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Inspiraling Roundabout

3 Comments and 4 Shares
Look, I just think we need to stop coddling those hedonistic roundabout hogs who get into the inner lane and circle for hours, wasting valuable capacity.
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Screwtape
42 days ago
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This was very confusing before I realised the author lives in a country where roundabouts go *anti*-clockwise.
gordol
42 days ago
Hey, we drive on the RIGHT side of the road. By definition then, you drive on the wrong side.
Covarr
41 days ago
Even as someone from one of those countries (which, btw, is most of them), this threw me off after tracing the traffic flow and realizing that actually using the thing to go anywhere but immediately to your right would lead you into into the oncoming lane from a different road. Also hey screwtape
zippy72
40 days ago
Driving on the left is the traditional side. Driving on the right started to spread after the French started doing it, probably because people thought it was cool.
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alt_text_bot
42 days ago
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Look, I just think we need to stop coddling those hedonistic roundabout hogs who get into the inner lane and circle for hours, wasting valuable capacity.

Frankenstein Claim Permutations

2 Comments and 7 Shares
When I began trying to form a new claim by stitching together these parts in such an unnatural way, some called me mad.
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Screwtape
143 days ago
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Intelligence is knowing "Frankenstein" is not the monster.
Wisdom is knowing *Frankenstein* is the monster.
rraszews
143 days ago
Pedantry is knowing that the monster has a legitimate legal claim to the creator's name.
Groxx
143 days ago
Frankenstein is knowing that intelligence is the monster.
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alt_text_bot
143 days ago
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When I began trying to form a new claim by stitching together these parts in such an unnatural way, some called me mad.

Euler Diagrams

4 Comments and 7 Shares
Things Leonhard Euler created ( most of math ( overlapping circle diagrams ) a cricket bowling machine ) Things John Venn created
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Screwtape
325 days ago
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I thought the convention was to name discoveries for the person who discovered them immediately following Euler.
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lamontcg
326 days ago
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Euler only invented half of Math, Cauchy invented the other half of Math.
Lythimus
326 days ago
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Is it funniest when the alt text is funnier than the comic?
alt_text_bot
326 days ago
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Things Leonhard Euler created ( most of math ( overlapping circle diagrams ) a cricket bowling machine ) Things John Venn created

Historical Dates

3 Comments and 11 Shares
Evidence suggests the 1899 transactions occurred as part of a global event centered around a deity associated with the lotus flower.
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Screwtape
430 days ago
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An explanation, for those as puzzled as I was:

Unix-based systems traditionally represent timestamps as "seconds since 1970-01-01". If some program requires a modification timestamp for some file and no accurate value is available, it will commonly use the value 0 as a default. When other systems carefully preserve that value, it leads to files with 1970-01-01 timestamp.

Spreadsheets traditionally represent timestamps as "(fractional) days since 1900-01-01". In the same way, asking for a timestamp when no valid information is available will often get the value 0 as a default. Since businesses run on Excel, there's a lot of transaction records with a 0 timestamp in Excel spreadsheets out there.

One last wrinkle: The first wildly popular spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3, had a bug: it assumed that the year 1900 was a leap year, so it assumed 1900-02-29 existed, and so every date timestamp after that point was off by one. When Microsoft created Excel, they carefully reimplemented that bug for compatibility's sake, but if you're a historian looking at the data, you might reasonable assume that spreadsheets stored timestamps as "(fractional) days since 1899-12-31". If you're storing timestamps in some different format, it might not be obvious that those are zero dates - you might assume there's just a lot of transactions processed on that day.
martinbaum
430 days ago
Staggeringly thorough, thank you!
rraszews
428 days ago
I knew the 1970 thing but didn't understand the provenance of the 1899 one; I assumed it had something to do with the Y2K bug (as a colleage of mine put it, "1899 and 1999 were two very different years, but they had one thing in common: the next year would be 1900")
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ghafarkkali
422 days ago
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JayM
430 days ago
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Hahaha. Yep.
Atlanta, GA

Logic Gates

3 Comments and 5 Shares
In C, the multiocular O represents the bitwise norxondor gorgonax.
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Screwtape
847 days ago
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"Norxondor" and "Gorgonax" would both be great names for dragons.
jlvanderzwan
847 days ago
Xand Gort, Norg Xort and Andorx Gant being the three heroes that slew them?
Jaryth000
842 days ago
I got half way through the chart and all I could think of was Kingdom hearts villain names...
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alt_text_bot
848 days ago
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In C, the multiocular O represents the bitwise norxondor gorgonax.

Contiguous 41 States

5 Comments and 7 Shares
Linguists, settling some inscrutable grudge, have been steadily sneaking more backdated synonyms for 'sharing borders' into the dictionary. They've added 'contiguous,' 'coterminous,' 'conterminous,' and next year they're adding 'conterguous.'
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Screwtape
1088 days ago
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For the non-Americans among us, which states are missing? I think Kentucky is one.
passionsocks
1088 days ago
Kentucky (KY) is there. The ones I picked up as missing quickly are North/South Dakota, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico. That leaves three I managed to (not?) miss looking at the map alone. (edit: Kansas, Indiana, Nebraska after a few more minutes)
calumhalpin
1088 days ago
New Mexico's the only one I've got so far.
mikedanger
1088 days ago
pennsylvania and delaware have been removed (2), maryland and west virginia were moved north to fill the gap. new mexico is removed (1) and wyoming is moved to hide it. kansas, nebraska, and both dakotas are also removed (4) which takes you to the normal 48 you'd seen on this type of map. I'm not sure how that was done without looking at a real map but I have a gut feeling iowa/missouri/arkansas were shuffled somehow to accomplish it.
brentashley
1088 days ago
nebraska, kansas, delaware
cosmotic
1088 days ago
Indiana is there
silberbaer
1088 days ago
I'm not missing any of them, unless they change the outcome of the election.
yerfdogyrag
1087 days ago
I love that he kept 4 corners.
jptoor
1084 days ago
@passionsocks's answer swapping Delaware for Indiana. That was way harder than I expected.
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fxer
1088 days ago
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Can cut a canal from the Chesapeake to the Great Lakes without Pennsylvania there
Bend, Oregon
deebee
1088 days ago
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My wife is a real map-nut, she screamed at this like it was a spider jumping out at her
America City, America
TrueGeek
1088 days ago
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Related - map of the US but Alaska is the focus and the lower 48 are in the small box in the corner:

https://www.williwaw.com/product/ak-usa-map/
Lawrenceville, Georgia
alt_text_bot
1088 days ago
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Linguists, settling some inscrutable grudge, have been steadily sneaking more backdated synonyms for 'sharing borders' into the dictionary. They've added 'contiguous,' 'coterminous,' 'conterminous,' and next year they're adding 'conterguous.'
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