3/17/26 - Happy St. Patrick's Day!! Plus - The Flattest States

Tuesday 3/17/26

Happy St. Patrick's Day, a global festival honoring Irish culture and its patron saint. What began as a religious feast day in Ireland has evolved into a worldwide celebration featuring parades, the color green, and unique traditions.

Most of the celebrations and revelry are and Irish-American creation. There are more people in the United States who claim Irish ancestry than the entire population of Ireland itself. The first parade was in Boston in 1737.

The world's shortest St. Patrick's Day parade is held in Dripsey, a village in County Cork, Ireland. It lasts only 100 yards, spanning the distance between the village's two pubs 

The Shamrock - Legend says he used the three-leafed shamrock to explain the concept of the Holy Trinity to the Irish people.

Green is the ubiquitous color of the holiday today, it wasn't always the case. Blue was originally associated with St. Patrick. Green became prominent due to its connection with the shamrock, the Irish landscape, and the green in the Irish flag

Drowning the Shamrock - This is a traditional Irish toast where a shamrock from your lapel is placed in a glass of whiskey, drank as a toast to St. Patrick, and then the shamrock is thrown over the left shoulder for good luck. (unless you're they behind the thrower.)

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Celebrate:

Camp Fire Girls Day

Corned Beef and Cabbage Day (yes, another Irish- American tradition)

Doctor-Patient Trust Day

Submarine Day

World Social Work Day

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A quarter of adults have forgotten how to work out either fractions or percentages, and even fewer remember how to calculate the mean, the median or the mode. The “mean” is the “average” you’re used to, where you add up all the numbers and then divide by the number of numbers. The “median” is the “middle” value in the list of numbers. The “mode” is the value that occurs most often. If no number is repeated, then there is no mode for the list.

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Saw a great map of the flatness of the US states.

No surprise that Florida is #1. With an average elevation of only 100 feet above sea level and a landscape dominated by wetlands, coastal plains, and the Everglades, Florida is effectively a massive, low-lying peninsula.

​Coming in at #2 and #3 are Illinois and North Dakota. Illinois, often called the "Prairie State," owes its flatness to the massive glaciers of the last Ice Age, which acted like a giant sandpaper, leveling the terrain as they moved south. This created some of the most fertile farmland on Earth. North Dakota, similarly, features the Red River Valley, which is the floor of an ancient glacial lake, resulting in a horizon that seems to stretch into infinity.

West Virginia (#50) is often cited as the least flat state. Known as the "Mountain State," almost its entire territory is covered by the rugged Allegheny and Cumberland Plateaus. There isn't a single "flat" county in the entire state. Joining it at the bottom of the list are states like Vermont, New Hampshire, and Colorado.

According to the map, New York is 37, and PA is 45.

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This sounds like science fiction, but it's real. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have figured out how to turn used plastic bottles into a frontline Parkinson's disease medication called L-DOPA. Here's how it works: they break down PET plastic—think soda bottles—into its chemical building blocks, then use specially engineered E. coli bacteria to transform those molecules into the drug. Lead Professor Stephen Wallace says, "If we can create medicines for neurological disease from a waste plastic bottle, it's exciting to imagine what else this technology could achieve." The research, published in Nature Sustainability, could pave the way for a "bio-upcycling industry" that turns trash into treasure—and medicine.

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A clinical trial found that listening to specially designed music with auditory beat stimulation can significantly reduce anxiety, announced March 16. Among several listening lengths tested, a 24-minute session showed the strongest effects. The music uses specific sound frequencies to influence brainwave patterns, offering a drug-free option for people dealing with anxiety disorders or everyday stress.

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Today's Useless Fact of the Day - Scientists have determined that the universe's average color—if you mixed all the light together—is a pale beige they called "Cosmic Latte."

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