As everyone else is saying, wear a mask if you have one.

But it seems like the question you’re directly asking is more about the fluid flow of air in the room. With your suggestion of alternating short/long breaths, you might be imagining that you can blow the germs away and then breathe in the clear space left behind, but of course it doesn’t work that way. Blowing or breathing quickly creates more turbulence, which stirs up the air and sucks in more air from further away—both of which increase your risk. (Reducing turbulence from your breath is the second function of a mask, besides filtering out particles.) In the best-case scenario, the germs are in large aerosolized droplets which will settle out of the air quickly, but only if the air is still—so you’d want to breathe softly and move as little as possible. (And the droplets can still be infectious after they fall, so wash your hands after touching anything as well.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Submarine_films

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Submarines_in_fiction

Pomegranate molasses.

They are regularly recycled.

Not according to the SSA’s Q&A:

Q20: Are Social Security numbers reused after a person dies?

A: No. We do not reassign a Social Security number (SSN) after the number holder’s death. Even though we have issued over 453 million SSNs so far, and we assign about 5 and one-half million new numbers a year, the current numbering system will provide us with enough new numbers for several generations into the future with no changes in the numbering system.

We could switch to hexadecimal digits and we’d be good for 68 billion.

A calorie is a unit of energy—it’s used to measure how much energy is contained in the foods you consume, and how much energy your body outputs in the form of physical work. These are objective measurements that have nothing to do with your body’s internal biology—you could measure the energy input and output of a robot or a car the same way. (In particular, calories in and out don’t tell you exactly how much weight you’ll gain or lose in the process—that’s dependent on your metabolism.)

The calories spent to work an exercise bike can be measured in terms of how much energy is needed to turn the pedals—it’s independent of whatever’s doing the turning.

“I do feel like it added a level of distance to it that wasn’t a bad thing,” he told Ars Technica. “Maybe a bit like a personal assistant who stays professional and has your back even in the most awful situations, but yeah, more than anything it felt unreal and dystopian.”

If the single word “dystopian” is how the editors decided to summarize that description, I’m not sure they’re doing any better than the AI.

Just do it subtly enough that you notice the character first and the vitiligo second.

“AI” is the new “Space-Age”.

It’s usually used for something that changes the superficial appearance of a thing without changing or obsuring its structure—and in this context it seems to mean making the DNA more detectable (by whatever means). I’m not picturing how this “dye” could do both those things at once on that scale.

He coated the rock in “a special epoxy” to prevent it from crumbling during slicing. Then, he washed the thin sections in a special dye that stained the DNA of the microbial cells.

What does that mean—I thought DNA was smaller that the wavelength of visible light? I guess it’s some larger molecule that binds to the DNA to make it more visible, but if that’s the case, “tagging” seems like a more appropriate term than “staining”.

I do remember that one of the reasons for so many Kurdish massacres is that the Kurds have a belief that Satan after the fall fell to Earth and cried such tears that they put out the flames of God’s wrath.

You’re probably thinking of the Yazidis—a group that lives in Kurdistan and speaks Kurdish but is distinct from the Kurds proper (who are mostly Sunni Muslims). The Yazidis have a very syncretistic religion drawing on elements of practically everything that ever existed in the region—including religions that were seen as heretical/satanic by subsequent ones.

The untidiness isn’t as odd as the impression that they’re all wearing almost-matching one-size-fits-all outfits that were passed out five minutes before the photo shoot.

The Gnostics associated the Old Testament Jehovah with the Platonic concept of the Demiurge—an imperfect or misguided lesser deity who created the material world but botched it up and included evil as an unintended consequence—as opposed to the New Testament “God” who was the Platonic principle of transcendent Goodness or Unity. So the Gnostics didn’t need a separate Satan to explain evil, since Jehovah was already covering that role.

The idea of Satan as the embodiment of evil is arguably an early medieval borrowing from Zoroastrianism. In the Book of Job he works in conjunction with God as a tester of souls, and his roles in the garden of Eden and the temptation of Jesus aren’t inconsistent with that. And a lot of the popular folklore associated with him originates from morally-ambiguous trickster figures from other traditions that were absorbed into Christianity.

He was still 200 miles from home when he was found (although he was headed in the right general direction).

If he kept heading west til he hit the coast, then followed the coast south, he was bound to get to Salinas eventually.

Not a single color, but in Chinese tradition there were five colors of equal political significance corresponding to the Wuxing cycle of changes—black, red, cyan, white, and yellow. Each dynasty was associated with a color (with other associated traits), and was expected to be followed by one of two other colors (depending on whether the succession would be orderly or revolutionary).

The circumstances where you’d be most likely to run into issues is where age plays an active role—e.g., Social Security or insurance. But those are probably avoidable if you’re careful. Otherwise, there’s no law against being really old or looking young, if you’re not trying to claim age benefits—for anyone else where the date of birth wasn’t relevant to their job, they’d probably just ignore it or assume it was a typo.

Boycotts have one advantage over “consistently directing your money to companies in which you are confident”—they can work even if there aren’t any better alternatives. A coordinated campaign to target one company at a time can eventually force a whole industry to change, even if the industry offered no meaningful choices to start with.

Maybe he worked a few years at a temp agency?