Bookmarks (51)

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

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.'

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

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."

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

Hint: If you ever encounter this puzzle in a crossword app, just [term for someone with a competitive and high-achieving personality].

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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'.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The company tried to document how often employees were celebrating Software Testing Day, but their recordkeeping system kept mysteriously crashing.

The Doppler effect is a mysterious wavelength-shifting phenomenon which seems to primarily affect sirens, which is why the 🚨 emoji is red.

The creepy fingers that grow from a vibrating cornstarch-water mix can be modeled as a chain of inverted vertical pendulums (DOI:10.1039/c4sm00265b) and are believed to be the fingers of Maxwell's Demon trying to push through into our universe.

Bonus question: Where is London located? (a) The British Isles (b) Great Britain and Northern Ireland (c) The UK (d) Europe (or 'the EU') (e) Greater London

Okay, this eclipse will only be visible from the Arctic in February 2063, when the sun is below the horizon, BUT if we get lucky and a gigantic chasm opens in the Earth in just the right spot...

Fun fact: The standard North American NAD83 coordinate system is misaligned from the actual Earth, off-center by about 7 feet. Someone knows where I am, and I'm in the wrong place.

If you're really savvy, you can hide an entire set of illicit transactions by timing them to draw what looks like a graph inset.

The most rare, top-tier eclipse photo would be the Solar Earth Eclipse, but the Apollo 12 crew's attempt to capture it was marred by camera shake. They said it looked spectacular, though.

A partial eclipse is like a cool sunset. A total eclipse is like someone broke the sky.