Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

It’s the corruption, stupid.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Donald Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

In after Baud. Damn.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Second rate reporter says what?

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Let me file that under fuck it.

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128Comments

  2. 2.

    wmd

    This 30 something woman goes into a bar, sees the bartender is hot.

    She orders, “I’d like a double entendre”.

    So he gave it to her.

  3. 3.

    pete

    Descartes walks into a bar and orders a whisky. “On the rocks?” asks the bartender. “I think not,” replies the philosopher and disappears.

  4. 4.

    Roger Moore

    A proton walks into a bar and asks for a beer. The bartender asks him if he’s sure, and he replies, “I’m positive”.

    A neutron walks into a bar and asks for a beer. He asks the bartender how much, and he says, “For you, no charge.”

  8. 8.

    Schlemazel

    Of course KXCD does the best & manages to clip just about every scientific endeavor. Because I would in IT security this one still makes me laugh:
    http://xkcd.com/327/

    Had I seen it soon enough one of my kids middle names would have been ”);drop table students; –“

  9. 9.

    Lavocat

    Two atoms are out for a walk.
    One of them says: “Oh, no, I think I lost an electron.”
    “Are you sure?”
    “Yes, I’m positive.”

    Also, I’m reading an amazing book on anti-gravity and … I can’t put it down.

    Thank you, thank you. I’m here all week. Try the prime rib.

  12. 12.

    srv

    WASHINGTON — The Secret Service says multiple gunshots were fired from a vehicle near the Delaware home of Vice President Joe Biden on Saturday night.

    Hillary’s ninjas sending a message.

  15. 15.

    JPL

    @srv: Yesterday, I mocked twitter and today lamb’s twitter feed had the breaking news about Biden’s home. Although the house is set back from the road, I assume it is guarded. Someone could have been hurt.

  18. 18.

    schrodinger's cat

    You run into the Uncertainty principle only when the magnitude of the product of momentum and position are of the order of the Planck’s constant (10^ (-34)). For a person or say a baseball you can totally determine both the position and the momentum at the same time. So the above strip is not a representation of reality.

    /pedant

  19. 19.

    Citizen_X

    Why can’t you breed a mosquito with a mountain climber?

    Because you can’t cross a vector with a scalar, of course!

  20. 20.

    Lynn Dee

    @pete:

    Haha. Here’s a true story. I was in Germany many years ago, shopping, and eager to try out my German. I walked into a store and asked to see some decorative combs. The two saleswomen showed me some in a case, but they were quite expensive. I said, “Ich denke nicht.” They looked quite startled. I realized what I’d said and thought, oh fuck it, and left. The whole store was too expensive anyway.

  21. 21.

    Theophylact

    How many theoretical quantum physicists does it take to change a lightbulb?

    One. One to hold the ladder, one to turn the bulb, and one to renormalize the wavefunction.

  27. 27.

    Buddy H

    Woman says:

    “For years I searched for my husband’s killer.

    But I couldn’t find anyone to to it.”

  28. 28.

    Citizen_X

    @Anubis Bard: *golf clap*

    Seems like a good place to drop this for the animal–and science–lovers among us. At the very least, it’s got me addressing annoying people as “tiresome biped!”

  30. 30.

    NCSteve

    A mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer and a Microsoft software engineer are taking a commuter train into the city one summer day when it suddenly stops.

    The mechanical engineer says “I could tell by the sound that we stopped because the train lost air pressure and the brakes engage.”

    The electrical engineer says “oh bullshit! Do you not see that the lights have gone off? We lost power. We’re stuck here until it’s back online.”

    The Microsoft software engineer says “hey, I don’t have a clue what’s wrong, but we should try closing all the windows, turning it off and turning it back on again and see if that fixes the problem.”

    Then an Apple systems engineer pops up out of nowhere and smugly says “you wouldn’t ever need to know anything about anything if this was an Apple train because it would just work.”

  33. 33.

    different-church-lady

    Q: How do you know an engineer is an extrovert?

    A: He stares at your shoes.

    *************

    I consider this cheating, and I wind up cheating about half the time, including the strip you linked to above.

  34. 34.

    Dave

    For those fans of XKCD who view it on a tablet or smart-ish phone, you may not realize it but there’s an additional joke visible when you hover your cursor over the image.
    The one for the “Location Sharing” panel is “Our phones must have great angular momentum sensors because the compasses really suck.”
    Oftentimes I find the HoverOver joke is either better than the panel or makes the panel far more interesting.

  35. 35.

    Lynn Dee

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    Not sure that would work either. That might simply indicate I didn’t believe the price. What we have here is an idiom, and I needed to use whatever the German idiom is for declining politely and moving on. After all these years, I still don’t know what that is. I should’ve just asked.

  39. 39.

    Thoughtful David

    There are only 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

  40. 40.

    Warren Terra

    @srv:

    WASHINGTON — The Secret Service says multiple gunshots were fired from a vehicle near the Delaware home of Vice President Joe Biden on Saturday night.

    I won’t be worried until I’m sure Joe Biden wasn’t the one driving the vehicle, shooting a gun, and just generally being the nation’s crazy uncle.

  42. 42.

    Immanentize

    The panel is like the joke my nerdly son told me: “Heisenburg is driving down the street when a cop pulls him over. “Do you know how fast you were going?” Asked the officer. “No, but I know where I was.” Replied Mr. H.

    Then there is this — two chemists walk into a bar and the first one orders H20. The secomd one says, “Ill have H20 too”. They both get their drinls but the second chemist dies.

    There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand base 16, f the rest.

  43. 43.

    Warren Terra

    @Dave:

    For those fans of XKCD who view it on a tablet or smart-ish phone, you may not realize it but there’s an additional joke visible when you hover your cursor over the image.
    The one for the “Location Sharing” panel is “Our phones must have great angular momentum sensors because the compasses really suck.”
    Oftentimes I find the HoverOver joke is either better than the panel or makes the panel far more interesting.

    This is why you should use the mobile site on any device where you can’t read the alt text by hovering.

  45. 45.

    Groogrux87

    Pavlov is sitting in his office when the doorbell rings. “Ah, dammit!” he exclaims. “I forgot to feed the dogs!”

  46. 46.

    MattF

    My initial reaction was classical rather than quantum mechanical– if the program had both her position and momentum, it would know everything about her. Then, it occurred to me– maybe this is a Heisenjoke. But I couldn’t be certain.

  50. 50.

    SP

    The Higgs Boson walks into a church. The priest says we don’t allow Higgs Bosons in here. The Higgs Boson says but without me how can you have mass?

  51. 51.

    Cervantes

    @Lynn Dee:

    I needed to use whatever the German idiom is for declining politely and moving on.

    Just saying Nein, danke would have covered it; or even simpler, just saying Danke and, literally, moving on.

  52. 52.

    JPL

    @Iowa Old Lady: How fun for us non scientists to read, though.

    @Citizen_X: The boy next door, loves to imagine what different animals say, especially by their tones. Although the video is a tad old for him, I bookmarked it so he could watch.

  53. 53.

    JPL

    @Lynn Dee: Your first answer was probably the best. They went home and shared a comical event that happened at work. You brought great joy.

  54. 54.

    RSA

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    For a person or say a baseball you can totally determine both the position and the momentum at the same time.

    Can you really? That is, without assuming a point mass or something similar? (Not a physicist.)

  55. 55.

    dmsilev

    I’ve always felt that an ideal space-opera weapon would be the Heisenberg Disruptor, a device which simply measures its target’s position very very very precisely. At which point, the target explodes away from itself at a fair sized fraction of the speed of light.

    (Pedantic physics note: The precision at which one can do a measurement depends in large part on the resolution of one’s probe. And for things like light, high resolution means high energy. So, what I’ve described above is actually just a Really Big Laser Cannon. Still, Heisenberg Disruptor sounds cooler.)

  56. 56.

    dmsilev

    @RSA:

    Can you really? That is, without assuming a point mass or something similar? (Not a physicist.)

    In theory, yes. Which is to say, there’s no fundamental law of nature forbidding it. In practice, measuring the trajectory of the center of mass and analyzing the spinning about that center is about as good as you can get. Which is why the joke about theoretical physicists starts with “first, assume a spherical cow” and experimentalists like me roll their eyes when theorists make predictions which require practically-impossible measurements to validate or disprove.

  57. 57.

    Roger Moore

    Q: How do you recognize a field service engineer by the side of the road with a flat tire?
    A: He’s changing the tires one at a time to see which one is flat.

    Q: How do you recognize a field service engineer by the side of the road out of gas?
    A: He’s changing the tires one at a time to see which one is flat.

    Q: How do you recognize your field service engineer?
    A: The spare is flat, too.

  58. 58.

    Glidwrith

    A colleague, many years ago worked at the Salk and got a bit punch drunk with the lateness of the hour:

    The p53rd Psalm

    p53 is my shepherd, I shall not cycle
    It maketh me to lie down in G1
    It leadeth me beside still nucleotide pools
    It restoreth my genome
    It leadeth me past the restriction point for replication’s sake
    Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of the cobalt irradiator
    I shall fear no gamma rays, for thou art Guardian of the Genome
    Thy amino and thy carboxy termini, they comfort me
    Thou maintainest my genomic stability in the presence of mine enemies
    Thou annointest my nucleus with p21/WAF1/Cip1/Sdi1/Pic1
    my cyclin dependent kinases overflow
    Surely pRb phosphorylation and E2F activation shall follow me
    all the cycles of my life
    and I shall dwell in a non-tumorigenic state until senescence

  60. 60.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Lynn Dee: Idioms are idiomatic, tis true!

    I recall my HS German teacher giving us a sentence to translate, as part of the daily verb exercise, containing one of the nouns of the week, “die Schmetterling”. He informed us that “der Butterflieger” was not an acceptable translation of “Butterfly” in the sentence.

  62. 62.

    Z

    Longer version of one of the above jokes:

    Schrödinger and Heisenberg are cruising down the highway with Heisenberg behind the wheel when they get pulled over by the Highway Patrol. The officer approaches and asks, “Do you know how fast you were going?”

    Heisenberg responds, “No. But I know exactly where I am.”

    The officer wrinkles his nose and says, “You were doing 112.”

    Heisenberg groans, “Great, now I’m lost!”

    The officer searches the rest of the car for contraband and calls out, “Hey! You guys know there’s a dead hooker in the trunk?”

    And Schrödinger yells back, “Well, we do now, asshole!”

  63. 63.

    bcw

    @RSA: Well, no. There is the same uncertainty it’s just that the uncertainty in position is ridiculously small compared to the size of the object and the uncertainty in momentum corresponds to a vanishing velocity since the mass is large (momentum=mass*velocity.)

  65. 65.

    Cervantes

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    The Star Trek transporter system has some technobabble thing called a “Heisenberg Compensator” in it.

    As explained by Star Trek consultant Michael Okuda in Time magazine (May 14, 2001):

    The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that you cannot know a subatomic particle’s exact position and its exact direction and velocity at the same time. To transport people you have to know all those things, so the Heisenberg compensator was devised to overcome that problem. It’s an attempt by the Trek writers to signal that they are at least aware of the issue. And how does the Heisenberg compensator work? “It works very well, thank you,” says Okuda.

    And there you have it.

  67. 67.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Bob In Portland: You profess to be a student of history, Bob. Can you give me a list of the countries that have voluntarily ceded sovereign territory to a foreign-supported armed insurgency? Take your time, I’ll check back later.

    In the meantime, a few photos of today’s peace (i.e. anti-terror) march in Kiev. Look at all those fascists. Tens of thousands came out in a show of national unity and support for the government against the Russian aggressor. Similar marches were held in Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Kramatorsk, even Slovyansk (remember the pitched battles for that town in late summer? It’s peaceful and pro-Ukrainian now, as it was before.)

  69. 69.

    Lynn Dee

    @Amir Khalid:

    Here’s the thing: In English, “I think not” has come to be simply a polite way of saying “I’m not interested.” “Ich denke nicht” doesn’t translate into that. I would guess “Ich denke nicht” is not something you would typically say in German under any circumstance, but it would translate literally as “I don’t think.” Similarly, “Ich glaube nicht” would translate literally as “I don’t believe,” and not as a polite way of saying “I’m not interested.” It would not translate as, say, “I don’t believe so.”

    I agree, though, if you truly wanted to say “I don’t believe in anything” or “I have no belief” or something along those lines, you would not say “Ich glaube nicht” but rather what you said. (I never was any good at endings, so I’ll just take yours on faith. They sound right. :))

  70. 70.

    Baud

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    You run into the Uncertainty principle only when the magnitude of the product of momentum and position are of the order of the Planck’s constant (10^ (-34))

    Except in politics, when you run into the Uncertainty principle whenever Mitt Romney is speaking.

  71. 71.

    Lynn Dee

    @JPL:

    I agree! I also brought great joy to the staff person at a cathedral I visited one afternoon. I wanted to ask if I could take pictures and said: “Darf ich die Bilden nehmen?” Fortunately I was carrying a camera. The worker laughed delightedly and said, “Ja, ja.” It wasn’t until I’d left the cathedral and was walking down the street that I realized I’d asked if I could take the pictures (the artwork on the walls, perhaps?), and that I should have said, “Darf ich photographieren?” or something like that.

    A good time was had by all!

  74. 74.

    Lynn Dee

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    Or: “Maeterlinck Schmetterling,” as Nabokov wrote.

    How did you end up taking German? Were you perhaps an Army brat? I was and took it for that reason, but I’m not sure I would have thought of it otherwise.

  78. 78.

    Lynn Dee

    @Amir Khalid:

    I remember memorizing the table of endings, but I never became very good at grabbing the right ending while speaking — mainly because the gender of most nouns never became automatic for me.

  79. 79.

    Corner Stone

    I wonder what Heisenberg would’ve made about the location and/or momentum of that INT Sherman just made?

  83. 83.

    different-church-lady

    I think we need a playoff open thread so that comments like “motherfucker” have some context in which they can make a bit of sense.

  85. 85.

    Amir Khalid

    @Lynn Dee:
    When I was first learning German, I made up a case table with all the personal, relative and interrogative pronouns; adjective endings; determiners; articles; and suchlike. I made a blank one too, and every so often I’d fill it in as an exercise.

  88. 88.

    Lynn Dee

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Four cases in German, yes. Plus, singular nouns are masculine, feminine or neuter, and plural nouns are lumped together. So sixteen cells in the table. Russian has, I see (thanks to google), masculine, feminine and neuter as well, but I didn’t see how plurals are handled.

  93. 93.

    Bill Arnold

    I read that cartoon two ways; first the physics joke, then as a sly way to ask her her mass (weight), disguised as a physics joke. Now wondering if there is a third way to read it.
    (explainxkcd does mention that possible second reading.)

  97. 97.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Lynn Dee: Declensions are dependent on the gender of the noun and on the sound of its ending consonant (hard or soft.) If gogol’s wife is still around, I’m sure a better explanation is forthcoming.

  99. 99.

    Amir Khalid

    @Gin & Tonic:
    Nominativ, Akkusativ, Dativ and Genitiv. By no means the biggest case system around, but still important, unlike in English where articles and adjectives don’t have to agree with the noun’s case anymore. I blame the Norman conquerors.

  101. 101.

    Bart Starr

    Heisenberg’s political uncertainty principle (as applied to congress): “If your position is everywhere, your momentum is zero”.

  103. 103.

    jim beam

    The programmer’s wife tells him: “Run to the store and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.”

    The programmer comes home with 12 loaves of bread.

    What do you get when put root beer in a square glass? A: Beer

  105. 105.

    Corner Stone

    @jim beam:

    The programmer’s wife tells him: “Run to the store and pick up a loaf of bread. If they have eggs, get a dozen.”

    The programmer comes home with 12 loaves of bread.

    This is hilarious because I’ve been telling my son that a computer does exactly what you tell it. The computer does not infer what you really mean.
    Thank goodness. *blushes*

  106. 106.

    catclub

    @RSA: Only to within 10^-34 of the suitable momentum and location units, absolutely, no. Very very close? Yes.

  107. 107.

    jim beam

    Two women walk into a bar, and talk about the Bechdel test.

    ********
    What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?

  108. 108.

    jake the antisoshul soshulist

    Johnny was a little boy,
    But johnny is no more.
    For, instead of drinking H2O,
    He drank H2SO4.

  110. 110.

    Thor Heyerdahl

    A Roman walks into a bar and raises his index and middle finger. “Five beers please.”

  112. 112.

    muddy

    Farmer is digging in his field with shovel and crowbar. Flatlander tourist stops to watch and asks what he’s doing. “Picking stone.” Tourist wants to know where the stone came from. “Glacier brought it.” Then he wants to know where the glacier went? “Back to get more stone.”

  114. 114.

    Doug

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Georgian has seven, and you have to know whether your verb is going to be active or passive to know which case the subject is going to be in. Russian was (for me) a nice, well-behaved Indo-European language by comparison.

  115. 115.

    Doug

    Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel, and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar. Heisenberg says, “It’s very odd and improbable that we three are in this bar together. It suggests to me that we’re in a joke, but I can’t be certain.”

    Gödel says, “Well, if we were outside the joke we would know, but since we’re inside it, there’s no way we can make that determination.”

    And Chomsky says, “Of course this is a joke, but you’re telling it wrong!”

    (Credit: John M. Ford)

  116. 116.

    jim beam

    Keeping on the Roman theme:

    A Roman walks into a bar and says, “I’ll have a martinus.” The bartender asks him. “Don’t you mean martini?” The Roman tells the bartender, “Listen, if I wanted two or more drinks I would have asked for them.”

  118. 118.

    DanR2

    A guy walks into a bar with a frog on his head.

    Bartender asks: “What is that?”

    Frog answers: “I don’t know, but it started out as a bump on my ass.”

    (P. Poundstone)

  119. 119.

    john fremont

    An infinite number of mathematicians walk in to a bar. The bartender says what will it be? The first mathematician says ” I’ll have one beer.” The second one says ” I’ll have half a beer. ” The third one says “I’ll have a quarter of beer. ” At this point the bartender says “You need to know your limits”, and he pours two beers.

  121. 121.

    Lynn Dee

    @Gin & Tonic:

    I don’t believe that’s right… the declension endings in German depend on the case (nominative, genitive, dative or accusative), and on the gender (or, gender for singular nouns; plural nouns are lumped together).

    I wonder if you might be thinking of something like the pronunciation of the -es ending depending on whether the sound at the end of the noun is voiced or unvoiced.

  123. 123.

    grumpy realist

    @jim beam: Wayne and Schuster used that in their “Flavious Maximus, Private Roman Eye” sketch. Great fun.

    And I see someone already pulled out the Abelian grape joke. I actually used that as the basis for a Halloween costume a few years ago. Dressed all in purple and had a train pass on a purple ribbon around my forehead. Nobody got it.

  124. 124.

    canuckistani

    Since my favourite Heisenberg-driving jokes have been taken, I’ll fall back on ‘Why do nerds get Halloween and Christmas confused?”

    OCT31=DEC25

  125. 125.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    @RSA:

    Yes. The problem with atomic masses is that everything you do has a significant effect on its position and momentum. Bounce a photon off an electron, and you’ve done something *huge* to it.

    A baseball is not affected to any measurable effect by bouncing a photon off of it. And you might say “but if we had really, really, really sensitive measuring equipment” – and I doubt that would matter. Maybe in free fall, far away from any gravitational body, there would be “an” effect.

    But it wouldn’t surprise me if it was literally impossible to measure the effect a relatively small number of photons has on an object as big a s a baseball, precisely due to the uncertainty principle. It might well be that the *only* way to make a measurement *that* precise would violate uncertainty. Because to measure such a *tiny* difference would mean knowing a *huge* amount about the reflected photons – do you see where I’m going here? That’s where to look for the Uncertainty Principle – in tiny things.

    Now, I’m not a physicist – don’t leave this comment thinking “it’s *literally impossible* to measure an effect that small.” I said that *wouldn’t surprise me* if that was the case – and used it to say that this is the *kind* of thing where you see the uncertainty principle pop up.

  126. 126.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    @grumpy realist:

    HMF! That’s because a *group* doesn’t commute, a group is commutative! It’s the *elements* of the group that commute!

    (Were I serious, I would now have to see a proctologist, something about removing a stick…)

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