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Earth/Venus Venn Diagram

2 Comments and 5 Shares
Actually, the fact that Mars is still orbiting safely over here means that it was technically an *Euler* apocalypse, not a Venn one.
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Screwtape
212 days ago
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Well, there's Venn, and there's Us.
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Groxx
212 days ago
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Don't forget the Earth-shattering kaboom!
Silicon Valley, CA
jlvanderzwan
208 days ago
Instantly read it in the appropriate voice, hah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9wmWZbr_wQ

US Survey Foot

2 Comments and 6 Shares
Subway refuses to answer my questions about whether it's an International Footlong or a US Survey Footlong. A milligram of sandwich is at stake!
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Screwtape
248 days ago
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For international viewers, 0.014 miles is about 23 metres.
jepler
248 days ago
this american had to convert it into feet before grasping the distance involved, fwiw
Groxx
247 days ago
Bah! It's just a bit over 0.015 miles, or around 50 feet plus half of that again to get 75 feet, plus some change because it's 0.016 not 0.015, plus a bit because a thousandth of a mile is closer to 53 feet, so it's closer to like 80 feet. Easy math. No need for your silly metrics system.
agwego
243 days ago
Statute mile or Nautical mile?
mcarson
239 days ago
How many footlong hotdogs is that?
Groxx
238 days ago
Somewhere between a fortnight and a furlong of footlong frankfurters
jepler
237 days ago
15.13 smoots
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deebee
243 days ago
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Hey where’d the alt text bot go?
America City, America

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
354 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
354 days ago
Hey, we drive on the RIGHT side of the road. By definition then, you drive on the wrong side.
Covarr
352 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
352 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
354 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
455 days ago
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Intelligence is knowing "Frankenstein" is not the monster.
Wisdom is knowing *Frankenstein* is the monster.
rraszews
455 days ago
Pedantry is knowing that the monster has a legitimate legal claim to the creator's name.
Groxx
455 days ago
Frankenstein is knowing that intelligence is the monster.
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alt_text_bot
455 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
637 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
637 days ago
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Euler only invented half of Math, Cauchy invented the other half of Math.
Lythimus
637 days ago
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Is it funniest when the alt text is funnier than the comic?
alt_text_bot
637 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
742 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
742 days ago
Staggeringly thorough, thank you!
rraszews
740 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
734 days ago
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JayM
742 days ago
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Hahaha. Yep.
Atlanta, GA
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