Innovation is awesome, right? I mean, it gave us the internet!
However, there is always a price to pay for modernization, and in this case, it’s in the form of digital eye strain, a group of vision problems that can pop up after as little as two hours of looking at a screen. Some of the symptoms are tired and/or dry eyes, headaches, blurred vision, and neck and shoulder pain1. Ouch!
Eye strain from staring at devices is a widespread issue. Most people work, play, and maintain relationships through screens, which averages out to 6 hours and 35 minutes per day (and that’s in addition to work or school)! That translates to 46 hours and 5 minutes per week, or 2,402 hours and 55 minutes per year.2
With numbers like these, attention to eye health is more important now than ever; our dependence on technology certainly isn’t going anywhere. And just like innovation brought us technology, innovation also holds the key to combating the effects it has on our bodies. Here are some key suggestions from eye care professionals to help reduce common symptoms of digital eye strain. Spoiler alert: none of them involve wearing glasses!
Follow the 20-20-20 rule.
You can find some relief by taking a 20-20-20 break: every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. It’s easy to remember because we all want 20/20 vision, and it’s a good excuse to look out the window.
Adjust your workspace screen to be slightly below eye level and about an arm’s length away.
This simple tweak to your work area can really improve your posture, as well as the amount of strain on your eyes. A win-win!
Adjust the brightness of your device.
Brightness levels also play into how hard our eyes have to work. Our screen brightness should match our surroundings, especially during the evening hours.
Say hello to Biofinity Energys® contact lenses!
These contact lenses are specifically made to address eye dryness and tiredness caused by digital devices. Digital Zone Optics® lens design and Aquaform® Technology are two innovations that when combined help with the tiredness and dryness that can be caused by digital eye fatigue.
Additionally, Biofinity Energys® monthly replacement contact lenses are designed to help our eyes better adapt for a more comfortable wearing experience3. This part is tricky because contacts can be hard to adjust to, and trust me—no one wants what feels like gritty sandpaper in there. Comfort is key!
If you’re sick of wearing glasses all the time and feel ready to do something new, visit biofinityenergys.com to learn more and to get your free trial certificate.
Asurion-sponsored survey by Market Research Firm Solidea Solutions conducted August 18-20, 2019 of 1,998 U.S. smartphone users, compared to an Asurion-sponsored survey conducted by market research company OnePoll between Sept. 11 – 19, 2017 of 2000 U.S. adults with a smartphone.
In addition to being the star of Marvel franchise "Thor," actor Chris Hemsworth is also a father-of-three? And it turns out, he's pretty much the coolest dad ever.
In a clip from a 2015 interview on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," Hemsworth shared an interesting conversation he had with his 4-year-old daughter India.
"My daughter's kind of envious of my boys," Hemsworth told Ellen. "She came to me the other day, and she's like 'You know, Papa, I want one of those things that Sasha and Tristan have.' And I'm like, 'What do you mean?' She said, 'You know the things in between their legs that you have.'"
Hemsworth said he tried to explain the differences between male and female bodies, but his daughter wasn't having it.
"She goes, 'I really want one!' Hemsworth said. "I'm like, 'A penis?' And she's like, 'I want a penis!'
And then, Hemsworth had the best possible response. He recalls:
She's four and I'm like, 'You know what, you can be whatever you want to be.' And she goes, 'Thanks, Dad.' Runs off into the playground and that was it.
And then, I cannot confirm, but I'm pretty sure the Ellen audience did this:
Major kudos to Hemsworth for taking a potentially awkward parenting situation and turning it into a lesson about love and acceptance.
'The Daily Show' takes a look at two hot-button issues.
This article originally appeared on 10.06.15
A previous episode of "The Daily Show" addressed two hot-button issues at the same time: abortion and gun control.
It was one of the earliest tests for new host Trevor Noah, and he pretty much knocked this one out of the park. The segment began with a discussion about the pro-life movement's laser focus on making completely legal abortions really, really hard to get.
Noah started with the movement's push to defund Planned Parenthood on what turned out to be deceptive, altered, and debunked videos. And even he had to admit, pro-lifers are pretty great at what they do, given that they were able to get Congress to hold hearings based on ... nothing, really.
Of course, not all people in the pro-life movement are against gun control, and not all people who are against gun control are pro-life, but there is a certain significant — and confusing — overlap on those two issues that is worth investigating.
So Noah turned his attention to the mass shooting in Oregon — the 294th of the year — and how we as a country are once again discussing gun control.
If pro-lifers are so concerned about the preservation of all lives, Noah wonders, then why don't they support common-sense gun control measures?
There's no need for doctored videos. Gun violence statistics exist (and they're terrifying). Imagine if the pro-life movement rallied behind that?
Noah then brilliantly compared reactions from two "pro-life" presidential candidates on the Oregon shooting and on abortion.
First up was Jeb Bush on what happened in Oregon. He urged against reactionary gun legislation. "Stuff happens," he said.
But compare that to his recent comments on abortion — which is, again, totally legal:
Now that's a response fitting for a mass shooting.
Noah looked over to candidate Carly Fiorina for her thoughts on the Oregon shooting. Similar to Bush, Fiorina cautioned against taking any action on gun control until we know more about what happened.
Now compare that to her comments on abortion:
It's not clear whether pro-lifers are waiting for an even 300 mass shootings in 2015 — which, at the pace we're going, should be sometime in the next month or so — before taking action. But in the meantime, it's really hard to see the "pro-life" rhetoric as anything more than hypocrisy.
In closing, Noah posed this to pro-lifers: If you actually care about lives, do something about guns.
Redirect the energy, lobbying, and rhetoric spent on fighting a more than 40-year-old Supreme Court decision toward sensible steps to curb gun violence.
"They just need to have a superhero's dedication to life," Noah says. "Because right now, they're more like comic book collectors: Human life only matters until you take it out of the package, and then there's nothing left."
Watch the complete segment in the video below.
Trevor proposes that anti-abortion advocates like Carly Fiorina and Jeb Bush channel their pro-life rhetoric into another vital issue: gun control.Watch full...
Sometimes you see something so mind-boggling you have to take a minute to digest what just happened in your brain. Be prepared to take that moment while watching these videos.
Real estate investor and TikTok user Tom Cruz shared two videos explaining the spreadsheets he and his friends use to plan vacations and it's...well...something. Watch the first one:
What in the wealth is thispic.twitter.com/NTPTKT5CZG
So "Broke Bobby" makes $125,000 a year. There's that.
How about the fact that his guy has more than zero friends who budget $80,000 for a 3-day getaway? Y'all. I wouldn't know how to spend $80,000 in three days if you paid me to. Especially if we're talking about a trip with friends where we're all splitting the cost. Like what does this even look like? Are they flying in private jets that burn dollar bills as fuel? Are they bathing in hot tubs full of cocaine? I genuinely don't get it.
To be crystal clear here, the top 5 friends on the Forbes list are willing to spend more than double what the guy at the bottom of the Welfare 10 list makes per year on a 3-day guy's trip. I don't know what to do with this information.
\u201c@Radio_Reem Those that make less are called the "Welfare 10" \ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude2d\ud83d\ude29\u201d
But that's not even the full spreadsheet. It might make sense if this guy was just rich, had always been rich, only knew rich people, and therefore having multiple millionnaire friends was his normal. Surely that's some people's reality who were born into the 1%.
That's not the case here, though, because Cruz also has a Welfare 10 list. He says this group of friends who make less than $100K a year call themselves that, and perhaps that's true. (If I were a part of this group, I might call myself a welfare case too because everything's relative and some of these dudes spend more in an hour of vacation than I spend on my mortgage each month.)
It's like we can see our society's wealth gap all laid out nice and neatly in a spreadsheet, only these people aren't even the uber-wealthy and uber-poor. This is just the range of this one guy's friends.
I have nothing against people who build success and wealth for themselves, and even $5 million per year is hardly obscenely wealthy by billionaire standards. But Cruz says he's known most of his "welfare" friends since college, which presumably means most of those guys have college degrees and are making pittance in comparison with the Forbes list. One could claim the guy making $5 million a year just works harder, but does he really work 100 times harder than the guy making $50,000? Doubt it.
Money makes money, and after a certain threshold of wealth or income, it's actually quite easy to get and stay rich without actually "earning" more money, assuming you're reasonably wise and responsible. So maybe the guys who are willing to shell out $125,000 for a week-long trip should offer to pay the travel expenses of the friends they "hang out with regardless of income" who don't even make that in a year, since that's probably just the interest they're making on their wealth anyway.
But what do I know? This is like an entirely different world to me and probably 99+% of Americans, as evidenced by some of the responses.
\u201c@araless Broke Bobby every time it\u2019s time for a trip https://t.co/VTUf3xW1DW\u201d
Naturally, there will be a range of incomes in any group of people, but 1) most of us don't actually know how much our friends make, and 2) even fewer of us make spreadsheets with that information in order to rank our friends and figure out who can go on which vacations.
People are just endlessly fascinating. That's all I've got.
Image pulled from YouTube video linked to website.
Unique words defining emotions beyond the scope of a typical dictionary.
This article originally appeared on 07.02.15
What if you needed a word for something that you can't quite define? Where would you turn?
Have you ever tried to explain something but gave up because the person you're talking to wouldn't be able to relate? Or worse yet, there's not an actual word for what you're trying to explain?
Haven't heard that term before? How about this one:
Anecdoche — a conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening.
No? How about this:
Opia — the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye.
Now, before you start doubting your own vocabulary skills, you won't find those words in any of the major dictionaries. Instead, they come from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a collection of newly minted words for life's hard-to-define feelings.
So, these words aren't real? Well, it's not quite that simple.
It's a word that's found in the dictionary, you might say. That leads to an entirely separate question: Whose dictionary? Merriam-Webster? Oxford? Cambridge? Urban?
The truth is that language is ever-changing, and what one might say is a "fake" word today could very well be a "real" word tomorrow (or within a few years, at least).
In June 2015, the Oxford English Dictionary added a handful of new words to its rolls, including "Interweb," "jeggings," "hot mess," "crowdfunding," and "cisgender." Will all of these words stick with us for the long haul? Almost certainly not. Still, in the mind of OED's editors, those words are just as real as any others.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, on the other hand, contains many useful terms that you won't find in a traditional dictionary ... yet.
You'll find words like "Vellichor" ("The strange wistfulness of used bookshops") and "Adronitis" ("Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone") buried within the dictionary's six-year history.
While some terms come off as, well, obscure, others seem to fill meaningful voids left by the limitations of language for common emotions.
Its existence feels almost otherworldly, like spells from the mind of J.K. Rowling.
\u201cHarry Potter Spells List\u201d
— Harry Potter World (@Harry Potter World)
1589672580
"I've been writing a dictionary of emotions for about five years, and still the most common question I get is, 'Are these words real?'" Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows creator John Koenig told Upworthy over email.
To answer that question, Koenig says (emphasis mine):
"One answer is an obvious 'no,' [they're not real] because you couldn't find them in a leather-bound dictionary — and because I create them myself by twisting together word roots from any one of a dozen different languages, from French, Japanese and Mayan to my personal favorite, Greek.
On the other hand, of course these words are real, because in reality there is no such thing. A word is not like a gold coin that you bite to tell whether it's counterfeit, so you might be able to trade it for a mule. It becomes real when it's spoken and understood. And by that standard, I've seen some of my words (particularly 'sonder') used earnestly in many different conversations online. Are they all wrong? Is 'sonder' any less meaningful because it hasn't yet been enshrined on the page of a leather-bound book? After all, almost every word in the Oxford English Dictionary has a birthdate, a notation of its first recorded use, back when it was just a yawp of nonsense that only made sense to one person, then two. All words were born this way."
Here's "sonder" by the way:
When it comes to how we think about words, popularity is often a stand-in for legitimacy.
You might not find the verb "retweeted" in the dictionary on your bookshelf, but it's an understood term. Koenig has thoughts on that, as well:
"So then, does realness require the blessing of popular use? How many millions of people does it take to change the word 'literally' to mean 'figuratively'? Is a word still alive if only one person knows its meaning? Or is that too far?"
"Personally, I think words should exist for their own sake, regardless of how they are used," Koenig says, pointing out that our language is particularly lacking when it comes to describing emotions.
"When I post a new definition or a new episode of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, I often have no idea if anyone else out there feels the emotion I'm trying to pin down. Because it's a one-man show, it's totally possible that it's just me. So then this question about realness [of a word] becomes just another way of asking, 'Am I the only person who feels this way?'"
During her talk, Curzan recounts someone asking her if "defriend" is a "real word." She wound up in the same sort of existential rabbit hole:
"What makes a word real? My dinner companion and I both know what the verb 'defriend' means, so when does a new word like 'defriend' become real? Who has the authority to make those kinds of official decisions about words, anyway?"
Here's Curzan giving her TED Talk "What makes a word 'real'?" in March 2014.
She touched on the process of words making their way into the dictionary. This might seem like a stale topic, but it's pretty fascinating.
To her, dictionary editors are similar to anthropologists — that's a way most of us probably hadn't thought about them before (if we thought about them at all).
"So how does a word get into a dictionary? It gets in because we use it and we keep using it, and dictionary editors are paying attention to us. If you're thinking, 'But that lets all of us decide what words mean,' I would say, 'Yes it does, and it always has.'
Dictionaries are a wonderful guide and resource, but there is no objective dictionary authority out there that is the final arbiter about what words mean. If a community of speakers is using a word and knows what it means, it's real. That word might be slangy, that word might be informal, that word might be a word that you think is illogical or unnecessary, but that word that we're using, that word is real."
So, what makes a "real" word? That's entirely up to you.
Dictionary of (@ObscureSorrows) / Twitter