exasperation

There's evidence piling up that there is an inverse correlation between outdoor time in childhood and nearsightedness. It's believed that the brightness of sunlight helps stimulate eye growth in a spherical shape, whereas children who don't get a lot of sunlight are more likely to have eyes grow in a non-spherical shape with greater distance between the lens and the retina.

You can search the scientific literature for myopia and childhood sun exposure for a large number of studies on the topic.

Does screen time correlate with myopia? Maybe, but through the confounding variable that both stats tend to be inversely correlated with sunlight exposure.

And on the flip side, when you're singing a little improvised song and your coworker prevents you from resolving the melody, it can be frustrating.

That JNCO era was really something.

You're commenting from a .nl instance and aren't aware of the 400+ year old timber buildings in the Netherlands, or the fact that there's a current project to build the tallest timber skyscraper in the world in Eindhoven?

The different style guides are designed for their particular environments. Most American newspapers and magazines follow AP, but most book publishers follow Chicago. Academics in the humanities tend to follow MLA, while academics in the social sciences tend to use APA. Hell, IEEE has a style guide for electrical engineers.

So do whatever you prefer. I tend to use Chicago because that's what I know best, but I have worked professionally in writing and editing publications that followed the Chicago rules.

Making houses out of wood.

This is fine. Lumber was historically plentiful in North America, and lumber houses last just as long as stone or brick.

Lumber has several advantages over stone/concrete/brick:

• Less CO2 impact from construction activities. Concrete production is a huge contributor to atmospheric CO2.
• Greater sustainability in general. Concrete is approaching a global sand shortage, because most sand in the world doesn't have the right qualities to be included in concrete.
• Better energy efficiency and insulation properties. Brick homes need double walls in order to compete with the insulation properties of a wood framed house that naturally has voids that can be filled with insulation.
• Better resilience against seismic events and vibrations (including nearby construction). The west coast has frequent earthquakes, and complying with seismic building code with stone/masonry requires it to be reinforced with steel. The state of Utah, where trees and lumber are not as plentiful as most other parts of North America, and where seismic activity happens, has been replacing unreinforced masonry for 50+ years now.
• Easier repair. If a concrete foundation cracks, that's easier to contain and mitigate in a wood-framed house than a building with load-bearing concrete or masonry.

Some Northern European and North American builders are developing large scale timber buildings, including timber skyscrapers. The structural engineers and safety engineers have mostly figured out how to engineer those buildings to be safe against fire and tornadoes.

It's not inherently better or worse. It's just different.

The two dominant style guides in the U.S. (Chicago Manual of Style and the A.P. Stylebook) prescribe no spaces around em dashes. When I do professional writing I default to Chicago, so I learned to eventually omit spaces around em dashes. That's still my main way of distinguishing myself, for now.

I think you've hit perfectly why I don't like the "unalive" and related euphemisms for death. Death, especially violent death, is a big fucking deal, and trying to obscure that impact behind vague or even cutesy words, makes it seem mundane or routine and accessible.

Every plant named in this meme, not just the ones on the girl, is a nightshade.

Even if you pay for a product, your user data is probably still being monetized.

Kettlebells are great for those with limited storage space and budget, to extend beyond what you can do with bodyweight exercise alone.

If you want to get as fit as you can and don't have any equipment, simply adding a pull up bar to a doorway and having a kettlebell in the house can really open up a lot of options for building more strength and doing stronger cardio routines.

But if you have the space for it, traditional strength equipment (barbell and weights, rack, bench) is probably better for strength.

I liken it to a cast iron skillet: if forced to limit myself to one thing, it would probably be this thing, but in a well-equipped setting it would rarely be my first choice to actually use.

We have plenty of studies that exercise improves sleep, both in people with regular sleep patterns and those struggling with insomnia.

This particular study, which concludes that yoga and tai chi are even better than most exercise, seems to be based on more limited data.

Rather than chase after the type of exercise that has the best results in a particular study, it's probably better to try for the type of exercise you're most likely to stick with on a regular basis, for better adherence to the general idea of regular exercise. Then get the general benefits of exercise, including improved sleep, that have been broadly proven with many studies.