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Please cut down on the loud capital-letter words - you don't want to wake the sheeple.

Obligatory xkcds.

Obligatory xkcds.

https://xkcd.com/1379/

actually, according to this the strong/weak forces do not use inverse square, because they're fundamentally different: they're based on particle exchange and the distance at which the particles can get exchanged is related to quantum uncertainty, which drops off a lot faster with distance than just inverse square.

Electromagnetic is stronger and is also inverse square but it's based on charge differentials, and at macroscopic scales objects tend to be neutral overall which means two planets (for example) have very little charge differential relative to the distance. If you could somehow move all the electrons from Mars to Earth they'd probably be pretty strongly attracted (I haven't done the math... maybe I'll send that one to What If).

obligatory.

Yes, I could care less what amount of carbon dioxide they are putting out.

Ob. xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1576/

This is what happens when you adapt computerized records in medical practice using more money than brains, as we do here in the U.S.

You quickly get huge databases of patients. Any medical resident looking for a cheap, easy journal publication can take a medical record database, run some standard statistical packages, and spit out correlations at p LT 0.05. https://xkcd.com/882/

Then they say, "Our statistical software https://blog.stackoverflow.com... corrected for cigarette smoking and every other known factor, and we're left with this correlation."

I'm dismayed that so many people don't understand this simple distinction, which has caused so much damage.

For example, the Nurses' Health Study found out that post-menopausal women who took hormone replacement drugs were less likely to have heart disease. The drug companies used this in a classic marketing campaign to sell hormone replacement drugs to post-menopausal women.

Then it turned out that hormone replacement drugs caused more breast cancer. This was responsible for a major uptick (epidemic) of breast cancer in the US. The correlation was spurious because some women tried to have healthy behaviors -- diet, exercise, weight loss, and hormone replacement drugs in the mistaken belief that the drugs were "healthy".

So you can expect a lot more studies and news stories like this in the future.

A POST request can be triggered by a different site. That different site can be controlled by a different entity. If your name contains code then responding with code to a request may even be a legitimate thing.

Inefficient for a computer, but very efficient for a person, who has significant dedicated hardware for language processing.

True.

That's why using combinations of words makes a good password for a human to remember, but hard for a computer program to crack. https://xkcd.com/936/

True and wrong. In this 3word case, those 3 words are completely unrelated (random). Which makes them not so easy to remember, especially because you need a relatively vast dictionary to map the entire earth. For passwords, people will always keep a password where words kind of work together (if you enforce 4 words, then "this is my password" will definitely be the #1). It's hard for computers to know which combinations make more sense than others, but recent advances in machine learning could change that (and also show that stupid password policies currently in use are completely missing the point : length or special characters don't help, the only thing that makes a good password is randomness/unicity to the human mind).

Back to the map, maybe it would be good to improve the word distribution so that combinations making more sense are located in dense areas (and not in the middle of the sea). Or just create a colored map where you can see combinations which make more sense so that you can easily pick one if your place has more than one.

Inefficient for a computer, but very efficient for a person, who has significant dedicated hardware for language processing. That's why using combinations of words makes a good password for a human to remember, but hard for a computer program to crack. https://xkcd.com/936/

(sudo-)Islamic terrorism

https://xkcd.com/149/

Presumably it's not a ham sandwich.

Or even better, you don't even have to copy the code, you just need to type the google terms that result in the appropriate SO question as the first hit.

The first joke I saw about this was Stack Sort (take the first SO search result for sorting, apply that to the list, loop down the results until it's sorted). This has of course been implemented.

Since it's been implemented, you could do a meta version - search for "stack sort implementation", and run that code!

Postgres is an excavator, while the other two are bobcats.

Obligatory xkcd : http://xkcd.com/325/

"Trust me, it wont work, I know from experience!" - Ballmer

Obligatory XKCD reference: https://xkcd.com/323/

Oblig xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1102/

Not in five years, maybe not in fifty; this is so absurdly over-optimistic, it's not even funny.

http://xkcd.com/1605/

We know SO LITTLE about how genes actually function to produce, well, you, the idea that we can, within five years, figure out which genes are "responsible" for aging and turn them off/around is ridiculous. The amount of feedback looping going on, even if we knew which genes produced which raw proteins, is so twisted that even figuring out the protein synthesis process itself requires super-computers, much less figuring out how all those proteins interact with your body.

We heard all this very same talk when the first Human Genome Project results were released. Please tell me what grand advances that has brought us, other than a few diagnostic tests, and some treatments for a couple rare diseases.

who changed her last name to Colon

Is this a failed attempted at an SQL injection attack?

I'd be interested to see the third-party sources that name you as the inventor of Scroll Lock.

Here is the source.

I think e^{pi}-{pi} is the test you're looking for...

...there hasn't been any statistically significant temperature increase in his lifetime.

Sigh. Obligatory xkcd

> who wants to bet it won't pan out?
https://xkcd.com/955/

USB does not have hardware interrupt lines, so USB is not used for anything critical... like your nervous system.

Little Bobby DROP TABLES http://xkcd.com/327/

There is, of course, a relevant XKCD cartoon.

            https://xkcd.com/378/

This phenomenon has a name: The Ballmer Peak

FTFY.

That's why he included thisAlgorithmBecomingSkynetCost = 999999999.

Oblig XKCD

https://xkcd.com/221/

Obligatory xkcd.

For reference. https://xkcd.com/326/

Going to space vs getting to orbit

Obligatory XKCD 326

There have been tons of reasons proposed for how it works. Given that its thrust seems to track its temperature, not the power being supplied to it, it's clearly a thermal effect. And there are much better ways to make rockets driven by thermal effects.

I'm amazed that there are still people talking about this thing here.

Anyway, obligatory XKCD. And again.

There have been tons of reasons proposed for how it works. Given that its thrust seems to track its temperature, not the power being supplied to it, it's clearly a thermal effect. And there are much better ways to make rockets driven by thermal effects.

I'm amazed that there are still people talking about this thing here.

Anyway, obligatory XKCD. And again.

More often that Google search only gets me one of these results https://xkcd.com/979/

Of course that just might be an effect of Google's refusal to accept true literal searches anymore. God I miss AltaVista's "near" search modifier...

I this rate were constant over a billion (10^9) years,

ObXKCD: https://xkcd.com/605/

So, Bobby Tables will have his name tattooed on his face...

And his sister is still trapped in a drivers license factory...
https://xkcd.com/327/

Relevant: Exploits of a Mom

https://xkcd.com/1604/

Would you like to find out the resistance of my "snake"? Its a long hard snake, and its all black.

It's not like the Microsoft progress bar was always useful.

Oh, and the journal in question is the "Journal of Contemporary Art" (Zivot Umjetnosti), which is so meta.

Because it's the question that everyone is probably going to have, the xkcd in question is #722, "Computer Problems".

> That sub-second syncronization is integral to the function of both GPS

No. GPS does NOT use leap seconds.

what-if xkcd #26 is actually on-topic for once.

It's all just mathematics at the end of the day.

While that is true, it also suffers from the failings of math. The hypothesis is that life is the transmission of information. Okay, then instead of asking how life began, the question becomes where did the information come from that is being transmitted?

In other words, if life is the transmission of information and there is no information to transmit, then there is no life. Since there is life, there must have been information to transmit, so where did it come from?

It's all just mathematics at the end of the day.

No, with butterflies...

Obligatory XKCD:
https://xkcd.com/378/

Obligatory XKCD cartoon.

I suppose you could say that Mars already has a robot population....

One of my favorite Ob. XKCD links: https://xkcd.com/1504/

Yeah, but how well does it run FLASH!? https://xkcd.com/619/

1. No. The maximum speed is the speed of light in quantum mechanics. Entanglement doesn't even have a speed. It is, from all measurements that have been done, valid in any reference frame.
2. No. c is defined in terms of time, not the other way around.
3. No. The correlations from entanglement transfer zero bits of information. They can only be observed with the assistance of normal communication channels. Combining the two allows you to hide but not send data.
4. Obligatory xkcd: No.