The original quark flavors were mint, vanilla, strawberry, chocolate, raspberry, and butter pecan, as described by the famed gelatiere Murray Gell-Mann. But his cross-town rival George Zweig insisted on substituting pistachio for butter pecan. The disagreement led to a long dispute until finally the Gilda Internazionale del Gelato was forced to abandon traditional flavors in favor of the non-descriptive terms ugly, delight, charm, strange, truth, and beauty.
Rejected terms included ‘hunky’, supercool, ‘better than your boyfriend’ and ‘I need at least two more drinks’.
I never really noticed before, but I do tend to think of colors when talking about at least some subatomic particles. Electrons are a bright green to me, and protons are red. Neutrons tend to be either white or gray. Muons are the same color as electrons, only as bigger spheres.
The only other similar thing I can think of is how I think of quarks, but it’s about shape, not color. They have that weird shape that stars appear to have in our atmosphere, or like a cartoon spark, just in 3D. And when three make up something, they’re arranged in an equilateral triangle.
As for where the colors come from: I suspect they’re from old books, but reinforced because I associate that bright green with electricity (or radiation) and because I think of the red wires that represent the positive side on a battery.
Eh, just assume continuity and you’ll be fine.
I’m disappointed that they had to include extra verbiage because their coordinate system didn’t include a time axis. There’s no need to specify “Thursday” if it’s shown that the hole only has a time-dimension extent up to Friday.
There’s no way you could manually spin it fast enough to simulate even a mild wind. He should have given Cueball a leafblower.
Forecasters all over are now hyperventilating in anxiety and considering whether their observation systems need armed guards or barbed wire or automatic turrets or something.
“Wow! Looks like we had an F5 tornado just an hour ago!”
::pause for thought::
“Never mind. It was just me hyperventitilating when I checked the anemometer.”
And a heat gun.
OK, the ends are bowlines, with a figure eight each on the free end. From top to bottom, we have a granny, a square, a sheet bend, a… I don’t know that one, actually, but it looks like some sort of relative of a sheet bend, and then… a Celtic knot?
Bottom looks like a Carrick bend to me.
I can’t place the one above, although it looks familiar.
Explain XKCD identifies that as a double sheet bend.
Ah, but on which side of the lossy/lossless line does [clone of your cat] fall? d&r 
That depends. If you don’t know where the clone is, then that’s lossy.
Oh, and the way Munroe drew his bowlines, it makes it very clear that a bowline is really just a rope sheet-bended to itself.