I'm pretty sure that I was the one that came with the idea for adding them to generic text widgets when I implemented that in KDE (originally to add spell checking in KMail, since spell checking in email clients wasn't a thing yet). At that time spell checking was only done in word processors. Pretty quickly every other environment, including Windows and macOS followed suite.
A quirky thought: I'm very much an advocate of "free range parenting", and mostly grew up with it myself in the US, and it's what my kids have here in Germany. My 7 year old walks to school alone (in my neighborhood), my 10 year old takes the subway to school, and they have a large degree of freedom in our neighborhood, generally going to after-school activities on their own.
But I wonder if part of why people worried less in earlier generations is that we were so close to the time where childhood actually was dangerous: 100 years ago in the US, 20% of kids didn't live to adulthood (mostly because of diseases we can now prevent). I wonder if that had some cultural impact on perception of relative dangers.
Interestingly, after looking at this more closely, what I said is true of rakija, which is what I'm most familiar with (part of my family is Serbian), but appears to not be significantly true for grain distillates. Your sources mostly don't address these topics though; the latter one is mainly about copper and lead levels.
Batches under a certain size don't have a problem with methanol poisoning. You need a large enough batch that you get a high percentage of methanol in the "heads". Usually for batches under 100L, it's not an issue. A sensible policy would be limiting "home" distillation to 50L batches (which is a lot of booze; hard to argue you need more than that in a batch for private consumption).
This was my thought the first time I heard these talked about on a podcast where it talked about there being infinite cooling ... and I just kind of face-palmed because it was like, "This is being discussed by people who don't know things about space." We already have places on earth with effectively unlimited solar power and effectively unlimited cooling (though not the same places) but without having to launch stuff into space.
My fancy basses are a Lakland and a Sandberg (also German). But even, say, Ibanez was doing a lot of interesting stuff with low-cost instruments in the 90s, and on the high end there was Alembic, Modulus, Fodera, Ken Smith, hell, even Music Man (from Leo Fender), Tobias (and later MTD). Neck-through construction, active electronics, composite bodies, fiberglass necks. I don't want all of those things in my basses, but it was exciting to be able to try them. There was so much experimentation in basses at that time, but it was pretty rare with guitars. Again, Parker seemed to be the only well-known company doing it.
My theory has been that it was that bass guitar is a new instrument. Electric bass really isn't an electric double bass, but electric guitar is an electric version of a steel-string guitar. There was a lot of history and nostalgia in guitar playing, whereas bass was this new thing.
The other part of my theory is that bass amplification demanded it to some extent. Amplifying a bass was hard at the time. And it's come so incredibly far. Guitar players still basically use the same amps they did in 1965. But bass players moved quickly from tubes to transistors, and now to class-d amplifiers, and miniaturized speakers. My 500 watt amp weighs 1.1 kg and fits in the pocket of my gig back, and my 4x5" cab which handles 400 watts of power and goes down to 35 Hz is 30 x 30 x 30 cm and weighs 9.5 kg. Those together are smaller and weigh less than my 15 watt guitar tube amp.
Pretty much this. They were perfect guitars for the 80s that came out right smack in the middle of 90s grunge. They were shredder guitars right as shredding was going out of fashion.
I loved Parkers, even though I was way more a grunge person than a 80s person, but I'm mainly a bass player, and bass building is generally a lot less conservative than guitar building, and building with more exotic materials wasn't out of style for bass in the 90s, so Parkers kind of felt like a 90s guitar that had been built by a bass company.
Adderall is just speed, which also has a long history of recreational usage. It was a widely used recreational drug decades before it began being used for ADHD.
There are a few different orders within the catholic church with some of their own intellectual, practical and traditional differences. Most popes don't come from any of the orders. The last two popes did. That's historically odd. Francis had been the first one from his order ever, even though it's the largest one.
I'm also a Texan in Germany, and my German's good enough that it often takes people a few minutes to notice I'm not a native speaker. (Left the US at 21, am now 44.) I definitely also have a lot of German artifacts in my spoken English at this point. At one point I was given the attempted compliment of, "Wow, your English is really good" – because I apparently almost sound like a native speaker. ;-)
My children are 6 and 9 and we've raised them tri-lingual. They mostly sound native in all three, but their Serbo-Croatian and English have some German artifacts as well. Also their vocabulary isn't quite at the age-appropriate level in English since I'm basically the only person they regularly use it with, and if I don't use a word with them, they probably don't know it. This may start to change now that my oldest has also begun reading books in English. (That went surprisingly quickly; once he started with English classes in the third grade, within 3-6 months, he no longer had a definite preference for books in German over English.)
The trap to be careful of is if your family language is German that the kids eventually stop answering in their parent's language. This seems to be easier when three distinct languages are in play, possibly. Since I speak English with their mom (Serbian), there's less pull towards the "outside" language (German). Oddly, the language the speak with each other has remained Serbo-Croatian. I'd always expected that to eventually change to German, but seems unlikely at their current ages. We mostly attribute this to them having sometimes spent several weeks alone with their grandparents in Serbia when they were young, and that being the only time they only spoke a single language for up to a month, and that having solidified it as their preferred language.
This is the standard way that kids learn to ride bikes in Europe. Apparently the English word for them is "balance bikes". Both my kids could ride one of them when they were 2.
Berklee is a music school. There are some fields where being average at a decent school can still result in being pretty successful. By and large, music is not one of them. Being an average music school graduate probably means not getting to work in your field (or doing something auxiliary in it, like doing e.g. booking at a club or something). Like, if you get a degree in computer science from a top school, it's almost certain that you can find work as a computer programmer if you want to. That's not true if you get a degree in jazz guitar performance.
I wonder if being location based would be helpful? I'm not actually a heavy phone user, but I would guess that people are mainly using it as a distraction when they're at home or work, and less likely if they're out and about? (Though honestly, for me, the main thing I use my phone for at home / work is two-factor-authentication, and there it'd probably be annoying.)
Yeah, there's something off in the story. I went to public schools in one of the most poorly educated cities in the US and of course we were doing fractions when we were 7. 9th grade (admittedly "honors", so about a year ahead of non-honors students) was geometry / trigonometry. For non-honors I believe that was algebra.
I ended up with my first hot tea ever by ordering tea in Mexico, as I would have in Texas. I was very confused when I got a mug of water and a tea bag. I was 15-ish. I'd literally never heard of anyone drinking tea hot. (This was in the mid-90s, so reading stuff on the internet wasn't much of a thing.)
Europeans, on the other hand, seem to be baffled by the concept that iced tea is just, you know, cold black tea, not a soft drink you buy at the store. I've seriously had people ask me how to make it.