900, which is especially impressive because pulling off a half-integer spin requires obeying Fermi-Dirac statistics.

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Exam Numbers

Calligraphy exam: Write down the number 37, spelled out, nicely.

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Chili Tornado Quake

Buildings constructed from softer materials were damaged by chili pepper impacts to the storm's high Richter-Fujita-Scoville-Mohs hardness rating.

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Olympic Sports

Thankfully for everyone involved, the Winter Olympics officials spotted me and managed to stop me before I got to the ski jump.

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House Inputs and Outputs

People think power over ethernet is so great, and yet when I try to do water over ethernet everyone yells at me.

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President Venn Diagram

Hard to imagine political rhetoric more microtargeted at me than 'I love Venn diagrams. I really do, I love Venn diagrams. It's just something about those three circles.'