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

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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.

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Temperature Scales

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.

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Experimental Astrophysics

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.

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Bad Map Projection: The United Stralia

This projection distorts both area and direction, but preserves Melbourne.

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Ravioli-Shaped Objects

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.

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Solar Protons

If any of you want to meet some cool local oxygen atoms, I can introduce you!

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CIDABM

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

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University Commas

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

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Númenor Margaritaville

I see white shores, and beyond it, a far green country under a tequila sunrise.

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Ingredients

Add main-belt asteroids to taste.

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UK Coal

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.

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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.