xkcd

Coyne

The part I "enjoyed" was the automatic presumption that the customer was a shoplifter. The cop knew he was getting change (told him to take it) so obviously he bought something, but obviously he didn't buy the Mentos he stuck in his pocket. He's so certain that when the cashier tells him t...

Coyne

addams wrote:Once upon a Time I lived up the Mountain from there.
We slept well at night knowing the Hot Spot was south of us.

Well, there is overconfidence for you. If you live on that island the hotspot is beneath your feet. (Though, yes, it does tend to leak out only at certain spots.)

Coyne

According to my dream, Microsoft Windows has a flag you can set in order to exclude unwanted Klingons.

Coyne

Yeah, I get why countries have to be careful about produce crossing borders, but is it necessary to be an asshole about it? Absolutely. But only if it's being brought in by an individual. If it's a company, they can bring anything. That's why we have so many recent problems with imported plants, cr...

Coyne

The first part of the dream involved the creation of a chunk of ice. A ditch with 45 degree walls was filled with water to a depth of 18 in. The bottom ranged from 18 to 36 inches wide. When it was full of water, the woman wizardess, who was Nicole Kidman, touched the surface of the water with a fin...

Coyne

Liri wrote:Maybe the cashier putting in the order entered the PLU code instead of the price.

Or maybe failed to enter between prices 9.30 and .11.

When you really get an amazing price is when they enter the UPC in the price field, yielding something like $4,710,160,012.00.

Coyne

You are right, I was using the wrong multipliers in my calculation. That's the problem with thought problems, you have to think...and I am obviously thought-challenged.

Coyne

But, if we did 5760, we'd have to find/make a new chain, and that's just such a pain... Add... If we chopped 2 feet off the chain, it would be 64 feet, so Acres would be 90 x 900, 81000 square feet. If we tacked on 6 feet, it would be 72 feet, and Acres would be 80 x 800, 64000 square feet. Okay, I ...

Coyne

Sorry, but there is no excuse for having 11 as a factor for the number of feet/yards in a mile. It's nonsensical. Well, maybe not to divide by 11 per se. But what about dividing by 440, just for example? If you want to divide by 440, there has to be an 11 factor in there somewhere. And it's a good ...

Coyne

TIL that the clove, an old English unit of weight, was equal to eight pounds when measuring cheese. Somehow I, and probably you as well, have survived this long without knowing that. So, let's see, that means there would be 14 clove in a Dutch cask ...and also that there would be 21 1/3 clove in a ...

Coyne

Soupspoon wrote:Be careful skipping over the critiques. They're a potential tripping hazard, especially as they're only ankle high and installed right next to the knee-high 'guard rails' by the buckets full of ebola.

The critiques bite ankles, too.

Coyne

CorruptUser wrote:It is a trick question. It turns out the penny is an octopus in disguise. Don't fall for it!

They don't need to be octopuses in disguise, pennies can kill you on their own.

Coyne

I suspect that is true because most people see bears as dangerous, and moose...not. Which is an incorrect assumption. I'm really not sure how someone looks at a moose and doesn't realize it could kill them. A moose is what happens when bears and deer mate. +1 I mean, anything with a large array of ...

Coyne

Moose are actually quite dangerous. They attack humans far more frequently than bears, for example (though moose are generally less likely to kill you, they can still deal a lot of damage). It's also apparently a bad idea to hit one with your car. I suspect that is true because most people see bear...

Coyne

And the moral of the story is, don't go around kicking mooses (meese?). Also TIL a moose is a kind of cow. Makes sense if you imagine them without the antlers. The plural of moose is also moose. And a female moose is a called a cow while a male moose is called a bull (like in a lot of other ungulat...

Coyne

I had a nightmare last night (for real, I thought about reporting it in Sleepy-Time Holodeck, but it's not really fodder for that) that mass shootings, sometimes more than one, were happening every day. It got so bad that, despite the screams of outrage, the Second Amendment was repealed. Then I fou...

Coyne

Surprising New Evidence Shows Bias in Police Use of Force but not in Shootings

Coyne

Tyndmyr wrote:This is a valve and a small bent pipe, not even really in a gun like shape, unless one is very imaginative.

Hey, any ~~port~~ shape in a storm.

Dr34m(4+(h3r wrote:I pointed a knife at a couple of police officers the other day to try to get them to kill me and they didn't even arrest me.

Sanity check needed.

Coyne

That's....not the right way to do it at all. If you dropped in functioning, you'd have a decent modern approximation. Well functioning militia being essential. Which, in fairness, if we use the term militia in the sense of the time, only really included men, and may have only included white men, de...

Coyne

A well met regularly Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Have it your way.

Coyne

"Regulated" as in "met regularly". Words often change meanings over time... From the Constitution: To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes; To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Sta...

Coyne

However, it's important to note that they do not define any actual militia; and while they do use the phrase "well regulated" to describe it, they decline to specify any political body as having the power to regulate it; not the Congress, or the federal government, not even the States. No...

Coyne

How did he accidentally injure THREE students? What type of gun was he demonstrating? Probably something like Liston's most famous case : Amputated the leg in under 21⁄2 minutes (the patient died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene; they usually did in those pre-Listerian days). ...

Coyne

[We must do something!] + [This is something!] => [We must do this!] It's marginally better than the "arming students with rocks" idea. I don't know, he looks serious to me. I think it would be more obvious sarcasm if he had gone with a ream of paper and every classroom, you know, so the ...

Coyne

U.K. man found to have gonorrhea resistant to conventional treatments Researchers at Public Health England have announced, as reported by the BBC, that a U.K. man has contracted a case of gonorrhea that is resistant to the two types of antibiotics that are normally used to treat such infections. It...

Coyne

Is there any need to distinguish between a woman whose husband has died and a woman who has never had a husband? (parallels the difference between parents who lost children and parents who never had them) Traditionally, there was, yes. It was distinction between virgin and not, between a woman who ...

Coyne

Also if two men are married, one of them dies, is the other one a widow or a widower? Widower. It's just a female/male distinction - it has nothing to do with the gender of the partner. "Bereaved" has a problem, because a person who lost one of fifteen children (or even a spouse) could be...

Coyne

Can you see Aconcagua from Everest? Everest is at 27°59′17″N 86°55′31″E, Aconcagua is at 32°39′12.35″S 70°00′39.9″W (Wikipedia). Using this great circle mapper yields 6945 miles surface distance between them on the surface. The Earth is a 360 degree sphere, and the angle between the center of the E...

Coyne

I've had my automatic brakes kick in because a plastic bag was blowing across the road in front of me - full on stop from near highway speed. If someone had been behind me, it probably would have ended badly. It wasn't even that large of a bag - certainly nothing that any person would see and decid...

Coyne

Now, that it is obvious the Russians played a part in breaking up the E.U. into more manageable bite sizes. Can your people strengthen their E.U. connections? For the Good of The Queen and everyone else, too. Hey now, the anti-EU crowd has got the vote just the way they like it. You don't think the...

Coyne

In all, Fischer was charged with one count of sexual battery and 12 counts of assault and battery by an officer and one count of false imprisonment. The charges could put him in prison for up to 14 years. Odd coincidence, 14 years for 14 crimes. Oh wait, I get it: wobblers , misdemeanors, up to one...

Coyne

Had the kitten dream again, the one where I rescue the abandoned kittens. There were seven this time, five scrawny week-olds and two healthier month-olds.

Coyne

For years I have hung my glasses on the lamp above my bed, by half-folding them and hooking them over the arm that holds the lamp. I know it is not the best, but it was safe and convenient and a reliable place to find them when I was looking for them. Today as I was lying on the bed, I swing my arm ...

Coyne

The problem also extends to those elements, such as police unions, who resist the idea of non-lethal force.

Police Union Boss Attacks New DA For Daring To Speak To Police Recruits About Deadly Force

Coyne

The dream even had a title, "Around the World in 80 Years" ( ref ). This ne'er-do-well decided to walk all the way around the Earth, which was possible because the Earth was ruined, not sure how. The surface was all craters, some of which had a deadly acid lakes in the bottom, but overall ...

Coyne

Is it currently a religious conflict, nationalist, or just various warlords trying to prove who is the biggest and baddest? Because honestly? I think this is one of those conflicts that can be perfectly described by "Dawn of the Peck", one of the Thanksgiving episodes of Bob's Burgers. So...

Coyne

The outcome on both is that people aren't killing anybody. I can't agree. I remember a news show here in Central Florida in which they reported three murders. One person had committed murder by stabbing the victim to death. The second person had committed murder my running over the victim with a ca...

Coyne

I drove into a parking lot surrounded by buildings. No one seemed to be in any of them, and the lot was deserted except for me. The doors had various names in gold letters, one of which was "Moahk Automotive." But my heads-up display showed labels for NSA, CIA, DHS, and etc. Hmmmmmmm... Re...

Coyne

IIRC, the original moon landing was something on the order of six inches per gallon. The moon is about 240000 miles away, and it took nearly 1 million gallons of kerosene, oxygen, and hydrogen to get there and back. 1 ft per gallon if you ignore the oxygen. Something don't seem quite right about yo...

Coyne

I was asking for a study or report that showed that people reluctant to gather information were found of wrong doing once the information was gathered. In other words, how often does an investigation lead to the discovery of criminal action? And how would anyone know this? This is the government th...

Search found 1319 matches