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And in case you're wondering, that referral code is mine for breadpig. Used it here, for instance.

UPDATE
Wow! You've skyrocketed the book up 442 spots to the #212th bestselling book on Amazon. Thanks for spreading the word, everyone.

Christina & I also visited Laos to see the first xkcd school we built with breadpig's profits.

More to literacy to come thanks to our book profits in the hands of RoomToRead.org!

Please consider signing up for the breadpig mailing list to keep abreast of all the good work your book-dollars are doing! We want to hear from you, too - don't be a stranger - as we want this process to be as transparent as possible (+$165,000 funds raised & profits donated by breadpig so far).

http://www.badscience.net/2008/09/dave-ford-from-durham-council-plays-at-being-a-scientist-again/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid#Developmental_disorders

I can highly recommend Bad Science by Ben Goldacre if you want to understand why your sons might have shown apparent improvement, without the Omega-3 supplements being the cause. It's a wonderful book which helps you understand the world around you in ways you never thought possible.

There's a children's book by Bill Brittain -- All The Money In The World -- that examines this question in great detail. A very entertaining read for 9-year-old me.

So, there is this book that I thought was pretty good!

This book has a nice ELI5-style chapter on these voting systems. And it's just generally a really good book.

https://smile.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Wrong-Mathematical/dp/0143127535/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496252174&sr=8-1&keywords=how+not+to+be+wrong

If you are looking for a gaming laptop, I just bought one of these for myself and one for the wife and it's great! https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B072QT88DG/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

NB: I'm done with the whole set now. A whole bunch of "blocks" seem to have gotten tangled up in the spam filter. With this subreddit's largely inactive moderation, I have no idea how to fix this. If you want to read all of my answers, go through the last few pages of my profile's submitted comments.

Second note: Since this has blown up on /r/bestof, I think I should clarify that the star/no-star thing isn't me trying to show off how how little I need to look up stuff because I'm all-knowing and infallible - it's to indicate that I HAVEN'T LOOKED UP THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION - I MIGHT BE WRONG. Common ones I've been corrected on are the // thing, the svchost thing, the trees-in-fields issue and the moustaches on cars. Bullets are blunt for aerodynamic reasons, Poseidon actually favoured the Greeks and it was all down to the son-killing. With that caveat in place, here we go:

Answers - first "box" (starred ones are ones I had to look up):

Why do whales jump*?
No-one knows exactly, though it's theorised that socialising is part of it, as its a far more common behaviour in pods than with lone whales.

Why are witches green?
There are theories floating around that it's to link them with death/putrefaction or plants/herbs. Personally, I think it's mostly because of the popularity of the film version of The Wizard of Oz, where the green skin was chosen partly to indicate she's a bad guy in a kid's fantasy world, and partly because it helped demonstrate their new Technicolour technology.

Why are there mirrors above beds? Ask your parents when you're older. Or don't, since you'll probably work it out by yourself by then. If you mean on the wall behind beds, I've never really seen this as common, but mirrors help to give the impression that the room is larger than it actually is.

Why do I say uh? This is a phenomenon called "speech dysfluency". Again, no definitive answer but often explained as placeholders while you struggle to find the word you use next. If you mean "why uh as opposed to, say, quorpl", different languages have different dysfluencies. You say uh/um because you speak English or another language that uses the same sound for this purpose.

Why is sea salt better? It's not really, it just has a cachet to it these days as panning is a more labour-intensive process and the added expense means more exclusivity. Prior to industrialised salt-making, people wanted finer-grained salt. There's a REALLY interesting book on the subject by Mark Kurlansky, if you want to know more about the history of the stuff.

Why are there trees in the middle of fields? They provide shade for field-workers during breaks. Less relevant now with increasing mechanisation, so most are there these days because they've "always" been there, and getting rid of trees is a bitch of a job.

Why is there not a Pokemon MMO*? The creator wanted (and still wants) to encourage people to play games with one another face to face. MMOs don't work like that.

Why is there laughing in TV shows? Because comedy shows with laugh tracks have historically outperformed those without them. People might bitch about them, the same way people bitch about trailers that give away too much of the story, but market research shows that you get more butts in seats regardless of the bitching, so that's the way they do it. I believe that the data on laugh tracks is coming back differently these days, which is why they're largely fading out.

Why are there doors on the freeway? Maintenance access. That or portals to alternate realities, depending on whether you've read 1Q84.

Why are there so many svchost.exe running? Failsafing. The svchost processes handle background services for the operating system. You have a lot of them because it means that if there's an error with one service (and hence one svchost process) it doesn't bring down the whole thing. There are other ways of handling this, but this is the way that Windows chose to go.

Why aren't there any countries in Antarctica? The Antarctic Treaty of (let me look it up) 1961 disallowed signatories from taking permanent territorial sovereignty of the continent. This hasn't stopped countries claiming chunks of land (including overlapping claims like the Argentine-British annoyance) but in practice access is shared for scientific research. Tat said, I expect that if it ever became economically worthwhile to actually start exploiting the resources in Antarctica, the Treaty would go up in a puff of smoke.

Why are there scary sounds in Minecraft? Because they add to a sense of danger, which gives a bit more of a thrill to players. It also gives another incentive to avoid Creepers, as the explosion scares the bejeezus out of me every time, even without the environmental damage.

Why is there kicking in my stomach? - you know those sticks you can buy that you pee on and get one line or two? You might want to go and get one of those. And then schedule an appointment with a doctor.

Why are there two slashes after http? Syntax - it separates the protocol being used (ftp being an alternative) from the address you're looking for.

Reminds me of Orbital Resonance. Fantastic book.

I read a book last year that directly targets this kind of "forced positivity":

Bright Sided: Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. It's a very interesting read and even delves into the Wall Street meltdown and how being perpetually optimistic may have contributed to it. I highly recommend checking it out - regardless of whether or not you subscribe to the author's views.

It's discussed quite a bit in this book.

He doesn't specifically address the shopkeeper, but the peeing in clam chowder is for sure discussed. And I believe the soap stuff is discussed. I haven't read the book in a couple of years.

My friend had the same problem in terms of hearing back from them so I ended up ordering my XKCD book from Amazon instead. It arrived in 2 days with Prime.

I can help with the dying/reaching up one. During death, the psycho-active drug known as 'DMT' is released from the pineal gland into the person's bloodstream. In Rick Strassman's studies of the drug, patients were given a 'hit' of the drug, purely to test how their bodies and minds would react. It was extremely common for that person to reach out for the other people in the room, both the doc in the room and the nurse(s).

Could be related, not sure. Check out the book if you're interested: http://www.amazon.com/DMT-Molecule-Revolutionary-Near-Death-Experiences/dp/0892819278

Randall needs to get together with R.A. Wilson and publish an updated and illustrated edition of Everything is Under Control.

You should read the book FOOP!

Read more here.

Infinite Jest is the only book I have read where the footnotes have footnotes.

That strip is like a rash, all over statistics textbooks.
From: http://www.amazon.com/Research-Methods-Psychology-Glynis-Breakwell/dp/0857022644/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1345772667&sr=1-2
http://imgur.com/k1bJ0

Sorry that I ask, but after seeing tons of these posts recently, is it this book that pictures are from?

I was first introduced to the Orion concept in Footfall over 15 years ago and it has stuck in my mind since.

I believe that's a comic from the book "Man, I Hate Cursive: Cartoons for People and Advanced Bears" by Jim Benton.
link

Ask what day, hour, minute, and second it will be in 30 days. Let's try to figure this out.

Some months have 30 days, others have 31, except for one fucker that has 28 days, except every 4 years it has 29, except it's still 28 if it's also a year evenly divisible by 100, except it still is if it's evenly divisible by 400. Write in all those exceptions.

Since we want to be accurate to the second, we need to take leap seconds into account. These aren't on a set schedule like leap years are. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service keeps track of how atomic clocks are tracking with the physical location of the Earth. They announce the need for a leap second every six months. You'll need to keep a database up to date with future leap seconds.

Need to cross a time zone? Now you've done it. You might think going from Pacific to Mountain timezones in the US just means adding or subtracting an hour. Except if you're going through Arizona; they don't believe in Daylight Savings Time in Arizona (good for them), so things depend on the time of year.

If you need to calculate sufficiently far back, then you need to account for the fact that there are 10 days missing in October of 1582.

If you happen to be be writing software for a few of the Old Calendarist sects of the Orthodox Church, you better not use any of that heritical Gregorian Calendar shit that puts Easter on the wrong day.

This is by no means comprehensive. There's literally a 500 page book on the subject of calculating dates. Modern timekeeping is the result of centuries of hacks upon hacks. By the time computers came along, it was already a huge mess with no way to clean it up.