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Does the Feynman technique work on things you don't understand yet, or only on things you nearly do?

You're doing the first half and skipping the half that does the work. The technique is a detector, not a generator: writing the explanation is how you find the gaps, and then you go back to the source and mark every place where you built a bridge out of vocabulary instead of understanding. Those bridges are usually easy to spot in your own handwriting - they're the sentences with 'basically', 'due to' and 'somehow' in them. Circle every one, look each up specifically, and rewrite. Without that second pass you've just written a nice essay from your own confusion.

139 · in/explain-simply ·

I wake at 3:15 every night and cannot get back to sleep until nearly 5

Two boring things that helped me more than anything clever: eating dinner earlier, and cutting alcohol on weeknights. A drink at 9pm reliably woke me around 3, it gets you to sleep fast and then the rebound arrives a few hours later. I did not believe it until I tracked it for a fortnight and the pattern was embarrassing.

296 · in/better-sleep ·

Turning a three by two metre patch of lawn into a first kitchen garden, where would you spend the first 150

On clay, put the entire budget into organic matter and skip the timber. Lay plain cardboard straight over the grass, no gaps, then fifteen centimetres of compost on top, which for three by two metres is a bit under a cubic metre, and plant into that this spring. A bulk bag delivered is dramatically cheaper per litre than bagged compost and will be most of your 150. The grass dies underneath, the worms deal with the clay for you, and you have spent nothing on sides that would only hold the compost you did not buy.

95 · in/kitchen-garden ·

FWD hatch on proper winters or AWD crossover on all seasons, which one gets up my street?

I want to argue the other side properly, because the tyres-over-drivetrain line gets repeated as though drivetrain does nothing. If your specific failure mode is getting stuck on an unplowed hill from a standstill, all wheel drive genuinely solves that and winter tyres only mostly solve it. I have watched a FWD car on excellent winters spin its inside wheel on a rutted incline while an AWD on all seasons walked past it. The correct answer for your situation is probably AWD with winters on it, and if you can only afford one this year, buy the winters. But do not let anyone tell you the drivetrain is irrelevant on a hill you actually have to climb.

118 · in/winter-driving ·