xkcd

Under the 'has cleared its orbital neighborhood' and 'fuses hydrogen into helium' definitions, thanks to human activities Earth technically no longer qualifies as a planet but DOES count as a star.

It does come at the small cost of a LOT more off-by-40-or-50 errors.

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It seems wrong that Fruit by the Foot is only sold by weight or by number of rolls.

Your homeowner's insurance might cover it, but be sure to check the subductible.

Briefly set a new record for tallest human-made structure by getting my knit sweater snagged on the skydiving plane door as I jumped and not noticing until I'd landed.

2040s: RNA formed the basis for life each of the five known times it arose on the early Earth.

I can't get over the suspicion that all those viral pictures are photoshopped and 'Flemish' belongs in the lower right circle.

AAAAAA A ÃA̧AȂA̦ ǍÅÂÃĀÁȂ AAAAAAA!

Unfortunately, KM3NeT led to the discovery of the Pauli anglerfish, which emits Cherenkov radiation to prey on neutrino researchers.

They just want researchers in the enclosure to feel enriched and stimulated. ('The Enclosure' is what archivists call the shadowy world outside their archives in which so many people are trapped.)

What's weirder is that muons turned out to be INCREDIBLY cute.

The bottom ones are also potentially bad news for any other planets in our solar system that have been counting on Earth having a stable orbit.

As a first step, they can put in a secondary deck, to help drivers try it out and find out how fun the jumps are. After a while no one will use the old flat deck and they can remove it.

It was great until my thumb slipped and I accidentally launched my telescope into the air at Mach 8.

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It struggles a little with complex positions, like when there are an even number of moves and it has to round down, but when run against itself it's capable of finding some novelties. At one point I saw six knights on the board at once; Stockfish rarely exceeds four.

They should add a little sticker that certifies that the humidifier supports water conservation, but in the sense of energy conservation or momentum conservation.

apparently the brief trend of users other than me posting new comics here has ceased again

Unfortunately, body size and bite force continue to increase.

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Alt text: I wonder what surviving human held the record before balloons (excluding edge cases like jumping gaps on a mountain bridge). Probably it was someone falling from a cliff into snow or water, but maybe it involved something weird like a gunpowder explosion or volcano.

Edit: Alt Text: Speed limit c arcminutes^2 per steradian.

You don't want the nitrogen percentage to be too high or you run the risk of eutrophication.

I don't dig pit traps and cover them with sticks and a thin layer of leaves nearly as much as I expected; I find a chance to do it barely once a month.

You may notice the first half of these instructions are similar to the instructions for a working nuclear fusion device. After the first few dozen steps, be sure to press down firmly and fold quickly to overcome fusion pressure.

The most important quantity for meteorologists is of course the product of latent pressure and temperostrophic enthalpy, though 'how nice the weather is' is a close second.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

https://xkcd.com/3025/

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The real key was inventing the windmill-powered winch.

Dinosaur Cosmics

They had BETTER make this a sample return mission.

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

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

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

"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."

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

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.

well well well, if it isn't a new xkcd

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

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

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.

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.

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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Original static webpage version: https://what-if.xkcd.com/6/

Conveniently for everyone, it turns out that dark energy is produced by subterranean parasitoid wasps.

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xkcd.com/2962

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Hopefully the HVAC people set it to only affect the AIR in the room.

The local police, building inspector, and fire marshal are all contesting my 'safety' assertion, or would be if they could reach me past all the traps.

The worst is when you wipe out in the barrel and you're trapped for several million years until erosion frees you.

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