If you fit Pascal’s triangle into a grid, then each cell displays the number of distinct paths that lead to that cell from the upper left (assuming only rightward and downward movements and no backtracking).
So, above, the cell marked 4 in the second row, fourth column, can be reached in 4 ways: 1-1-1-4, 1-1-3-4, 1-2-3-4, and 1-2-3-4.
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Hovertext: I would be more open to your critique if it were expressed in radians.
Thanks for a wonderful BAHFest East, everyone. I've never seen that auditorium so packed!
Hpeckeri'd buy that album
This is from an email where a client’s outlines their idea for a CD cover design:
Client: The cover Should be a muscular skunk devil pimp like creature throwing accusations of your past crazy life but a glowing peace around the person because they are not what they use to be. I saw a good example on Deviant Art, but That’s not quite it. don’t want female with T and A so all viewers may not get offended.
As I was doing a daily check of our client’s networks, the connection broke completely.
One of our biggest clients called immediately, because every minute without a working connection is a heavy financial loss for them. We were in red alert mode. It’s not often that everything breaks at once.
While we were looking everywhere, we had to focus on the server room because that was the likely culprit.
A server with 500+ plugged in cables looks like spaghetti. You have to plan and manage it carefully or you make a huge mess and create all sorts of new problems.
I started to investigate the server when I noticed an ethernet cable that looked out of place. I followed it from one port to… the port right next to it. This had created an endless loop for the server, because the server was feeding back into itself. I pulled the cable out and BAM! Everything worked again.
Me: Who did this?
Employee Whose Job Isn’t IT: (guiltily) M-me?
We asked him why he thought plugging a loose cable into a massive server was a good idea.
Employee Whose Job Isn’t IT: I saw this cable lying there, and no one was using it. I saw two free ports and put it in them, so it wouldn’t feel useless.
After a massive facepalm from everyone else at the company we banned him from the server room.
“here are your x-rays. i’m afraid you should avoid physical activity until this heals — oops, how did two tickets to everest in IMAX 3D get into the frame”
Image: Flickr
For Fuse 18, the experimental typographic publication that appeared in February 2001, type designer Matthew Carter reflected on the grand lettering that appears on public buildings: It’s meant to last for eternity, but inevitably it’s effaced by weather, by other inscriptions, and by the graffiti of vandals.
So, wryly, he offered DeFace, which speeds up the process.
“This typeface,” he wrote, “contains a set of inscriptional capitals that are self-vandalizing: each letter has graffiti associated with it that deface neighboring letters. Depending on the text, the graffiti can vandalize both the underlying capitals and other graffiti to make a palimpsest of marks that are individually legible but obscure in combination.”
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I don’t think he has the authority to do that.
That’s probably pretty close.
The homies who been holding it down since day one.
he nods to himself quietly. “that sounded good. that sounded pretty real. i’d be comforted.”
Hovertext: 'Your feelings are stupid' is actually my family motto.
Thanks for a wonderful BAHFest, everyone!
The client had a web shop he wanted to have “reactivated” and redesigned. I asked him if he remembered, where he created the site so I could log in and take a look. After I checked the source code I figured out where it was created and asked him to log in.
Client: I forgot the password, can’t you just hack it, or something?
Me: Sorry, but it’s not that easy. If it was, you would have a serious security issue. Why don’t you just click on “Forgot Password”?
Client: I forgot which email I used.
Me: Just try it, it will tell you, if the email isn’t valid.
Client: Wow, found it, but there’s a problem.
Me: What’s the problem?
Client: I forgot the mail-login too, can’t you just hack the mails?
Me: Why don’t you just click on “Forgot Password" first.
Client: Oh, wow you’re so smart!
“Consequences aren’t a punishment or an angry thing as many of us have come to know. They are also not empty threats to manipulate the other person. Instead, consequences entail taking heed of a pattern of behavior, using that to inform future interactions and stating what will happen going forward. It might mean you no longer correspond with a person as frequently or not at all, and the relationship changes because their actions communicate a lack of respect.”
great way to define the term “consequences,” which has always seemed vaguely threatening. take care of your self!
mr. casio continues to ignore our summons for him to appear in court
CRAZY MUTHAFUCKA NAMED SATURN
Saturn Devouring His Son (1819-1823), Francis Goya / Straight Outta Compton, N.W.A.
Making sure our most vulnerable people suffer is actually a long cherished political tenet of at least half our population.
Hovertext: Still, this is the most current reference I've made all week.
Only 20 general admission tickets left :) Thanks, geeks!
Been rereading some 80s comics if you can’t tell
“buh, okay, everyone do prayers silently for the next 30 minutes. then we’ll sing one more of these songs and it’s quittin time”
You exist because of a fragile string of circumstances: Your parents had to meet and procreate at a particular time, and so did their parents, and so on. If any of these things had not happened, you would not be here.
But the past that produced you also produced a whole series of historical and natural calamities — the Holocaust, World War I, and slavery, for example. Very likely those calamities influenced the delicate causal chain that leads to your existence. Without them, your ancestors would not have met and had children when they did. Properly speaking, then, shouldn’t you regret your own existence, since it required these tragedies to bring it about?
University of Haifa philosopher Saul Smilansky writes: “A ‘package deal’ is involved here: those events, together with oneself; or, the absence of the historical calamity, and the absence of oneself. So, all considered, ought one to prefer never to have existed, and to regret that one exists?”
(Saul Smilansky, “Morally, Should We Prefer Never to Have Existed?”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91:4, 655-666.)
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Hovertext: Other than the silent part, this explains a lot of Internet behavior.
Hey geeks! If the site is loading wonky for you, just refresh. If that doesn't work, clear your cache then refresh. I promise it'll work!
Lately, thanks to the patreons, I've been going back through old comics and updating the votey buttons. I noticed that I used to post much longer, more personal, and at times remarkably stupid blogs. For the last 5 years or so, things have gotten incredibly busy between the growth of SMBC, all the new projects, and the growing family. I'd like to get back to where sometimes I talk about things here. I started saying more stuff on twitter, which is probably not the best place to just sit and talk with people. A comics blog post probably isn't either, but on the plus side, people can't really talk back.
Anyway, I just want to thank you all for reading all these years. I'm amazed that there are people who have stuck with the comic through all its many phases.
Zach
PS: For those asking, we hope to have the mobile version of the site complete in October!
the men and women of the NYPD’s elite computer crime task force are back on the job. looks like this guy was planning the world’s biggest orgy
If two people want to split up amicably, the easiest solution is to divide their assets equally, with each partner getting 0.5. But suppose that one partner goes to a lawyer who charges a fee f but promises to get more, by an amount m + f, leaving his client better off by the amount m. If this happens, then the second partner will get only 0.5 – m – f. If the second partner engages their own lawyer then the split is equal again, except that now the lawyers’ fees must be paid:
This is an example of the so-called prisoner’s dilemma: Both sides would be better off if they left the lawyers out of it, but if one engages a lawyer than the other had better do so as well.
Now suppose that each partner can choose the amount of lawyer time to buy, and that they get a payoff that’s proportional to the amount they spend. If one spends x on lawyers and the other spends y, each measured as a fraction of the total assets, then the first partner should receive an amount given by:
An industrious divorcee can now use calculus to maximize this expression, varying x and keeping y constant. The optimum value of x turns out to be 
Well, now what? Knowing all this, what’s our best course? If we could trust each other then we’d each pay a pittance on lawyers and get nearly 0.5 each. But I’m aware that if you pay a millionth and I pay a thousandth (still nearly a pittance), I’ll get nearly 99.9% of our assets. And simply resolving to outspend you won’t work: If you spend 0.36 then I should spend 0.24; I’ll come away with less than you, but this is the best I can do.
“Looking at the graph of 
(Anthony C. Robin, “How Lawyers Make a Living,” Mathematical Gazette 88:512 [July 2004], 313-315.)
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