Some of my favorite xkcd comics
54 comics, newest first, each with its alt text underneath. Tap a title to give that comic its own page.
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Let Go
After years of trying various methods, I broke this habit by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished--and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.
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Complex Conjugate
Fun fact: if you say this every time a professor does something to a complex-number equation that drops the imaginary part, they'll eventually move the class to another room and tell everyone else except you.
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Positive Attitude
Having a positive attitude is almost tautologically good for your mental health, and extreme stress can hurt your immune system, but that doesn't mean you should feel like shit for feeling like shit.
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Constructive
And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co-- ... oh.
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Connected
Or love in general, for that matter. It just leads to the idea that either your love is pure, perfect, and eternal, and you are storybook-compatible in every way with no problems, or you're LYING when you say 'I love you'.
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Bad Ex
Since the goatee, glasses, and Seltzer & Friedberg DVD collection didn't tip you off, there will be a $20 negligence charge for this service.
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Still No Sleep
I'm not listening to you. I mean, what does a SQUIRREL know about mental health?
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1996
College Board issues aside, I have fond memories of TI-BASIC, writing in it a 3D graphing engine and a stock market analyzer. With enough patience, I could make anything ... but friends. (Although with my chatterbot experiments, I certainly tried.)
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DFS
A breadth-first search makes a lot of sense for dating in general, actually; it suggests dating a bunch of people casually before getting serious, rather than having a series of five-year relationships one after the other.
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3x9
Handy exam trick: when you know the answer but not the correct derivation, derive blindly forward from the givens and backward from the answer, and join the chains once the equations start looking similar. Sometimes the graders don't notice the seam.
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Principle of Explosion
You want me to pick up waffle cones? Oh, right, for the wine. One sec, let me just derive your son's credit card number and I'll be on my way.
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Science Valentine
You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right.
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Strip Games
HOW ABOUT A NICE GAME OF STRIP GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR?
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Dimensional Analysis
Or the pressure at the Earth's core will rise slightly.
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Force
Force-choking the chicken.
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Revolutionary
I mean, what's more likely -- that I have uncovered fundamental flaws in this field that no one in it has ever thought about, or that I need to read a little more? Hint: it's the one that involves less work.
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Pandora
What? Oh, no, the 'Enchanted' soundtrack was just playing because Pandora's algorithms are terrible. [silence] ... (quietly) That's how you knooooooow ...
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Academia vs. Business
Some engineer out there has solved P=NP and it's locked up in an electric eggbeater calibration routine. For every 0x5f375a86 we learn about, there are thousands we never see.
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Movie Narrative Charts
In the LotR map, up and down correspond LOOSELY to northwest and southeast respectively.
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Tech Support Cheat Sheet
'Hey Megan, it's your father. How do I print out a flowchart?'
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Newton and Leibniz
YEEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH!
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Haiku Proof
After somewhere around 40 hours, there's no academic reason to go to the class. Only go for the hallucinations.
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Cutting Edge
I remember trying to log in to the original Command and Conquer servers a year or two back and feeling like I was knocking on the boarded-up gates of a ghost town.
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Porn
I have a thing for corrupt women.
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Period
413 nanohertz, by the way.
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Fermirotica
I love how Google handles dimensional analysis. Stats are ballpark and vary wildly by time of day and whether your mom is in town.
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No Pun Intended
Like spelling 'dammit' correctly -- with two m's -- it's a troll that works best on the most literate.
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11th Grade
And the ten minutes striking up a conversation with that strange kid in homeroom sometimes matters more than every other part of high school combined.
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Friends
Friends with detriments.
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Moving
We need a special holiday to honor the countless kind souls with unsecured networks named 'linksys'.
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Regrets
And nothing for 'I'm glad I saw Epic Movie.'
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Impostor
If you think this is too hard on literary criticism, read the Wikipedia article on deconstruction.
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Thinking Ahead
Did he just go crazy and jump out the window?
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Purity
On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.
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Math Paper
That's nothing. I once lost my genetics, rocketry, and stripping licenses in a single incident.
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Important Life Lesson
I didn't even know I *had* the Monty Python 'Lumberjack' song.
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Forgetting
Of course, the assert doesn't work.
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Python
I wrote 20 short programs in Python yesterday. It was wonderful. Perl, I'm leaving you.
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Ballmer Peak
Apple uses automated schnapps IVs.
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Facebook
'Here, I'll put my number in your cell pho -- wait, why is it already here?'
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Alone
Worries assuaged, the numbers become less important than your touches.
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Factoring the Time
I occasionally do this with mile markers on the highway.
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Dream Girl
No matter how elaborately you fool yourself.
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Graffiti
FOR AN INTRIGUING TIME CALL
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Random Number
RFC 1149.5 specifies 4 as the standard IEEE-vetted random number.
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Right-Hand Rule
To really expand your mind try some noncartesian porn. Edwin Abbot Abbott has nothing on 'Girls on Girls in Tightly Closed Nonorientable Spaces'.
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Command Line Fu
When designing an interface, imagine that your program is all that stands between the user and hot, sweaty, tangled-bedsheets-fingertips-digging-into-the-back sex.
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Matrix Transform
In fact, draw all your rotational matrices sideways. Your professors will love it! And then they'll go home and shrink.
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e to the pi times i
I have never been totally satisfied by the explanations for why e to the ix gives a sinusoidal wave.
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Nihilism
Why can't you have normal existential angst like all the other boys?
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Accident
As far as treachery-as-driving-music goes, Katamari music is matched only by Guitar Hero music.
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Science Fair
This project actually inspired a two-hour powerpoint presentation that Al Gore gave around the country.
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dPain over dt
You laugh to keep from crying, you do math to keep from crying . . .
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Useless
Even the identity matrix doesn't work normally