xkcd

I have stopped paying for the server on which the blog automation is run, so this tumblr will no longer update.

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Someone’s probably working on an eBook app where, if you stop reading right before some plot twist happens, the app will wait a while and then send you a breaking news alert about what’s happ...

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Sorry to cut it short, I’m on my phone. When I’m back at a keyboard, I can give you another 5,000 words. When I’m Back at a Keyboard ]

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Rome’s declaration of war against Carthage was sent from a no-reply address, so Hannibal had to cross the Alps to deliver his “UNSUBSCRIBE” response in person. Inbox ]

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My brother once asked me if there was a function to produce a calendar grid from a list of dates in Google Sheets. I replied with a single-cell formula that took in a list of dates and outputted ...

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Kind of rude of them to simultaneously issue an EVACUATION - IMMEDIATE alert, a SHELTER IN PLACE alert, and a 911 TELEPHONE OUTAGE alert. NWS Warnings ]

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“Wait, we’ve MOVED since 2010. How on Earth did–” “Look, some of us were just born to be champions.” Expiration Date High Score ]

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“Mostly it means that I’m acutely aware that the kid one table over coughed as the server walked past with our food.” Gastroenterology ]

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If only somebody had warned them that the world would roll them like this. How Hacking Works ]

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When Salvador Dalí died, it took months to get all the flagpoles sufficiently melted. Flag Interpretation ]

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Psychology researchers say our ‘flashbulb’ memories of big events can be unreliable, but I clearly remember watching live on CNN as Challenger crashed into and destroyed the Berlin Wall. Fi...

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It also works for anything you teach someone else to do. “Oh yeah, I trained a pair of neural nets, Emily and Kevin, to respond to support tickets.” Trained a Neural Net ]

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The Antikythera mechanism had a whole set of gears specifically to track the cyclic popularity of skinny jeans and low-rise waists. Lunar Cycles ]

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The typical Shadow Biology Department is housed in a building coated in a thin layer of desert varnish which renders it invisible to normal-world university staff. Shadow Biosphere ]

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40 digits: You are optimistic about our understanding of the nature of distance itself. Coordinate Precision ]

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WE WILL ARREST THE REVOLUTION MEMBERS Predictive Models ]

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The articles are much shorter, but I assume that’s because this version predates the merger with the Hawaiian text that created the modern Hawaiian-Greek hybrid wiki-pedia. Reading in the Ori...

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I can’t believe how bad corruption has become, especially given that our league split off from the statewide one a month ago SPECIFICALLY to protest this kind of flagrantly biased judging. M...

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Gotta feel kind of bad for nation-state hackers who spend years implanting and cultivating some hardware exploit, only to discover the entire target database is already exposed to anyone with a w...

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Ironically, I’ve been having these same arguments for at least a decade now. I thought we would have moved on by now, but somehow the snide complaints about millennials continue. Millennials ...

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