Lawnmower Boy

Don't worry.  It'll get named after some dead white guy.

We lost a member of the gaming group this week, and not my wife, who is still contending with cancer.  Instead, it was another guy, three years younger than me, who succumbed to a case of non-Hodgkins lymphoma that was recognized less than a month ago.  (If you have unexplained pain in your shoulders, get yourself checked; it seems to be due to crosstalk between nerves that go on into the vital organs.)  I knew he was ill and had been diagnosed, but apparently he underwent total organ failure on Wednesday or Thursday.  Last night's gaming session was a remembrance.  For reference, the core of this gaming group started in the late 1970s, and I joined up with it in 1989 or so.

I wholeheartedly concur that restrictions on research for political purposes (as demonstrated with regard to firearms) is unacceptable. Research should not be limited because we don’t like the implications.
 
The massive spike in suicide is worth research separate and apart from gun violence. We’ve seen our hotline calls more than double in the past two years, with much younger demographics (although still predominantly male). I would like to see greater focus on causal factors and potential interventions. I realize that’s complicated and likely political in nature, but without good research it’s very hard to craft interventions (which is literally my job). I know a lot of the historical reasons, they have been stable for 30+ years. Recent increases are likely attributed to social isolation, and other negative impacts of the necessary pandemic response, but interventions have lagged well behind the skyrocketing rates… with mobile response implementations delayed in California until at least 2025. While I understand the reticence to delve into the potentially negative impacts of our other health interventions, the opportunity through the nation wide “988” number shouldn’t be missed. 
 
Anyway, more research and support for social policy based on data is typically a good thing and I would hope for more of it (rather than additional restrictions).
 
 Edit: In case anyone’s interested in a reputable data source. https://suicidology.org

The Turakian Age might be about right as it is a fairly standard Fantasy. 

I started to post a theoretical game scenerio about an artificial intelligence terrified for her lost freedom hoping to see how others would have their heroes react...
 
then I realized "I've done this before"
 
I think my brain is calcifying.

Well, she made her point early on.  Particular fundamental problems have existed in subatomic physics, and those were solved by hypothesizing unknown particles; antiparticles in general, the neutrino, the Higgs; she doesn't mention the J/psi but that's another example.  Finding new resonances in the subatomic zoo, while useful for some cross-checks, has not been of such fundamental utility since the discovery of the Higgs.
 
There are fundamental problems now, but they are on a different level.  The Standard Model is incomplete ... but we have not been able to reach regimes to point toward hints of where the incompleteness lies nearest our abilities to explore via experiment.  And as much as theoreticians would like to tell you otherwise, it is experiment that has always guided theory toward more fundamental insight.
 
(If you need an example from a different field, go look at theories about planets and planetary physics from the 1950s.  Limited as we were back then to observations from groundbased telescopes with photographic or simple photoelectric detectors, there was lots we could neither know nor guess in that era.)
 
The phenomenon of whipping up speculative particle models from fragmentary accelerator data is practice by the particle theoreticians for when something real comes.  It's like practices in pro sports.  No one is all that interested in them, but you gotta do those in order to stay in shape for the real deal.
 
 

Another reviewer would point out that the table is of little use when upside-down or sideways, and ask the creator to speculate on improvements to fix that.

The tacos in question
 

We have no idea how many asteroids the dinosaurs managed to deflect before failing to stop the one that caused their extinction.  For all we know, it was Dinosaurs 17, Mammals 1.

Just because I choose not to drink, that doesn't automatically make me no fun. That is a separate choice that I have also made.