Lucius

Actually I've heard blacks were buying guns at record numbers due to trump's election. https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/trump-s-victory-has-fearful-minorities-buying-guns-n686881

The Article At BoingBoing

Could this hold the record for longest RPG campaign?

Girl builds a better way to detect Lead to help folks in Flint and elsewhere

Working on laminated armor; yes, you can make effective, light armor out of linen. Its light and tough enough to protect from light archery and will protect well from weapons. Its also pretty cheap and easy to make compared to forged armor. A historical group at a university worked on recreating Greek armor and here's what they discovered.
 
Basically its layers of linen with a laminating material -- they used 'rabbit glue' but there are reports of using wax as well.  The material is very resilient and even softens slightly over time to fit to yoru body better.  This is armor you could make at home with available supplies and be ready for war.
 
So that's part of the mix for players to choose from.  Its light enough that it won't encumber much (good for casters) and actually protects better against arrows than a lot of much more resilient armor.

I heard he was famous for inventing a new ligature, the Rather Knot.

Then it wasn't such a big fan, was it?
 
Lucius Alexander
 

The palindromedary says
 

The Speed of Light Beer maybe

I'm also up for making a serious contribution. Here's Snopes on this emerging urban myth/fake news. The facts here rate as "mixture," but the attribution as a single story by Dan Rather seems to be an invention.

I've been looking for an original source for this story directly from Dan Rather. I've seen several repostings attributing it to Rather, but no original.
 
Not saying he didn't write it, or that it's not true; but we need to be better than everyone spreading unverified reports these days.

In addition to what Rather reports below, there are other indications that a) we were there supporting Russian interests for some bizarre reason, and forces from Chad, which has been a valuable ally against terrorist groups, had been removed from the area because the administration attempted to put Chad on the travel ban list.
From Dan Rather re: Niger:
"While everyone is so busy talking about Trump's #fakepresidenthandling of his call to the widow of the soldier killed in Niger, you're all missing the important part of that story -- the part about what happened that night in Niger.
Here's what we know so far:
These soldiers went to a meeting in an area near the border with Mali. This is a well known hot spot for ISIS activity.
Our soldiers were not backed up by US Military air support. No, they were backed up by the French, who were not authorized to intervene or even fire a shot.
Our soldiers did not have armored vehicles. They traveled in pickup trucks.
Our soldiers were given faulty intel that said "it was unlikely that they would meet any hostile forces." Of course, they walked into an ISIS ambush. It was chaotic and they took three casualties.
It took the French 30 minutes to arrive. When they did, they were not authorized to help. So, a dozen of our Green Berets fought a battle with more than 50 ISIS fighters, without help, for 30 minutes.
Finally, a rescue helicopter arrived, but it was not a US military helicopter. No, we apparently outsourced that job to “private contractors.” So, these contractors landed and loaded the remaining troops, the injured and the dead.
Here's where this gets really bad ....
Because they were not military, they never did a head count. That is how Sgt. La David Johnson was left behind.
That's right .... they left him behind.
According to the Pentagon, his locator beacon was activated on the battlefield, which indicates that he was alive when they left him there.
They recovered his body 48 hours later, but are refusing to say where. According to his widow, she was told that she could not have an open casket funeral. This indicates that he was mutilated after being left behind on the battlefield.
This is what led to the nonsense we're obsessing over. This is the real story. As usual, you're allowing it to be about Trump's distraction.
The Trump Pentagon gave these men bad intel, no support, outsourced rescue people and then tried for more than a week to pretend it never happened.
In that time, Trump spoke on many occasions and never mentioned it. He tweeted attacks on many but never mentioned these men.
Only after pressure from the media has he bothered to even acknowledge these men and their service."
Please COPY & PASTE to share

https://archive.org/services/img/elementsofnoneuc00carsuoft
 
For your pulp hero scholar's bookshelf.

1d6 random tables are even odds but 2d6 tables have a bell curve.
 
e.g. rolling a 1-1 is the only way to get a Brick (2), but a 1-5 2-4 3-3 4-2 or 5-1 gives a Mentalist (6).
 
This makes Mentalists that much more common than Bricks.

((OFF TOPIC)) 
This is an aluminum foil recipe. Serves one. Make multiple separate packets if you are serving more than one.
 
Chicken part (I'm a white meat guy, so it was usually a breast)
1/8 to 1/4-inch thick slice of a medium onion
Garlic powder (two scant pinches)
Dried oregano (two scant pinches)
Bottled Russian salad dressing (two generous teaspoons)
 
Comment: The Russian dressing has honey in it (most salad dressings don't) which makes the baked juice have a nice glaze to it. Other dressings are a real step down.
 
Lay out the foil. Cut the onion slice in half. Separate the rings of one half of the slice, and array them on top of the middle of the foil.
 
Sprinkle a pinch of garlic powder and pinch of oregano over the onion.
 
Pour 1 teaspoon of the salad dressing over the onion.
 
Lay the chicken part atop everything.
 
Repeat the first few steps: separated onion ring halves, garlic powder, oregano, salad dressing, but everything goes on top of the chicken.
 
Roll up the foil to make a sealed packet. Take care to bend the ends up, and don't puncture the foil, so the juice doesn't escape the packet while cooking.
 
Bake on an oven sheet or pizza pan. Starting with a cold oven and a frozen chicken breast right out of the freezer (c'mon, what bachelor remembers to thaw anything?), set your oven for 400 F and the timer for an hour.
 
I prefer to serve this with rice; put a mound of rice on the plate, pick open one end of the packet and pour the juice over the rice. Then open the packet the rest of the way and put the rest on the plate. Strangely, Worcestershire sauce is a good table condiment with this.
 
Note only the knife and the cutting surface and knife are dirtied in the prep process. No pans, unless the foil leaks. Fairly long cooking time, but tasty enough to prepare and serve for a prospective S.O. and even prospective mother-in-law.
 
Five stars. Joe Bob says check it out.

Putting this here for Lucius, since it's prose follow-up to something in the haiku thread.
 
There seem to be three flavor eigenstates, or just flavors, of neutrinos: each neutrino is associated with a lepton. Electron neutrinos go with electrons (and anti-electrons, a/k/a positrons). Muon neutrinos go with muons and their antiparticle. Tau neutrinos go with tau leptons. These flavors matter for reactions with other particles. As an example, an isolated neutron is unstable and it will decay into a proton, an electron, and a neutrino. That neutrino is *always* an electron neutrino. There are other reactions that will produce particles including a muon and a neutrino. In such a reaction, that neutrino is *always* a muon neutrino.
 
If messed with, though, one flavor of neutrino can turn into a different flavor. That is, once an electron neutrino is made, somewhere later in its travel if you try catching it, it may no longer be an electron neutrino; it may be a muon neutrino.
 
This can only happen if the neutrinos have a nonzero mass (in the original concept, and for decades thereafter, it was assumed they were massless) and if the masses are modestly different and the actual "real masses" of the neutrinos are not exactly the same as the average massese of the three neutrino flavors. In that case, a neutrino in one of these "mass eigenstates" will be a mixture of more than one of the flavors, and the probability of finding a particular neutrino as a particular flavor varies as the neutrino travels. It oscillates among the flavors.
 
We have seen this in more than one way. The "solar neutrino problem" was the situation that Ray Davis's chlorine-based experiment for detecting neutrinos from the Sun did detect neutrinos, but only about 40% of the predicted number; this problem persisted from the mid-1960s into the 1990s. During that time it was the only means capable of detecting solar neutrinos, but because it involved a reaction that made an electron, it could only detect electron neutrinos. An exhaustive theoretical analysis of the solar interior model showed that every possible adjustment to the solar model made the discrepancy worse. With the development of adequate neutrino detectors in the 1990s, capable of seeing both electron and muon neutrinos, the "flavor oscillation" was seen both in neutrinos made by particle accelerators and in the solar neutrinos. Including the effects of the oscillations turns the chlorine experiment's result into a full success, with the brilliant link to then-unknown physics operating in the neutrinos.
 
Finally, the word "eigenstates" is from mathematics; it refers to the "characteristic vectors" of a matrix of equations (linear algebra). In intermediate physics problems for coupled oscillators, the behavior of the system looks messy if you try describing it in terms of the individual oscillators, but is much easier to understand if expressed in these characteristic vectors, which describe the natural modes of oscillation of the *system*, not the individual pieces of the system.

Six quarks, three colors
(and their anti-versions) make
Mesons and baryons

She: You're wasting your time here.
Me: Nor am I the only one, I suspect.
 
Lucius Alexander
 
Sometimes I waste the palindromedary's time.

Allow me to take
This opportunity to
Say: you quark me up!
 
Lucius Alexander
 
 
The palindromedary is reminding me I have someplace else to be now

You're a strange one, aren't you?

These particles are
Elementary: Bosons,
Also Fermions.
 
Fermions have spin
That is half-integer always
Never integer
 
Fermions follow
Fermi-Dirac Statistics
(Note how they are named)
 
Bosons have integer
Spin, Bose-Einstein Statistics
(Again, note the name)
 
Lucius Alexander
 
The palindromedary hopes I get around to haiku about quarks, as they can be charming

These particles are
Elementary: Bosons,
Also Fermions.
 
Fermions have spin
That is half-integer always
Never integer
 
Fermions follow
Fermi-Dirac Statistics
(Note how they are named)
 
Bosons have integer
Spin, Bose-Einstein Statistics
(Again, note the name)
 
Lucius Alexander
 
The palindromedary hopes I get around to haiku about quarks, as they can be charming

"The fact that a high school student needs a permission slip to read Fahrenheit 451 is proof that someone completely missed the point of the book."

Seems like a good enough explanation of the ending to qualify for a No Prize.

I'm digging the No-Prize reference!  I actually "won" one of those, back in the day.  I received a very colorful envelope (Hulk was on it, IIRC) with nothing in it.
 
It's not like the other Trek series didn't engage in techno-babble and play fast and loose with science, so the 'dark matter storm' didn't bother me much.  But time travel stories are difficult to pull off and Seth didn't quite get it right.
 
I find myself like this show so far.  It's earnest, and reverential of the source material... errr, inspirational material... while giving it a goose here and there at the same time.