When a factor of 100 is a rounding error… 
“So next year will be 65,000,002 B.C.”
“Yeah”
“So in sixty-five million and three years, it’ll eventually reach zero”.
“I guess”
“So… why are we counting towards that particular year?”
“2040s: RNA formed the basis for life each of the five known times it arose on the early Earth.”
“The most awkward part is when you have to pause to put on your shoes before you continue rolling out the door.”
When Charisma is your dump stat in favor of Dexterity.
“Briefly set a new record for tallest human-made structure by getting my knit sweater snagged on the skydiving plane door as I jumped and not noticing until I’d landed.”
According to various sources, even a large knit sweater with very fine yarn only uses 12,000 feet of yarn. But a typical skydive is at about 10,000 feet, meaning it would be hard not to notice your sweater unraveling to that extent. Worse, the dive probably takes at least 5 minutes, at which point the plane is probably around 40,000 feet away.
Even if you assume the plane flies a tight circle and drops you off at a lower than usual altitude, the Burj Khalifa is 2700 feet tall. I’d think that’s barely on the threshold of noticing missing from a sweater (about 22%).
I’m also unsure about the method of unraveling. Wouldn’t a sweater be knitted in a circular pattern? It would somehow have to travel all the way around the person (and their parachute) many times without itself snagging on something.
Perhaps the person isn’t wearing the sweater, and instead has tied the arms around their waist. That way, much more can be lost without the person noticing, plus it can deploy without circling all the way around.
I say, I say, it’s a joke, son. Don’t take it so seriously.
Cue Wheezer.
I tried to look up what the altitude record for aerostats is, but there’s some confusion between height above sea level and height above launch site (the Chinese keep launching them in Tibet). Since they’re tethered I would think the latter is more relevant to this comic strip.
These folks Tethered Aerostat Radar System - Wikipedia aren’t record setters. But they are sorta-routinely up at 15,000 feet. So taller than Randall’s sweater. Not fully permanent like the Burj Khalifa, but definitely longer lasting than Randall’s sweater too.
I used to fly by the Cudjoe Key facility on the way into Miami. It was fun to try to spot the balloon. We usually could. The tether is invisible from any material distance. More often you’d see the balloon down at ~10K feet or lower, but once in awhile they were up near the top of the 15,000 altitude reservation they always had. It was sorta funny because our terrain warning system’s database included a 15,000 foot tall cylindrical “peak” a few miles in diameter rising up out of the Florida Keys. The famously pancake flat and just barely above water level Keys.
From the highway that runs the length of the Keys you can see the hangar facilities and easily follow the tether up into the sky. On hazy or cloudy days the balloon on top is invisible, but on clear days it’s pretty obvious even 3 miles up.
Per the article, the tether is 25K feet long.
This came up on XKCD’s Youtube channel.
Three wise men and a hovercraft - cool concept.
Is it full of eels?
Who knew myrrh was an eel repellent? Not I.
Randall Munroe’s actual job is to take absurd premises and take them waaaay too seriously. I’m just participating in the fun.
“Your homeowner’s insurance might cover it, but be sure to check the subductible.”
Who was complaining above about Randall’s puns? I think he put that last bit in just to piss you off.
As a kid growing up in sight of the Pacific shoreline along the “ring of fire” I always thought it would be utterly cool to have a volcano emerge in my backyard. But a small one. I could charge admission to see the lava fountains.
xkcd had a solution for that, too:
You would have to be sure to clean it daily.
That happened to Dionisio Pulido. It was not very cool.