This is the new blog from the xkcd guy. I do not think there has been a thread on this.

some gems:

Story of what happens when you have 3 glasses,
left with a vacuum in bottom half, water in top half
middle with water in bottom half, air in top half
right with water in bottom half, vacuum in top half



end of story: people get cut and the kitchen is wet




Story of baseball that leaves pitcher's mount at 0.9c:
everything blows up. BUT before then, they strike a really gnarly pose. Too bad this pose could not be photographed in practicality, since the shock-wave is traveling the speed of light.




Story of a mole of moles:
Their self-gravitation is enough that they condense into their own moon.
They form petroleum in the center.
Later on, geysers of mole guts spew out in volcanoes.

8/17/2012 3:11:29 PM

it was mentioned in the xkcd thread but otherwise, no. It's pretty cool. I just finished reading the one about a mole of moles, which lead to me reading about ices I through IX, which lead to me reading about Ice-Nine and remembering how cool I thought Cat's Cradle was in college.

8/17/2012 3:13:51 PM

Quote :

"pitcher's mount"

8/17/2012 3:16:55 PM

noted, happy now?

8/17/2012 3:49:37 PM

^^

8/17/2012 3:52:11 PM

What if a rainstorm dropped all of its water in a single giant drop?

9/18/2012 11:04:20 AM

fearful skrillex storms

9/18/2012 11:16:30 AM

^^ YES!!

9/18/2012 7:52:47 PM

haha

Quote :

"Fear reigns supreme as the world fears rain supreme, but years pass without any signs of the disaster repeating. "

9/18/2012 9:01:58 PM

Quote :

"Our laser keeps pouring more and more energy into the plasma, and the plasma keeps getting hotter and hotter. The particles bounce off each other, slam into the surface of the Moon, and eventually blast away into space at a terrific speed. This flow of material effectively turns the entire surface of the Moon into a rocket engine—and a surprisingly efficient one, too. Using lasers to blast off surface material like this is called laser ablation, and it turns out to be a promising method for spacecraft propulsion. The Moon is massive, but slowly and surely the rock plasma jet begins to push it away from the Earth. (The jet would also scour clean the face of the Earth and destroy the lasers, but we’re pretending for the moment that they’re invulnerable.) The plasma also physically tears away the lunar surface, a complicated interaction that’s tricky to model. But if we make the wild guess that the particles in the plasma exit at an average speed of 500 kilometers per second, then it will take a few months for the Moon to be pushed out of range of our laser. It will keep most of its mass, but escape Earth’s gravity and enter a lopsided orbit around the sun. Technically, the Moon won’t become a new planet, under the IAU definition of a planet. Since its new orbit crosses Earth’s, it will be considered a dwarf planet like Pluto. This Earth-crossing orbit will lead to periodic unpredictable orbital perturbation. Eventually it will either be slingshotted into the Sun, ejected toward the outer Solar System, or slammed into one of the planets—quite possibly ours. I think we can all agree that in this case, we’d deserve it."

10/3/2012 11:33:39 AM

http://what-if.xkcd.com/18/

In Armageddon, a NASA guy comments that a plan to shoot a laser at the asteroid is like “shooting a b.b. gun at a freight train.” What would it take to stop an out-of-control freight train using only b.b. guns?

Quote :

"The Tactical Edition Drozd Blackbird is a high-end BB machine gun (of course there are BB machine guns). It fires 1200 rounds a minute at a muzzle velocity of over 200 meters per second. At those speeds, standard BBs are capable of fracturing bone."

11/5/2012 2:13:18 PM