xkcd

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People throw away the ends of bananas? Because they're "gross"? ?!?!?!? I was completely unaware of this phenomenon. I open bananas from the stem end, because it's easier (duh), and then I eat the whole thing and leave only the empty peel. If that last bit tastes any different from the res...

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The only baklava I've ever had was from Greek restaurants and bakeries (I didn't know it came otherwise), and yes, I was still disappointed. I think it's the nuts turning me off, because buttery dough and honey sounds like it should be delicious. It must be because of the nuts, then. Because baklav...

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herbstschweigen wrote:
Mikeski wrote: ... "You humans and your one-dimensional time. ..."

I am developer for a software that uses two-dimensional time.

You mean git?

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By the way, I guess being an American president is one of the most dangerous occupations you can have. (I have crossed it out of my list.) I once read somewhere that, up until then (early 1980s if I remember correctly), all the U.S. presidents who had been elected in years ending in 0 had died whil...

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somitomi wrote:The fact I particularly like is that helicopters are also capable of "autorotating" allowing them to not plunge like a brick if the engine fails.

Which also comes in handy when the tail rotor fails.

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likewise I hate how rising house prices are treated as a good thing economically when it’s only good for real estate investors and bad for everyone who, yknow, wants to live somewhere. But even that can be sold with an appeal to greed: OK, sure, you're paying a million $CURRENCY_UNIT for what your ...

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I'm one of those who never learned "left" and "right" - I mean, I know which side is which, I just don't know which word goes with which side. Growing up in Southern California, I was pretty good about west=north vs. south=east, just based on "the ocean's that-a-way".....

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[...] if you did a two-handed keyboard mash, it's conceivable that you'd end up with "xkcd". But I thought that Randall specifically came up with that sequence of letters because it doesn't spell anything and doesn't look like an abbreviation or acronym for anything. For the longest time,...

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Personally I think putting yourself in a self-driving car is insane. You're putting yourself in a death-box that can kill you at the whim of its software. Do you ever get in a taxi? That's different. The taxi driver is trying to stay alive, just like you are. Unless you find yourself with a suicide...

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xtifr wrote:So far, the Unicode Consortium have balked at accepting any made-up languages

What about emoji, though?

N.B. I'm not one of those people who disapprove of emoji in Unicode. There are plenty of code points available to have some fun with... But I am curious, what's the official rationale there?

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speising wrote:

image1.jpeg (15.06 KiB) Viewed 3359 times

I tried looking up that character. It appears to be 糇, which is Chinese (didn't find it in my Japanese dictionary), meaning "dried rice" or "dry goods / provisions," U+7CC7.

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What's really weird is that a zillion years of evolution hasn't come up with an immune-system mod to protect [teeth]. They're the only body part where your body says "protect those? Nah, screw em, they can rot and die decades before the rest of you." I guess the "having two sets of t...

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I recognize that Randall is as, errr...., bemused as any of us You use that word , but I do not think it means what you think it means. You mean "ceemused" isn't the same thing only even more so? Shall I demuse you all? That'd be quite eemusing. I'm quite femused to find out what's next -...

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I can't help but notice the decrease in quality started BEFORE the powerpoint/ms-paint era. There is a very real chance, that the decline was started simply by using software instead of drawing graphs by hand, as lowering the entry barrier to something typically results in more people doing it, wit...

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What happened during March 1997 which made him don't believe anything? You may want to acquaint yourself with Explain Xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/792:_Password_Reuse You won't always find conclusive answers there to every xkcd-related question, including this one, but you may f...

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A sextillion tons of gold. You could bankrupt every country on Earth a million times over by dumping that amount into the economy. Only because the physical weight of all that gold is enough to _crush_ the economy. And everything else on Earth. And even if one were to deliver a fraction of the gold...

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While the inheritance-with-strings attached idea can lead to very amusing scenatios (Brewster's Millions!), how realistic are they? I have this idea that if someone leaves me something, I get it (minus applicable taxes), and that's that. In my non-expert opinion, conditions would be unenforceable. T...

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Also applies to cars. According to a Wikipedia, the basic model of that series weighed 790 kg, while the basic model of the current [VW Golf]series (the seventh) weighs 1351 kg, a 71% increase. How much bigger will it have to get before they start to feel the need to introduce a new, smaller model ...

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Also applies to cars. As in "Jay Leno owns several Ferrari" vs. "my dentist just bought a Ferraro"... Speaking of cars, I used to own a 1980 VW Golf, the one that was sold as the Rabbit in the U.S., i.e. the first series. According to a Wikipedia, the basic model of that series ...

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I guess I have to be the cynic here... Was this a sponsored comic? Could be. I thought the name was odd -- why not "Desert Golf," without the ing? But there it is, in $MY_SMARTPHONES_APP_STORE, with exactly that name, and very similar looking screen shots. I just might fall for it. Could ...

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1900 and 2100 are divisible by 4 but not leap years. (Googles) Ah of course 3/4 of every '00 year breaks the rule. Because being off by 0.75 days a century would have been horrible come the year 3000. "Winter came a week early, noooo" Why do you think the Gregorian calendar reform happene...

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(D.2) GPS by itself takes 12.5 minutes if it hasn't had a signal in 30 days, it is only less if it had a signal more recently. Since when? I've used TomTom navigation devices that had no connectivity whatsoever except for the GPS receiver. You updated maps over a USB link from a PC, if indeed you e...

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Steve the Pocket wrote:The main caveats I can think of are (A) constructing a homemade EMP might be illegal

How do you even create an EMP, other than by detonating a nuclear bomb?

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Do people really do stuff in bed after waking up but before getting up? Other than slamming the snooze button on the alarm, that is? I read the news and do crossword puzzles between waking up and getting up. You used to have to get up to get the newspaper first, and even then, newspapers aren't bed...

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I think the better compromise is to use 0 for the freezing point of water and 200 for the boiling point. The Fahrenheit people get to keep their body temperature and "nice" weather numbers. The Celsius people get to keep "negative == ice" and scientifically supported definition....

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Also 0.008 hassles a year. Conservatively, it's probably a lot lower. So, your break-even point is 125 times being cautious vs. 1 time dealing with a fire. OK then, but I really hope my downstairs neighbors don't think like that! I'm also not sure about your definition of "conservative." ...

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Also 0.008 hassles a year. Conservatively, it's probably a lot lower. So, your break-even point is 125 times being cautious vs. 1 time dealing with a fire. OK then, but I really hope my downstairs neighbors don't think like that! I'm also not sure about your definition of "conservative." ...

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Now, what if the sprinklers are faulty and catastrophically dampen running appliances? :) Between the choices 1. Appliance started a fire, but insurance covered the damage 2. Appliance started a fire, but sprinklers put it out. Now I have water damage, but let's say for the sake of argument that th...

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Don't leave a dumb pan unattended. Smart pan, crockpot, heck rice cooker, no worries. Anything automatic is fine. It's fine as long as it doesn't fail. True story: a guy I know once turned on his dishwasher and then went out. The dishwasher got stuck in the post-rinse heating cycle. The heating ele...

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Don't leave a dumb pan unattended. Smart pan, crockpot, heck rice cooker, no worries. Anything automatic is fine. It's fine as long as it doesn't fail. True story: a guy I know once turned on his dishwasher and then went out. The dishwasher got stuck in the post-rinse heating cycle. The heating ele...

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xtifr wrote:In fact, some of the linguistic battles currently going on in East Asia suggest that there are some people in power who most definitely do not know (or won't admit) that humans don't work this way.

Example?

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I assume that cast iron pans are some kind of fresh hipster hell that had passed me by. Is high-maintenance medieval cookware the new thing, in the same way that not having gears on a bike is the new having gears on a bike? Funny, I hadn't heard of a rise in popularity of velocipedes, boneshakers a...

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Imagine that a government would decree the following: “Starting this specified day, everybody in this country must get up one hour earlier than usual. You must all go to work an hour earlier, go out to lunch an hour earlier, go home an hour earlier, blah blah blah blah Imagine that a government wou...

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As the first commenter, I posted this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY&t=345s I'think you'd like it. Excellent rant, thanks! I didn't click on it in your first post, fearing it would be another anti -DST rant, and I didn't want to jack up my blood pressure so early in the morning. :...

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And I'll say it once more: abolish not only DST (and friends), but all timezones except UTC. Local time has no bearing to the position of the Sun anyway *groan* I'll probably never live to see a year go by without hearing some badly-thought-out DST hating. One day, I'm sure the DST-o-phobes will ge...

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I will have to agree that it is one of the coolest things I have ever seen. Even with the clouds getting mostly in the way. We viewed from the NorthEast corner of Georgia I flew down to Charleston, SC, because I wanted to see the totality, not just the 70% or so we would see in the NY metro area. I...

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Couldn't stop thinking of this cartoon when i saw the following map also printed in a recent new scientist issue: https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/interactive/2013/feb/15/meteorite-fall-map what a coincidence most meteorites fall down in europe & north america :p must be the weight of ...

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The Equinox or Solstice are the same thing in different places. Umm, no? Or maybe I just got whooshed , before I even got round to being critical of the rest. The equinox is a place in an orbit. He didn't didn't mention the season. You could have inferred that because it means two different things,...

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I knew flawlessly which words go with der, die, or das, long before anyone alerted me to this strange concept of "grammatical gender." lol like, good job. I wasn't bragging. This is simply normal when you're growing up with a language. If remembering things like gender, or case, or mood, ...

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Grammatical gender is supposed to be obvious. If there's any pattern, in German, as to which nouns have which gender, I've never noticed it -- apart from the obvious ones, i.e. words that specifically mean male or female people or animals. (And even there you have the exception, pointed out by spei...

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