xkcd

Eoink

I like the way that something with "new" in the name is probably the second oldest of its type, for reasons that become obvious when you think about it. I went to college in a city where the two churches downtown are known as the Old Church and the New Church. The former was completed 771...

Eoink

I've always had a sneaky fondness for neologism in this context, a word that started as self-referential and then stopped being so.

Eoink

Spider Robinson did a lot of That's Amore puns in his book the Callahan Touch, I'm quite surprised that a search didn't get the lyrics. And yep, I came close to laughing out loud.

Eoink

On a music site about 15 years ago, the filter turned Saturday into Sadoggie-dooay. Which was made very obvious by a series of posts where each person (including me) who saw this tried it to see if it really was the filter, so the thread had about half a dozen consecutive posts which just had "...

Eoink

philipquarles wrote:Fun fact: an actual horse can output significantly more than one horsepower for short periods of time. The highest power output ever documented by a single horse is 14.9hp. source

So in this case one horsepower = 14.9 horsepower, divide both sides by horsepower, 1=14.9.

Eoink

Shell we stop the puns now?

Back on topic, the childhood/adolescence walking with books strikes a chord, oddly enough in my current state of senescence, I can walk and read a Kindle, but can't walk and read my phone, maybe because of the greater interaction needed with the phone.

Eoink

I was immediately reminded of 616, but going back to have a look he seems to have matured a bit now.

https://xkcd.com/616/

Eoink

Hmmmmmmmmm. I wonder how one goes about constructing a mathematical model of these things... Step 1: Simulate a universe.... Step 2: Don't be inside the simulation. Oh dear, I believe I've made an error. Did you start by defining recursion? You need to define recursion before you start simulating, ...

Eoink

Talking of strange lists and strange words, how about this: Are there any words which are their own definition? I thought of "self-explanatory" but that's kind of the opposite. How about "word", "noun", " pentasyllabic", and on its first use only "neolog...

Eoink

'Fill this text box with gibberish by mashing random keyboard keys' would be more suitable as the last question. I caused the form to submit prematurely, so started again. Play with that, data geeks! I also managed to pause the music I was listening to, type the number 90 in the Google search box i...

Eoink

Eutychus wrote:Nice to see the return of Black Hat Guy.

But if the car requires the weight of a small adult in the passenger seat to operate, how come it's been "left running" when there's nobody in it?

I took it that it wouldn't move until there was a driver in the driver's seat.

Eoink

Old use of the word, meaning historical or ancient.

Eoink

Also: the radiation pressure depends mostly on your surface area while the gravity depends on your mass. Whether they balance out depends on your surface/mass ratio. A solar sail will have winning radiation pressure (on all sane distances) while a uranium sphere will have winning gravity. A uranium...

Eoink

wayne wrote:**twitch**
**twitch**

parsecs

**twitch**

used as a measure of time

**twitch**

like light-years

**twitch**

To cheer you up..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bosSsgzgenA

Eoink

Neil_Boekend wrote:There are plans to change to Type C. That plug has rotational symmetry.

And will still take 3 attempts to insert correctly, due to USB-space properties.

Eoink

Those are the two worse and least informative questions that any employer could possibly ask. It seems like the only reason anyone ever asks it is because it has become tradition. Or maybe it's a test of the interviewee, if they manage to neither look contemptuous nor shout "What a stupid ques...

Eoink

I've always wanted to answer the first question with "Over-modesty".
Randall seems to be looking at his stick figures in odd contexts at the moment,

Eoink

I wish people would stop linking to comic 915. I always seem to end up Googling "canadian surrealist porn", and I have a horrible feeling that I am ending up on a watch list somewhere.

Eoink

Beavertails wrote:So many people commenting on proven science across MULTIPLE experiments. Sigh. Next thing you'll try and convince me of is that vaccines are real.

Oh they're real. But do they work?

Eoink

commodorejohn wrote:Anybody who thinks scientific accuracy should take precedence over entertainment shouldn't be allowed anywhere near entertainment.

But is probably more useful in labs.

Eoink

I stand corrected. It's a long time since I read the Arthur legends. Probably like 3/4ths of my life ago. Plus I probably read them in Dutch. My apologies for the confusion. I ought to have written "if you're familiar at all with the stories, you [might] recall" etc - it's a perfectly rea...

Eoink

I did my degree at Imperial College in the early 1980s, when it was still a college of London University. In my experience, the use of "college" to refer to University education tends to be from those who went to a collegiate university, and feel allegiance to the college. So certainly Imp...

Eoink

niauropsaka wrote:The Voynich Manuscript is in the lower left quadrant? Clearly neither of the middle lines is zero, because that is definitely >0 weird and >0 unclear.

It was solved about 6 years ago...

http://xkcd.com/593/

Eoink

Some of them? I don't know any other type. How would such a timer work if it didn't have the pegs to set the on/off times? I'm pretty sure I've seen some really old ones in which on/off times are set by some sort of widgets that can be moved around the dial but not completely detached from the devi...

Eoink

The main airport in the UK used to be known affectionately(?) as Thiefrow because of the amount of luggage that went missing.

Eoink

I remember hearing that there was an experimental image recognition technology in the 80s which supposedly "learned" to tell whether or not a tank was present in the image. The program was trained with a collection of input images, and then when tested with further images it performed ext...

Eoink

... When the George W. staff was taking over the White House Offices, Some people, (names were never named) removed all the W's. They were Replaced with Blanks. ... There was a great line from a Bush staffer, who said something along the lines of "My keyboard still had its W key. I saw what ha...

Eoink

There are various parodies of the Twelve Days of Christmas showing the likely real responses of the recipient, this is one of the more printable (linkable?) versions:

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~dsalt ... 12days.htm

Eoink

I'm not sure, I don't think a TV show about the Hepatic Birds would have been as successful. (I actually agree with your general point, just couldn't resist the cheap joke.)
For non-Brits, and Brits younger than me, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Liver_Birds

Eoink

Jupitest. I love this: it would be for an exoplanet similar to Jupiter but bigger. Similarly Jupit would be slightly smaller than our gas giant. You inspired me to come up with some more names to apply as we discover exoplanets with a similarity to ones in the Sol system: .... Saturn and Neptune ar...

Eoink

:D I approve, though I'm not sure why Legolas is snatching a LEGO leg. Thanks. I dunno, those elves get up to all sorts of weird shit. And if you're immortal I guess you get pretty bored. You could easily spend a million years playing with Lego, and then you'd need a lot of bricks, figs etc. You mi...

Eoink

This reminded me of the techniques used on the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, where "1" was often replaced by PI/PI and "0" by PI-PI. The BASIC programs were tokenized on entry and stored in tokenized form. Numeric literals were stored as an escape byte followed by four bytes of floating...

Eoink

How about a comment on the current newpix? One newpix deadline. Although not in the game format, I'm working on that, I can't resist posting a favourite story the current newpix reminds me of. When George Bush took over from Clinton, Clinton staffers amused themselves by removing the W keys from th...

Eoink

Molpily campfirey
Needle pulled lunacy
M S C H A is
Pronounced Mscha

Producing Poetry
Doubledactylily
Each picture's archivist
Nexpixbot's pa

Eoink

Blitzily Molpily
Neologisticly
Momery Popery
Newpixing ONG

Cuegan heroic'ly
Sandcastle engineer
Riversea theorise
StratPlayer song

Edited to fix bloody autocorrects.

Eoink

Late to the party, Outside stuff and all that, but for what it's worth: Legos. Alla time . Also, US English and UK English have that singular/plural thing going on: The Yankees are in first place in the AL East . Man U is the Premier League champion . But we'd say New York is in first place. That's...

Eoink

you may be placed in the foam maiden(it's like the iron maiden, but made out of the tthe memory foam they use in mattresses.) Is it comfy? I dunno. All the commercials say so. The Inquisition runs commercials? Man, I'd love to see one of your ad agency's storyboards. They're not what you expect...

Eoink

StratPlayer wrote: *snipped*
Now off to blitz, as best as I can -- the Outside is weighing heavy on me today, so it may be a while before I am current with the recurrent currents of the OTT...

I can see your raisining here.

Eoink

Rule110 wrote:Indeed.

The Alt-Text

Once upon a morning cheery, while I pondered, slightly bleary
...

I can only... wait for it.

Brilliant pastiche, true to the original, and capturing the spirit of the needle pulled thing beautifully, thank you.

Eoink

Cueball's picking a flower! Sure hope it isn't poison oak, or poison ivy. Or nettles. I doubt they have enough knowledge of their world to avoid such things. ETA: PFAN, and my 200th post! Um, uterus! Fallopian tubes! Did I do that right? As the GLR has already warned us http://xkcd.com/443/ Be care...

Search found 79 matches