JillyB

A good bicycle is what I was going to put. I was able to get rid of my car and dramatically cut my spending on rental bikes and public transit.

I think it's moreso the quality of the toilet that determines if it gets clogged. It could be something about American toilets that makes them susceptible or something about your place's toilets that makes them immune.

A method of optimizing parameters for manufacturing bearings. Specifically the raceway superfinish process.

There are several machine parameters (oscillation speed, stone pressure, time, etc) that go into the superfinish process. The only output is surface roughness. I created a way to optimize for a low roughness. The best part was that once you set it up, you can just start printing out worksheets and handing them to engineering techs to get some more data collected.

Before I did this, superfinish parameters were considered a bit of a black art and were only adjusted when there was a problem. This means they were always as bad as they could possibly be.

Well I don't think it would have been possible to assemble

Me and my friends used to get high and play geometry wars on the 360. Lots of fun passing the controller around to see who can get the farthest.

Eh. It would be better if there was something actionable but some things can just be news sources.

TBH, I agree with you. However a lot of people's PCs are no longer supported with no practical way to change that. For those people that are trying Linux out timidly and reluctantly, I'm fine with a little handholding. I wouldn't recommend someone switch to Linux unless I knew they were a bit savvy. But if they're worried about going behind on security updates and can't afford a new PC, I will suggest their one option, even if I know it will be challenging at times.

For me personally, I would remember none of that if taught to me. I'm stubborn and handy enough to figure it out during an emergency. For the kind of noob OP is describing that benefits from a handheld on-ramp, they will probably never be able to do what you're describing.

I think a good compromise would be mentioning a few things that you can do in case of emergency so a more savvy person would know what to look for in an emergency. You don't have to teach them so much as tell them there is something they can do. If there's a fire, idk where the fire extinguisher is but I know there is one and I can go looking.

This was going to be my suggestion. Most noobs will be familiar with phone app stores. You can present a distro's software manager like an app store. People coming from another OS will probably be happy they don't have to find, download, and install their programs.

As a Linux noob, this is not as basic as you think it is. It's probably cool to show them "sudo apt install [program]" as a neat trick to dip their toes into the command line. All the other things you mentioned would scare me away if it was presented as beginner essential knowledge. I legit have no idea what you're talking about.

Disturbing the cat results in no attacks. It just means that the peaceful cat gets woken up from their cute nap, which is bad.

Ahh this makes sense