In my suburban high school social world, before cell phones:

• Loitering around shopping malls
• Showing up to the movie theater an hour or two before the movie we all agreed to watch together, and then an hour or two after.
• Parks and playgrounds if the weather was ok
• Cafes, diners, restaurants where lingering was tolerated, even for those who didn't order anything.
• Local sporting events (usually high school or rec league teams).

A lot of these still exist in some degree, but the loss of malls and movie theaters has really put a damper on things, and the rise of cell phones has deemphasized the need for in person interactions with peers (rather than following an influencer on social media).

Y'all have never been to court ordered alcoholics anonymous meetings and it shows.

Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the first known version of the Serenity Prayer, and it's been through a few revisions just by popular word of mouth or even literal Hallmark greeting cards, but the version they say at AA meetings is:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

The basic principle can be decoupled from the religious origins and still be a useful approach to life. Learn not to stress about the things not in your control, while still taking control of the influence you do have.

I'm not sure the complaint about the MED questionnaire calls the study itself into question.

The study followed people who did follow randomized selection criteria in earlier studies, so the initial weight loss and fat loss did come out of a randomized protocol. Then, years later, they showed that those original random selections did have long lasting effects in visceral fat deposits, even for those who gained all their weight back. So far, we've got evidence that randomized interventions work at reducing visceral fat, which strongly suggests causation.

Then, they showed correlations between low visceral fat and other cognitive effects, and brain scan effects, suggesting causation there, too.

They did mention that they used the MED score in multivariate analysis, but didn't try to make any particular casual or even correlative link with that MED variable itself. They just put it in so that MED scores didn't show up as a confounding variable.

In other words: reducing visceral fat is good for the brain, and we're pretty sure there's causation here. Looking at people's self reported diets did not disrupt that core finding.

There's some evidence that healthy low carb diets are more effective than healthy low fat diets at changing the ratio of visceral fat to subcutaneous fat.

And another meta study suggests that it's more effective to exercise more (even if you end up eating more) than to solely restrict calorie consumption.

I mean, the much more obvious sources of lead are paint and pipes, which are still present in many homes. The federal government estimates that about 30% of homes still have lead-based paint, and one nonprofit estimates that about 20% of utilities still have lead pipes somewhere in use. One depressing estimate is that roughly 70% of children in Chicago, the US's third largest city, are in households served by lead pipes.

Gun use may lead to lead exposure, sure, but lead itself was such a commonly used substance that guns aren't the only source of lead.

But my argument is that even if the MED score is completely worthless, and completely ignored by the study design, the causation and correlation between the actual variables people care about are there: those randomly selected for interventions in prior studies now have less visceral fat, and score higher on certain cognitive measures, even if they gained all their weight back.

I'm not disagreeing with you about how much value the MED scores provide. I'm just looking at how the study used the MED scores and I'm satisfied that what you're describing doesn't affect the core findings.

My argument is that quibbling about definitions only works when we're talking about strict legal definitions, and the thing with the law is that the definitions are whatever the lawmakers want them to be. As a result, the legal definitions depend on context and place (such that an American legal definition would not apply in Canada or France or India), so any global discussion of guns should stay away from legal definitions.

There's a whole world of firearms that are legally classified by the ATF as pistols, but that are visually, ergonomically, and tactically indistinguishable from submachineguns that happen to fire semiautomatic, complete with a brace and where adding a foregrip might change the legal status. That's all I was referring to with my pistol comment: the legal definitions have diverged from common understanding of what types of firearms fall into which types of categories.

You can go out and complain that the word assault rifle should only apply to automatic/burst/select fire rifles, but that's not what anyone else means when they describe assault rifles in a colloquial sense. If you're talking the strict legal definition, well, the 1994 law had a strict legal definition of assault weapons covering semiautos, too.

So my original point is simple: interjecting into a conversation about guns in a colloquial and cultural discussion, and insisting on the WWII military definition of assault rifle is out of place, especially when plenty of automatic weapons would not qualify under that definition. This discussion wasn't the place for you to make that argument about definitions.

I think a causal relationship can be inferred, based on the proposed mechanism: firearms tend to have lead dust on them, and failing to properly store firearms tends to lead to cross contamination with living spaces, especially carpets and the floor where babies crawl and put things in their mouth.

The next step should be to investigate a link between safe storage practices and environmental lead content in the home: in the carpets, etc.

Gun people insisting that the word "assault rifle" only applies to automatic or select fire rifles (or better yet, doesn't apply to carbines or submachine guns) because it's a fixed definition set by Adolf Hitler himself (seriously, it's a calque from WWII Germany) is a tired and irrelevant argument.

If we're gonna be sticklers for definitions, the 1994 assault weapons legislation made a strict legal definition, and that's what most people mean when they're describing that.

But whatever you want to call two-handed firearms with detachable magazines, whether they fit the WWII definition, the Army field manual definition, the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban definition, or whatever else, I think everyone knows what people are talking about. Even if it's technically a carbine or a submachine gun or a pistol with a foregrip.

We're not negotiating a legal document, we're just talking about gun culture generally on an internet forum.

People are allowed to have their own preferences different from mine, but I'm always thrown off by the number of comments on the internet who insist they don't care about boob size.

Personally, I'm like the fake straight persona that Captain Holt puts on in Brooklyn 99: "I see a pair of thick, weighty breasts and all logic flies out the window."

Plastic injection molding doesn't require a lot of hands, but it does require a relatively skilled supervision of the process and the assembly line.

As a result, plastic toys aren't a good candidate for child labor. It's just not cost effective compared to automated systems.

Stuffed toys, though, may benefit from tiny fingers doing fine stitching, so maybe that would've been a better candidate for comics like this.

I'm imagining a set of big naturals

I don't understand any dog barks

That's obviously false. Any dog owner knows when their dog is begging for help getting something out of reach or being let in/out of a gate, which barks mean "hey someone's at the door" or "squirrel" and which yelps mean pain. Beyond that, growls and body language can communicate quite a bit, too.

City planners in the 60s favored male trees for this reason. Then air pollution and a warming climate, mixed with all that extra pollen, gave rise to a huge increase in seasonal allergies in urban areas.

In an episode of Nathan Fielder's Nathan for You, he once convinced a haunted house to try a gimmick that it starts off normal, but halfway in the staff and management freak out that one of the staff accidentally touched a guest, pulls them aside out of the haunted house into normal lighting, and a whole biohazard suit team and ambulance has to quarantine the guest for a bit in a series of escalating interactions that they've contracted some highly contagious and deadly disease, before they reveal that it was all part of the haunted house.

Then a real lawyer is waiting at the end asking if they want to sue for emotional distress, because Nathan Fielder wants the haunted house to drum up publicity that it was so scary that they've been sued for it.

Isn't she just...Italian?

He was constructing his own languages and scripts in his teens, after having learned Anglo Saxon and Latin (and seeing how those fed into modern English), plus Esperanto.

He traveled all over Europe in the summers between university semesters, taking in the different landscapes, cultures, and languages.

He was a British Army Officer for World War I, leading units consisting of men from different backgrounds (class, education, trade) from his own. He devised a code system to bypass Army censors to keep his wife updated on his location and movements. And he experienced the horrors of being in the front lines of one of the most horrific wars in history.

Then after the war he became an accomplished academic, worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, specialized in Middle English and Old English translations, and translated several major works (including the definitive translation of Gawain and the Green Knight).

So by the time he started formally working on Lord of the Rings, he had built up such a rich set of experiences, skillsets, and knowledge that everything he knew was going into that world building.

No way a 25-year-old could have written Lord of the Rings. He needed 20+ years of adult experience to get to the point where he could write it.

Oysters have made the switch between poor people food and rich people food quite a few times. Tuna has made the switch in my lifetime. It probably has something to do with how easy they are to harvest/catch when plentiful versus the results of overfishing, and how delicate the food is in the supply chain.

Plain bread doesn't have sufficient water activity to support bacterial growth.

Focaccia is generally bread with oils/fats (oils aren't water so they don't contribute to water activity).

Sweetened pastries have more water in them, but have most of the water bound to sugar molecules so that there's not enough water activity to support bacterial growth.

But pizza has a water-based sauce on the crust, and often has moist toppings. That's why some pizzas become soggy over time. That's enough water activity to support microbial growth, including some microbes that cause illness. So pizza should be refrigerated.

Sarah's Scribbles is one of the better comics for drawing the author's self as pretty cute in most comics but knowing how to draw herself as an ugly goblin when the comic is making a point about insecurity or embarrassment around physical appearance.

That comic is basically the gold standard for how to convey those ideas in an otherwise cute art style.