Stranded

At least they're not alone down there.

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Three Kinds of Research

The secret fourth kind is 'we applied a standard theory to their map of every tree and got some suspicious results.'

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Time Traveler Causes of Death

Many a hungry time traveler has Googled 'trilobites shellfish allergy' only to find their carrier had no coverage in the Ordovician.

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Classical Periodic Table

Personally I think mercury is more of a 'wet earth' hybrid element.

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Storage Tanks

We're considering installing a pressurization system to keep the tanks at constant pressure solely to deter them.

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Ferris Wheels

They left the belt drive in place but switched which wheel was powered, so people could choose between a regular ride, a long ride, and a REALLY long ride.

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Helium Synthesis

Our lawyers were worried because it turns out the company inherits its debt from the parent universe, but luckily cosmic inflation reduced it to nearly zero.

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Celestial Event

If we can get a brood of 13-year cicadas going, we might have a chance at making this happen before the oceans evaporate under the expanding sun.

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Meteor Shower PSA

If you hold the meteor too long, it may imprint on you and form a contact binary, making reintroduction to space difficult.

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Vice President First Names

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University Age

This only makes it more urgent that we adopt my roadmap for the next 10 years, which should put us solidly in the lead.

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Matter

He was the first person to land a 900, which is especially impressive because pulling off a half-integer spin requires obeying Fermi-Dirac statistics.

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Exam Numbers

Calligraphy exam: Write down the number 37, spelled out, nicely.

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Chili Tornado Quake

Buildings constructed from softer materials were damaged by chili pepper impacts to the storm's high Richter-Fujita-Scoville-Mohs hardness rating.

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Olympic Sports

Thankfully for everyone involved, the Winter Olympics officials spotted me and managed to stop me before I got to the ski jump.

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House Inputs and Outputs

People think power over ethernet is so great, and yet when I try to do water over ethernet everyone yells at me.

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President Venn Diagram

Hard to imagine political rhetoric more microtargeted at me than 'I love Venn diagrams. I really do, I love Venn diagrams. It's just something about those three circles.'

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CrowdStrike

We were going to try swordfighting, but all my compiling is on hold.

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Organ Meanings

IMO the thymus is one of the coolest organs and we should really use it in metaphors more.

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Beam of Light

Einstein's theories solved a longstanding mystery about Mercury: Why it gets so hot. \"It's because,\" he pointed out, \"the sun is right there.\"

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Hatchery

Anadromous fish are more vulnerable in rivers, since the lack of salt means you can quickly crack passwords using rainbow trout tables.

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A Crossword Puzzle

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Number Line Branch

Attention all passengers: This is an express sequence to infinity. If your stop is not a power of two, please disembark now.

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Pole Vault

Ugh, and we JUST went through this yesterday with javelin.

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Bracket Symbols

’\"‘”’\" means \"I edited this text on both my phone and my laptop before sending it\"

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Alien Theories

They originally came here to try to investigate our chemtrail technology, and got increasingly frustrated when all their samples turned out to just be water ice with trace amounts of jet exhaust.

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Routine Maintenance

The worst was the time they accidentally held the can upside down and froze all the Earth's magma chambers solid.

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Bad Map Projection: Exterior Kansas

Although Kansas is widely thought to contain the geographic center of the contiguous 48 states, topologists now believe that it's actually their outer edge.

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Situation

We're right under the flight path for the scheduled orbital launch, but don't worry--it's too cold out for the rockets to operate safely, so I'm sure they'll postpone.

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Network Configuration

If you repeatedly rerun the development of technological civilization, it turns out that for some reason the only constant is that there is always a networking utility called 'netcat', though it does a different thing in each one.

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Electric vs Gas

An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that's the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.

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Pascal’s Wager Triangle

In contrast to Pascal's Wager Triangle, Pascal's Triangle Wager argues that maybe God wants you to draw a triangle of numbers where each one is the sum of the two numbers above it, so you probably should, just in case.

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1.2 Kilofives

'Oh yeah? Give me 50 milliscore reasons why I should stop.'

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Broken Model

In addition to eating foxes, rabbits can eat grass. The grass also eats foxes. Our equations chart the contours of Fox Hell.

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Magnet Fishing

The ten-way tie was judged a ten-way tie, so no one won the grand prize, a rare fishing monopole.

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Unsolved Chemistry Problems

I'm an H⁺ denier, in that I refuse to consider loose protons to be real hydrogen, so I personally believe it stands for 'pretend'.

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Fluid Speech

Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.

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Cell Organelles

It's believed that Golgi was originally an independent organism who was eventually absorbed into our cells, where he began work on his Apparatus.

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Modes of Transportation

My bold criticism might anger the hot air balloon people, which would be a real concern if any of them lived along a very narrow line directly upwind of me.

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Complexity Analysis

PERPETUALLY OPTIMISTIC CASE: Early in the execution, our research group makes a breakthrough on proving P=NP.

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Local Group

Cosmologists estimate the spaghetti strand to be about 200 septillion calories, though it could be higher depending on the nutritional value of dark matter.

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Room Code

Sorry to make you memorize this random string of digits. If it helps, it can also double as a mnemonic for remembering your young relatives' birthdays, if they happened to have been born on February 5th, 2018.

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Exponential Growth

Karpov's construction of a series of increasingly large rice cookers led to a protracted deadlock, but exponential growth won in the end.

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Ocean Loop

I can't believe they wouldn't even let me hold a vote among the passengers about whether to try the loop.

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Bloom Filter

Sometimes, you can tell Bloom filters are the wrong tool for the job, but when they're the right one you can never be sure.

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Elementary Physics Paths

==COSMOLOGY==> 'Uhhh ... how sure are we that everything is made of these?'

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Driving PSA

This PSA brought to you by several would-be assassins who tried to wave me in front of speeding cars in the last month and who will have to try harder next time.

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Chasing

Certain hybrid events can only happen in certain locations where all the conditions are present; chasers flock to the area in and around Kansas known as tumbleweed-colliding-with-possum alley.

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Google Solar Cycle

From Google Trends, it looks like the lag between people Googling cocktail recipes and 'hangover cure' is 14 hours.

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Good and Bad Ideas

While it seemed like a fun prank at the time, I realize my prank fire extinguishers full of leaded gasoline were a mistake.

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