Xkcd Memes

Posts tagged with Xkcd

The Unholy Units Of Science

The Unholy Units Of Science
*Shocked anime face intensifies* The physics gods are laughing at us! Torque (newton-meters) having the same units as liter-atmospheres is the kind of dimensional analysis nightmare that keeps engineering students awake at 3 AM. And don't get me started on British Thermal Units—they're the chaotic evil of the measurement world! The universe is held together by duct tape and dimensional coincidences! Next you'll tell me that electric potential energy (joules) is measured in coulomb-volts... OH WAIT IT IS! *maniacal scientist laughter* This is why physicists drink coffee by the gallon-pascal!

Engineering Solutions Gone Airborne

Engineering Solutions Gone Airborne
Engineering at its finest! The "improved" suspension bridge design takes practical infrastructure and turns it into a death-defying rollercoaster. Sure, you'll save on construction materials with "less cable" and boats get "more clearance," but the real innovation is launching unsuspecting drivers into the air for those delightful "fun jumps." Nothing says civil engineering progress like converting your morning commute into an involuntary physics experiment on projectile motion. Your car becomes the test subject, and gravity the unforgiving reviewer of your trajectory calculations. Next up in infrastructure improvements: catapult off-ramps and trampoline-based public transit!

Fields Arranged By Purity

Fields Arranged By Purity
The scientific hierarchy complex in one perfect comic! Mathematicians casually existing in their abstract realm while everyone else squabbles about which discipline is more "pure." Physics majors thinking they're the pinnacle of applied science, chemists feeling superior to biologists, and poor sociologists at the far end getting roasted as "applied psychology." The academic superiority complex is strong with this one! Meanwhile, mathematicians are off in their own universe of pure abstraction, blissfully unaware that the rest of science even exists. As someone who survived undergrad physics, I can confirm this hierarchy is discussed with deadly seriousness in department lounges everywhere.

CSI: Geology Department

CSI: Geology Department
When geologists investigate crime scenes, everything becomes a rock formation! These rock nerds are examining a murder victim and immediately jump to geological explanations - "iron-rich intrusion" (probably just a knife) and "clastic material falling into a rift" (definitely just a stab wound). It's like watching CSI: Geology Edition where the cause of death is never murder, just "unexpected tectonic activity in a biological system." Next they'll be carbon-dating the weapon instead of checking for fingerprints!

Mathematical Symbols: Choose Your Weapon Wisely

Mathematical Symbols: Choose Your Weapon Wisely
Fighting a mathematical symbol to the death? Choose wisely, my fellow number nerds! 🔪 The empty set (∅) would be useless—it literally contains NOTHING to attack you with! Meanwhile, that integral sign (∫) is basically a mathematical scythe ready to calculate the area under your lifeline. And don't get me started on pi (π)—it's irrational and NEVER ENDS, just like my ex's arguments! Personally, I'd be terrified of fighting the infinity symbol (∞). How do you defeat something that goes on forever? That's like trying to finish grading papers during finals week—IMPOSSIBLE!

The Chemical-Free Paradox

The Chemical-Free Paradox
Marketing: "Try our new chemical-free product!" Chemist: *imagines world without molecules* Physicist: *imagines world without fundamental particles* Listen, everything is chemicals. Your water? Chemicals. Your organic kale? Chemicals. Your "all-natural" deodorant? You guessed it—chemicals. The universe is literally made of them. Next time someone brags about their "chemical-free" lifestyle, just smile and think about how they're basically claiming to be an ethereal being composed of pure nothingness.

The Scientific Hierarchy Of Smugness

The Scientific Hierarchy Of Smugness
Behold the eternal academic food chain! The top panel shows sciences arranged by "purity" with physicists smugly declaring dominance while mathematicians exist in their own dimension entirely. Meanwhile, the bottom panel reveals the dirty secret - as complexity increases, everyone's just desperately simplifying reality to make their equations work! This is basically every interdepartmental faculty meeting distilled into its purest form. Physicists think they're the apex predators of science until they need to calculate something with actual real-world messiness. Then suddenly it's "assume a spherical cow" time! And poor mathematicians, off in their abstract universe where numbers don't even need units. They're playing 5D chess while everyone else is arguing about whose science has more prestige. Truly the introverts of the academic world!

The Algebra Revenge Tour

The Algebra Revenge Tour
The eternal math education debate captured in stick figure glory! Former student smugly declares they've forgotten all algebra since graduation, triumphantly proclaiming "no one has needed me to solve for X!" only to have their math teacher deliver the ultimate comeback: "I told you'd never use it... IN YOUR FACE!" The comic brilliantly skewers the "when will I ever use this?" crowd while pointing out the bizarre contradiction: people proudly boast about forgetting math but would never brag about not learning music, cooking, or languages. It's the perfect encapsulation of math anxiety disguised as practical thinking! Next time someone says "I haven't used algebra since high school," just smile knowingly. They're using algebraic thinking constantly—they just don't realize it's hiding in everything from cooking ratios to budgeting to programming their thermostat!

Physics Of Love: Angular Momentum Edition

Physics Of Love: Angular Momentum Edition
This is peak physics romance! The stick figure is spinning counterclockwise, claiming it steals angular momentum from Earth, thereby slightly slowing the planet's rotation and extending nighttime. It's a beautifully nerdy way of saying "I want more time with you." While conservation of angular momentum is a real physical principle, the effect of one person spinning would be so infinitesimally small that you'd need to spin for billions of years to add even a microsecond to the night. But that's what makes this so charming—using ridiculous physics hyperbole as a love declaration. Classic XKCD—turning fundamental physics into unexpected poetry. Science pickup lines don't get more adorably geeky than this!

The Ballmer Peak: Coding's Liquid Inspiration

The Ballmer Peak: Coding's Liquid Inspiration
The legendary "Ballmer Peak" - that mythical blood alcohol sweet spot (0.129% - 0.138%) where programmers supposedly achieve coding superpowers! Named after Microsoft's former CEO Steve Ballmer, this pseudo-scientific phenomenon suggests there's a magical BAC level where your inhibitions drop just enough to make you a coding genius, but before you start typing with your forehead. The truth? Most programmers have tried to calibrate this experiment themselves, only to wake up the next morning to code that looks like it was written by a cat walking across the keyboard. The final panel really hits home - Windows ME suddenly makes perfect sense! That operating system wasn't a bug; it was a feature of someone trying to find the Ballmer Peak and overshooting spectacularly. Next time your code won't compile, maybe you're just not drinking enough... or perhaps way too much. Science is hard!

Biased Numbers

Biased Numbers
Classic programmer hubris! Nothing exposes human bias quite like a "random" number generator that mysteriously favors certain digits. The punchline is perfect - defending algorithmic bias by anthropomorphizing numbers with inherent value. It's the computational equivalent of "I'm not biased, those people just happen to be objectively worse!" The eternal struggle between randomness and the human inability to accept that 7 isn't actually luckier than 4. Statisticians everywhere are quietly sobbing into their probability distributions right now.

The Evolution Of Division Notation

The Evolution Of Division Notation
Ever wonder how different species of humans write division? 🤓 The evolution gets wilder as you go down! Regular folks use A/B, but scientists? They're too sophisticated for that slash nonsense. They prefer the elegant fraction bar. And those fancy scientists with their superscripts? Pure mathematical peacocking! But when you see F(A,B) with that summation symbol... that's your cue to flee the building. That's not division anymore—that's math having an existential crisis!