Shoes are sized for socks.

Platypus. So goofy looking on one hand. Poisonous spurs on the other.

A review paper from a reputable journal. The Annual Reviews series was great for this. Some of the Nature journals also used to run mini-reviews associated with research papers in the issue.

SHUTUP! ~it might hear.~

Because he’s a long way away. Longer than miles away…maybe…light years?

Because their continued employment depends on them hitting their targets so they need support staff to do their jobs.

I was married to a lawyer for years. They have to bill somewhere from 1700-2200 hours a year to stay on partner track. And they can’t bill every hour that they’re working (although they can double up sometimes by using the minimum 2/10ths of an hour). My sympathy is with the lawyer. It’s not a power dynamic, it’s how the firm makes money and what you’re there to do.

Happy Birthday has the kind of universal recognition you’d be looking for. Maybe in 300 years there’ll be a lyrical shift towards something more interesting. I know multiple versions of Greensleeves. The Cuckoo is the other song that I can think of with a long history. The wiki article doesn’t fully capture it. I’ll stick something in here later.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo_(song)

I’m not sure you can. I can see Sigma Aldrich selling it by the kilogram for research use. I’m not sure there is an approved human formulation. If it’s because of that gut paper lactulose is pretty easily available.

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.

Waiting for those fuckers to retire? You bet.