Ex Machina

Hey, this Apple wireless mouse on my desk uses plain old AA batteries! I was expecting something needlessly proprietary. Thank you, Apple Mouse Battery, for not existing — and may you continue to exist only as a fever dream visited upon mid-level Apple marketing executives.

Hypothesis: The move to downloadable content hurts burglars, because CDs & DVDs, once easy to sell, are now less common & fetch a lower price.

I totally did not get this xkcd strip from 19 May 2010 -- and that's awesome!

I have a lot of feeds on my Google Reader account, but one of the few that I read religiously is Randall Munroe’s xkcd.

I’m going to risk some major geek cred here to make an embarrassing admission: I don’t always understand the punchline in xkcd strips.

It’s like that old game show, Win Ben Stein’s Money. Just about every episode is an intelligence test disguised as a joke. When I get it, it’s funny — and genuinely funny, not funny in an arch, “Oh, aren’t we so smart because we get this?” way. When I don’t get it, I always google the punchline. Invariably it’s something interesting, even if it’s not related to my field or my interests.

Today’s strip inspired this post. How IP addresses are assigned isn’t your usual fodder for comic strips, and like most punchlines, it’s not as funny if you have to do research to understand it. But I do get the punchline in xkcd strips often enough that it makes me want to figure out what I missed in the ones where I don’t.

I love it when comedy works hard at making us smarter. I wish there were more comic strips like this.