Eh, 2022-3 wars are just as horrifying, they just happen on a smaller scale. Look up what was going on in the Bucha town, what are living conditions in Gaza, how many people were forced to leave homes in African and Asian civil wars… The scale of minefields in Ukraine, etc.

Language classes were, at least wherever I was taking them, much less demanding with regard to time, homework etc than normal uni classes.

Language courses. Check if your uni offers language classes for students and pick an obscure one (that is not English and possibly not Japanese unless you fancy Japanese culture). In my experience it’s a setting which forces conversations and sometimes surprisingly deep ones (how many of your classmates know what’s your favourite color? Well the ones from the language class do after an exercise of color words).

Similarly maybe the uni or someone else in the town runs language cafe’s. Informal places where people who learn a language will show up to talk with natives.

Look around if the uni has student clubs around an interest. My university had a ton of such “student circles” some of them were for people more than normally interested in the faculty’s discipline, some were about something completely different. They should allow people in based on interest, not affiliation and an active one is a great experience.

Oh true, the mineral salts from supplements (and broader salts of necessary metals) should count! Thanks for a long answer!

Two things: geography and popular support.

Most of Germany is a massive plain with super-dense settlement network. There is nowhere to hide for a partisan group and by 20th century it’s not possible for local chieftains to hold sovereign power as it’s easy to just move towns/regions. Nazis had no way to hide their potential guerilla operations, no way to rely on sympathetic locals in select places. Afghanistan is sparsely populated, with local communities, which sometimes can be isolated from each other due to terrain and distances. The entire country is mountains which have hardly ever been surveyed and are inhospitable to anyone not born there (and even then it’s just too easy to hide).

Yes, millions of Germans supported the Nazi party. But millions more were quietly against it or were “not interested in politics”. After WW2 the Nazi party was soundly beaten and the non-commited/antinazi Germans could build a civil society - in a land which had centuries of civic traditions. Whereas the Taliban have more commited supporters and weaponise the religion which already is very influential in any individual’s life in a land dominated by patriarchal clan social structures.

Knuth’s arrow shows up in… Magic the Gathering. There’s a challenge of “how much damage can you deal with just 3 cards and without infinitely repeating loops?”. Turns out that stacking doubler effects can get us really high. https://www.polygon.com/23589224/magic-phyrexia-all-will-be-one-best-combo-attacks-tokens-vindicator-mondrak

I like Stand-up Maths, usually starts with a real-life situation and escalates into proper math, sometimes also programming shows up.