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

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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.

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Apples

The experimental math department's budget is under scrutiny for how much they've been spending on trains leaving Chicago at 9:00pm traveling at 45 mph.

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Fishing

'That's definitely above the catch-and-release size minimum for planetesimals.' 'I'm going to throw it back anyway.'

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Hyperacute Interdynamics

Our models fall apart where the three theories overlap; we're unable to predict what happens when a nanometer-sized squirrel eats a grapefruit with the mass of the sun.

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Chessboard Alignment

Luckily, the range is limited by the fact that the square boundary lines follow great circles.

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Inverted Catenaries

Some tires are marketed as 'all-shape tires,' but if driven in a climate with both inverted catenary falls and triangle falls, they wear out really fast.

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Website Task Flowchart

Tired of waiting on hold? Use our website to chat with one of our live agents, who are available to produce words at you 24/7!

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Bridge Clearance

A lot of the highway department's budget goes to adjusting the sign whenever the moon passes directly overhead.

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Satellite Imagery

Every weekend I take an ATV out into the desert and spend a day tracing a faint "(C) GOOGLE 2009" watermark across the landscape.

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Fifteen Years

"Want to feel old?" "Yes."

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Geologic Core Sample

If you drill at the right angle and time things perfectly, your core sample can include a section of a rival team's coring equipment.

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Service Outage

Now, if it were the *Canon* wiki, it's possible to imagine someone with a productivity-related reason for consulting it, but no one's job requires them to read that much about Admiral Daala.