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

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Time Capsule Instructions

Inside is a third box, labeled DO NOT OPEN UNLESS YOU ARE IN THE TIME ZONE WHERE YOU OPENED BOTH PREVIOUS BOXES.

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Lasering Incidents

I still don't know how the police found my compound where I ran an illegal searchlight depot/covert blimp airfield/fireworks testing range.

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Sun Avoidance

C'mon, ESA Solar Orbiter team, just give the Parker probe a LITTLE nudge at aphelion. Crash it into the sun. Fulfill the dream of Icarus. It is your destiny.

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D Roll

Under some circumstances, if you throw a D8 and then a D12 at an enemy, thanks to the D8's greater pointiness you actually have to roll a D12 and D8 respectively to determine damage.

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Exclusion Principle

Fermions are weird about each other in a standoffish way. Integer-spin particles are weird about each other in a 'stand uncomfortably close while talking' kind of way.

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Linear Sort

The best case is O(n), and the worst case is that someone checks why.

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Phase Change

Even when you try to make nice, smooth ice cubes in a freezer, sometimes one of them will shoot out a random ice spike, which physicists ascribe to kiki conservation.

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METAR

In the aviation world, they don't use AM/PM times. Instead, all times are assumed to be AM unless they're labeled NOTAM.

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The Maritime Approximation

It works because a nautical mile is based on a degree of latitude, and the Earth (e) is a circle.

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Making Tea

No, of course we don't microwave the mug WITH the teabag in it. We microwave the teabag separately.

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Seismologists

And even when they're not distracted, they usually get kicked out for illegal under-the-net 'subduction spikes'.

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Infinite Armada Chess

Stockfish 16 suggests the unconventional opening 1. RuntimeError: Out of bounds memory access

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Advent Calendar Advent Calendar

The growth rate of items per day may may seem absurd, but it's actually much less than the acceleration in the 12 Days of Christmas song.

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Second Stage

Hmm, they won't do in-flight delivery, so let's order a new first and second stage to our emergency landing site and then try to touch down on top of them to save time.

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Neutrino Modem

Our sysadmin accidentally won a Nobel Prize while trying to debug neutrino oscillation error correction.

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Cold Air

We also should really have checked that the old water tower was disconnected from the water system before we started filling it with compressed air.

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D Combinatorics

Look, you can't complain about this after giving us so many scenarios involving N locked chests and M unlabeled keys.

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Arizona Chess

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

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Kedging Cannon

The real key was inventing the windmill-powered winch.

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The Future of Orion

Dinosaur Cosmics

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Europa Clipper

They had BETTER make this a sample return mission.

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Geometriphylogenetics

There's a maximum likelihood that I'm doing phylogenetics wrong.

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Number Shortage

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

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Proterozoic Rocks

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

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Probabilistic Uncertainty

"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."

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Demons

Though they do appreciate how much he improved the heating system for the flame pit.

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Disposal

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.

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Wells

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.

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Sandwich Helix

The number one rule of string manipulation is that you’ve got to specify your encodings.

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RNAWorld

Disney lore: Canonically, because of how Elsa's abiogenesis powers work, Olaf is an RNA-only organism.