Yeah, that really annoys me too. Luckily, you can turn off the pause and re-center actions for the different announcements.
In Dwarf Fortress/data/init/announcements.txt, replace the birth_citizen line with:
[BIRTH_CITIZEN:A_D:D_D]
Source: wiki
Thanks much for that. I briefly checked the wiki under reports but that wasn't the spot.
Regarding danger room and military gender, I use an all male military. I've been trying to pick squad members based on healing rate and disease resistance, since other stats can be trained. I don't know if there's a cap or not, but the speed at which danger rooms work I was figuring on maxing them on all native weapon types and seeing what their str/agi/end/etc looks like at the end.
For whatever reason my danger room is always full of empty barrels (and baby corpses). It seems like non-military dwarves grab an ale barrel and treat it as a bar. Not sure why. I haven't gotten around to designating alcohol stockpiles on each heavily used Z-level yet, though I do have a dining room. Hoping the problem goes away once I get some more meeting halls, statue gardens, etc. set up. But for now the baby corpses show up either due to laborers trying to cart off the empty barrels, or the people dragging the ale barrels there to start with.