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#1334 Second Let me just scroll down and check behind that rock. Annnnd ... nope, page copyright year starts with '19'. Oh God, is this a WEBRING?
#1336 Transformers A helicopter bursts from a chrysalis and alights on a rock, rotors still damp.
#1337 Hack HACK THE STARS
#1338 Land Mammals Bacteria still outweigh us thousands to one--and that's not even counting the several pounds of them in your body.
#1339 When You Assume You know what happens when you assert--you make an ass out of the emergency response team.
#1340 Unique Date If our current civilization lasts another 8,000 years, it's probably fair to assume the Long Now Foundation got things right, and at some point we started listening to them and switched to five-digit years.
#1341 Types of Editors m-x machineofdeath-mode
#1342 Ancient Stars 'The light from those millions of stars you see is probably many thousands of years old' is a rare example of laypeople substantially OVERestimating astronomical numbers.
#1343 Manuals The most ridiculous offender of all is the sudoers man page, which for 15 years has started with a 'quick guide' to EBNF, a system for defining the grammar of a language. 'Don't despair', it says, 'the definitions below are annotated.'
#1344 Digits It's taken me 20 years to get over skyline tetris.
#1345 Answers Stanford sleep researcher William Dement said that after 50 years of studying sleep, the only really solid explanation he knows for why we do it is 'because we get sleepy'.
#1346 Career They'd convince me to come out of retirement for one last job: biting into a giant lump of slightly soft wax a couple of times.
#1347 t Distribution If data fails the Teacher's t test, you can just force it to take the test again until it passes.
#1348 Before the Internet We watched DAYTIME TV. Do you realize how soul-crushing it was? I'd rather eat an iPad than go back to watching daytime TV.
#1349 Shouldn't Be Hard (six hours later) ARGH. How are these stupid microchips so durable?! All I want is to undo a massive industrial process with household tools!
#1351 Metamaterials If I developed a hue-shifting metamaterial, I would photobomb people's Instagram pics with a sheet of material that precisely undid the filter they were using.
#1352 Cosmologist on a Tire Swing No matter how fast I swing, I can never travel outside this loop! Maybe space outside it doesn't exist! But I bet it does. This tire came from somewhere.
#1353 Heartbleed I looked at some of the data dumps from vulnerable sites, and it was ... bad. I saw emails, passwords, password hints. SSL keys and session cookies. Important servers brimming with visitor IPs. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, c-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. I should probably patch OpenSSL.
#1354 Heartbleed Explanation Are you still there, server? It's me, Margaret.
#1355 Airplane Message PHARAOH IRY-HOR, FROM THE 3100s BC, IS THE FIRST HUMAN WHOSE NAME WE KNOW.
#1356 Orbital Mechanics To be fair, my job at NASA was working on robots and didn't actually involve any orbital mechanics. The small positive slope over that period is because it turns out that if you hang around at NASA, you get in a lot of conversations about space.
#1357 Free Speech I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.
#1358 NRO 'DISPATCHING DRONE TO TARGET COORDINATES.' 'Wait, crap, wrong button. Oh jeez.'
#1359 Phone Alarm Who's calling me?? WHY IS THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD CALLING ME!?
#1360 Old Files Wow, ANIMORPHS-NOVEL.RTF? Just gonna, uh, go through and delete that from all my archives real quick.
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