It’s a little more accurate to say the Boulder-Denver-Colorado Springs nascent metroblob is in the middle of nowhere.
Those three areas have not grown together … yet. The non-suburban areas between them aren’t devoid of population; they’re semi rural but seem destined, water permitting, to fill in over the next 30-40 years.
And now I’m kind of wondering what Denver has, that makes it a site for a city. Most cities are built around some obvious geographical feature, like the mouth of a river. Is there a major river that runs through Denver, and if so, is there any significance to that spot on the river?
Wiki’s potted history says it was originally connected to the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush, plus a nearby minor river in what’s otherwise pretty dry territory. So more to do with the luck of where the gold was found than anything else.
At least as to North/South. As to East/West, ISTM towns were semi-destined to spring up in the foothills, not out in the arid flats, nor up in the steep country.
If you’re driving in from the east, there’s no change between Kansas and Colorado, just a tilt to the plains as you keep going up.
Then it’s almost BOOM mountains with Denver in the last flat-ish area before you can’t pack people in.
Based on mapping, it looks like Fort Collins and Cheyenne will eventually be assimilated into the Denver blob too.
In regards to the Statistics one, even if you don’t need statistics to choose between vaccination and no vaccination, you probably do still need them for decisions like one dose vs. two, or how big the doses need to be, or how much time between the doses, or any of myriad other questions the research was designed to answer.
I wish they wouldn’t use such highly technical terms like blooped.
I prefer splooshed. After all, they’re semi-liquid. I wonder how far the splooshes went? Probably clear to Earth’s orbit. :eek:
Incoming!!!
There is, in fact, such a thing as contact binary stars, which are exactly what they sound like: Stars so close that they’re touching.
That sounds even more violent and unhealthy for children and other living things than does “crossing the streams.” And we know what happens when that happens.
That reminds me of the fact (that I probably learned here but might have been Youtube Astronomy video comments) that you could fit all the other planets on a line with each just touching the next in between the Earth and the Moon, if only just barely, and obviously depending on how you define the surface of the larger planets. I couldn’t believe it at first when I read it, but if you do the math it checks out.
Interesting. Said another way, even the small amount of Space between Earth & Moon is still a lot compared to all the solids, liquids, and appreciably-thick gases in the whole solar system. Space is big. Really really big.
But what happens when you let go of the magic that put them all touching, and conventional physics suddenly takes over? A giant Earth-crushing SPLOOSH; that’s what! 
It’d be epic to watch from a suitable distance. Say out about Alpha Centauri.
So, I’m pretty sure that the current one is a pop culture reference, but I’m apparently even less up on pop culture than is Randal Monroe. A little help?
According to Explain XKCD, it’s a reference to a Simpsons episode from 1995.
It’s a pretty obscure reference, and also a misquote. If that’s really what he was going for, its a miss.
It’s an internet meme. I don’t doubt that it originated with that Simpsons episode, but responding to a post about bacon or whatever food or what have you is currently internet cool with “Yesss” or, worse, “Yasss”, and “Inject this directly into my veins” is a meme.
As is “Shut up and take my money!”, which comes from an episode of Futurama.
I’d honestly forgotten until I read that comic that this is when works start entering the public domain again.