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

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Eliminating the Impossible

'If you've eliminated a few possibilities and you can't think of any others, your weird theory is proven right' isn't quite as rhetorically compelling.

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Plums

My icebox plum trap easily captured William Carlos Williams. It took much less work than the infinite looping network of diverging paths I had to build in that yellow wood to ensnare Robert Frost.

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SNEWS

People say setting of fireworks indoors is dangerous, but I looked at their energy release and it's like 10^-40 foe; totally negligible.

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Bad Map Projection: Zero Declination

'The zero line in WMM2025 passes through a lot of population centers; I wonder what year the largest share of the population lived in a zone of less than 5° of declination,' he thought, derailing all other tasks for the rest of the day.

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Installation

Do YOU remember the skylight being this big?

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Carbon Dating

This dating is corroborated by the presence of stone tools at the site, rather than earlier and less effective helium ones.

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Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs

Staplers are actually in Pseudosuchia, making them more closely related to crocodiles than to dinosaurs.

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Binary Star

The discovery of a fully typographical star system comes with a big asterisk.

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Groundhog Day Meaning

Originally, the ceremony used a variety of rodents and mustelids, but over time most people agreed it made sense to standardize on a specific individual ground squirrel in Pennsylvania.

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Proof Without Content

There's also a proof without content of a conjecture without content, but it's left as an exercise for the reader.

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Chemical Formula

Some of the atoms in the molecule are very weakly bound.

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Early Arthropods

'Ugh, I'm never going to be like spiders. My descendants will all just be normal arthropods who mind their own busines and don't do anything weird.' --The ancestor of a bunch of eusocial insects

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Double-Pronged Extension Cord

'Oh, and can I borrow 50 sacks of loose flour, a pile of lithium-ion batteries, a bucket of bleach, and a bucket of vinega--' 'NO!!!!!!'

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Cost Savings

Unfortunately, my scheme to trick NASA has now taken over a decade longer than planned and has run way over budget.

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Aurora Coolness

I've had countless nights where the line never left the bottom zone of the graph, but the few moments where it's climbed all the way to the top have made up for them all.

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International Station

Welcome to the International Space Station Exclamation Point!

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16 Part Epoxy

Some surfaces may seem difficult to glue. But if you research the materials, find tables of what adhesives work on them, and prepare your surfaces carefully, you can fail to glue them in a fun NEW way that fills your house with dangerous vapors.

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Sailing Rigs

I wanted to make the world's fastest yawl, so I made the aft sail bigger, but apparently that means it's not a yawl anymore! It's a real ketch-22.

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Planetary Alignment

We're going to need to modify the surface to mount it on the test stand. Which ocean basin do you like the least?

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Superstition

It's important to teach yourself to feel responsible for random events, because with great responsibility comes great power. That's what my wise Uncle Ben told me right before he died; he might still be alive today if only I'd said rabbit rabbit that year!

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Tensegrity

Some people argue that the tension and compression in the human skeleton is technically tensegrity, but it's missing the defining characteristic: making people say 'wtf, how is that thing floating?' when they see it.

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Conic Sections

They're not generally used for crewed spacecraft because astronauts HATE going around the corners.

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Anyone Else Here

Anyone else watching this Youtube video in 1954? If so, my last trip definitely messed with the timeline.

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High Altitude Cooking Instructions

1,300,000-1,400,000 ft: Ask a crew member to show you how to use the ISS food warmer.

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Truly Universal Outlet

Building Inspectors HATE This One Weird Trick

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Sauropods

Vertebrae Georg

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Funny Numbers

In 1899, people were walking around shouting '23' at each other and laughing, and confused reporters were writing articles trying to figure out what it meant.

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Pole Vault Pole

My goal in life is to be personally responsible for at least one sports rule change.

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Telescope Types

I'm trying to buy a gravitational lens for my camera, but I can't tell if the manufacturers are listing comoving focal length or proper focal length.

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Jumping Frog Radius

Earth's r_jf is approximately 1.5 light-days, leading to general relativity's successful prediction that all the frogs in the Solar System should be found collected on the surface of the Earth.