Agreed. These are genuinely difficult problems that aren’t going to get solved by our current crop of silicon valley “geniuses”.

CRISPR is the closest we get It might be the honorary winner since it was wasn’t fully exploited until the 21st century, even though it was cloned and being used in the 90s.

We had a 3d printer in the 90s at my Uni. It built layers with laser cut paper lol. It was the cheapest version available and it lived in the engineering department for rapid prototyping. This link says they were invented in 1981, metal sintering was added in 1988 and fused filament in 1989. https://ultimaker.com/learn/the-complete-history-of-3d-printing

You’re not wrong. But there are counter examples. I was going to use the example of the jet engine in my last answer as a true paradigm shifting development that had immediate impact. And in the mid-century period too! Or the first powered flight occurred in the first decade of the 20th century and had an immediate impact. The transistor and solid state electronics would be another example.

So let me flip it around and say we’ve had a quarter century without a major technological breakthrough. There’s been progress, but it feels incremental. I spent a night with a physicist a few years ago who was arguing that progress is slowing because we are still relying on the exploitation of Newtonian physics. There are a few technologies that have made the leap to nuclear physics. But we’ve had the basics of quantum physics for a century now and haven’t been able to exploit it in a useful fashion.

OLEDs were built in 1987 I saw my first VR demonstration in the 90s (and it wasn’t cutting edge then). I saw my first AR demonstration then as well as part of an undergraduate engineering fair. And so on. I just looked up maglev trains - in commercial use since 1984.

I don’t disagree that there hasn’t been refinements, improvements, or commercialization of technology, but there hasn’t been a technological leap or invention that I can think of in the 21st century.

I’m genuinely not sure that anything has been invented in the 21st century.

Detachable penis if you’ve never heard the song.

But we had Dick Nixon, Dick Cavett, and Dick van Dyke during that period.And lots more. So I don’t think that’s it.

Penis.

Cauda

Penis is derived from the Latin for “tail”. As penis came to mean schlong over time, Latin switched to cauda. Dick only became a euphemism for the fuckstick in the 1980s. Why? I have no idea. But other proper names are/have been used including “Peter”, “Johnson”, and “John Thomas” that I can think of off the top of my head.

There are layers of variability there that can’t be captured with a line plot. The data density is too high to even capture the decanal progression in a useful way, forget about monthly and annual variability . So no.

This is a really interesting visualization. I love the density of the data and the way it captures the year over year variability by month while allowing the annual variability to plainly stand out. This is really good.

Waiting for those fuckers to retire? You bet.

Sticks and stones can break my bones, But names can never hurt me.

So Greece has a problem. Well 👍

It’s real, but cobbled together from multiple sources. For instance we haven’t referred to the “reticular activating system” since maybe the 1980s? They call it the “reticular arousal system” which is either a neologism or maybe a reactivation of the term in the literature. I haven’t been active in the area in over a decade.

I’ll note that this broadly accurate on a macro level, but the details really matter. There are different cortical layers for instance and cell types and the nature of the signal processing differs by layer. So saying “X connects to Y” is useful in some sense, but provides much less information than you might imagine.

This is part of my actual area of expertise. They mis-labeled the locus coeruleus as being “stress”. Arousal would be more correct. They also missed Barrington’s Nucleus right next to it which controls micturition. Absolute trash.

Laughs in Edmonton.

Laughs in Edmonton.

No. But it’s getting there. In business continuity we used to be advised to keep a POTS (plain old telephone service) line around because it would the last service to go down and the first one to come up. About a year ago we were advised that we shouldn’t bother. The copper lines convert to VOIP at a switch station.