According to the Author, Fred Rogers a.k.a. Mr. Rogers (from the popular children’s show) is just as friendly on camera as he is when fighting with his wife.
It’s okay. Do not worry and don’t be afraid. Just focus on happier times, such as your childhood. Everything was magical and bright back then, without the complexity of adulthood. It is OK to focus on your past In order to escape the present. This is why you built a ball pit in your home - it acts a cradle and rocks you to sleep when all you want is to die and never be alone again.
The man with the hat on uses the common “green flash at sunset” phenomenon to distract another man while he knocks him unconscious and steals his Tesla Roadster - the only car other than a Delorean that is releveant to geeks.
The Author and his female partner prepare for sex in an unusual ritual: preparing a “homeopathic” contraceptive. While preparing this homeopathic contraceptive, they aim a joke squarely at doubters. “We will be sure to get pregnant now,” the female partner says with ironic glee as she prepares for her upcoming momentary sexual encounter safe in the knowledge that unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are blocked by the remedy.
The caption then reminds the Reader how effective and easy homeopathic medicine is. So effective that it can completely halt conception; something not even the best modern (and risk-laden) birth control medications and awkward latex sheaths can do. Were the Author and his partner to continue the regimen they would be unable to conceive, effectively removing them from the gene pool and the evolutionary process.
This comic is a change of pace from the usual science-focused theme, instead focusing on humanist activism. The Author wants to remind us that science, while it has its place in many human endeavors, can in fact be misguided sometimes. There is a wealth of alternative medical treatment that is more effective, more safe, and more accessible to the average person. Many so-called skeptics deny the efficacy of these practices because of methodological differences, doing much more harm than good with their legalism. The Author wants us to remember that human suffering should be addressed even if that means skipping tiresome rigamarole like the expensive (and usually pointless) “double-blind placebo controlled trial.”
Because in primitive cultures, counting systems only accounted for small numbers - anything about that was considered uncountable or “many.”
This comic is funny because those primitive cultures would not have had television.
A man details his functional workflow to extract an embedded video from a web page. The Author, his head clutched in his hands and writhing in something akin to an allergic reaction, relates an internal monologue about not wanting to know how anyone less technically literate thinks. To people like the Author, the Method is at least as important as the Results.
This demonstrates an axiom of nerd culture, “Why aren’t you as smart as I am?” Many hackers invest countless hours of their lives learning a huge volume of detail about specifics of today’s technology, but then because of their profound insecurities dismiss this effort entirely. This effect is akin in many ways to Impostor Syndrome, but usually rooted in the need for positive parental or peer attention. But, nerd dominance tells these individuals that anyone with fewer facts memorized is beneath them. These conflicting social cues lead the nerd to a kind of pauper’s arrogance: “I may be scum, but this person is even worse than scum!”
A women and two men are engaging in casual conversation when the woman politely offers food to the men (presumably her guests). Her politeness is mistaken by the men as sexual interest and one of the men follows with crass and threatening innuendo, asking if she is metaphorically offering them a three-way sex act.
However, as in so many XKCDs before, the woman is calm and canny to the ways of nerd culture, even in the face of the rare nerd gang rapist. She immediately acts to remove herself as the focus of the conversation by starting a discussion of vocabulary, insinuating that she is not as smart as her would-be rapists, but that they could educate her. Very few insecure male nerds can avoid the lure of a woman both willing to talk and listen to them, so they immediately begin debating amongst themselves about the coarser points of grammar and vocabulary, struggling for nerd dominance. As they fall into arguing amongst themselves, the woman continues to feed the argument with a quick comment as she slips out the back door and runs for help.
The Author has applied a concept from computer science to the dating world.
A DFS or Depth-first Search is a method for searching certain data structures that is used to teach the concept of algorithms and graph theory to introductory computer science students. It is a simple search where you start looking at the root (top) of a graph and continue down each branch until you find your target, or reach the end and go back up to continue.
In this comic, the stick figure is using this method to prepare for a date. He starts from the top level and drills down into each category (branch) looking for a problem to prepare for. This takes a long time, so when the date arrives he is still in the process of doing his search.
This is humorous because the stick figure chose the wrong algorithm, which effectively ruined his date. He will lose his one chance at procreation, thus moving us one step closer to removing autism from the gene pool.
This comic may be humorous to fans of the Lord of the Ring movie series staring Elijah Wood.
The comic is making fun of a classic scene wherein Gandarf the Wizard tells The Hobbits (main character) about the fall of a once great dwarven civilization. According to Tolkien’s fiction, the city and one-time centre of dwarven industry was also called Hadoophodrond by the Bindar, Cassanndoro by the Flam and Patchouli-herp in the Common Spyeerch, all meaning the Dwarrowonslfdelfgh.
However, in this version, the dwarves did not awaken a dark beast named Sauraon, but rather dug a hole too deep to get out of, since they are very short.
Here’s one for the mathematics geeks.
The Author is making a visual pun on the similarity between the square root operator and the division operator. If you follow from left to right you will see the “three times the square root of 81” turn into “81 divided by three” when he drops the multiplication operator. In this particular example, the two numbers multiplied is the same as dividing the second number squared by the first number. This is not always the case.
This is a retelling of a scene from the classic movie Jurassic Park. In this version the scientists responsible for the creation of the dinosaurs have genetically modified their protons in order to make them dwarfs (smaller). Because of this it is much easier to deal with them escaping (because they are smaller).