xkcd.WTF!?

Explanation ➲

A deviled egg is a dish created by cutting a hard-boiled egg into halves and replacing the yolk with a paste frequently made using the yolk itself, additional ingredients such as mustard and mayonnaise, and topped with a red spice (usually paprika). Importantly, the paste has a larger volume than the original yolk because of the ingredients (and probably some air) added into the originally homogeneous yolk substances. Randall Munroe parodies the dish by creating several alternative versions of the dish for other professions using word plays on the name of the dish.

Chef - Deviled egg

The original dish with the excess paste piled above the egg white.

Landscaper - Leveled egg

Many landscaping projects involve leveling irregular ground surfaces. A landscaper may prefer to serve their deviled egg with a leveled flat surface. (This happens to resemble a normal hard-boiled egg cut in half.)

Designer - Beveled egg

Bevels are a design pattern of creating non-perpendicular surfaces between adjacent edges. A designer may prefer to serve their egg with the edge of the white beveled to give their eggs a more modern, aesthetically pleasing look.

Physicist - Demon egg

This deviled egg is designed to look like the Demon Core which was a sub-critical plutonium sphere manufactured during the Manhattan Project to investigate the properties of criticality. The Demon Core consisted of three parts: two plutonium-gallium hemispheres and a ring designed to keep neutron flux from "jetting" out of the joined surface between the hemispheres during implosion. The set of plutonium pieces got their name from the 2 criticality incidents that occurred when scientists were investigating this property. The first accident resulted in the death of Harry Daghlian. In the second incident, experimenters covered the core with two neutron reflecting shells separated only by a handheld screwdriver. The screwdriver slipped, causing the core to become completely covered by the neutron reflecting shell, bringing the core past its criticality limit. A large amount of radiation caused the subsequent death of physicist Louis Slotin. The dome of the boiled egg and the toothpick resemble the configuration of the experiment. The demon core was also referred to in 1242: Scary Names.

The title text refers to ionized-air glow, a blue light emitted by air submitted to an energy flux from radiation and seen during the incidents involving the demon core.

For a detailed explanation of the Demon Core, Kyle Hill produced an Youtube Documentary regarding the Demon Core.