Here is what we know about sentience. Sand is sentient. The desert is sentient. The sky is not sentient. Plants are intermittently sentient. Dogs are the most sentient. We are not sentient. The planet as a whole is sentient. The parts that make up that whole are not sentient. Holes are sentient. We are not sentient. Gift cards are sentient until they expire. States in which it is illegal for gift cards to expire have created immortal sentience. Money is not sentient. The concept of private property is sentient. Sand is sentient. The desert is sentient. We are not sentient.

This has been the Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner.

Is your identity safe, listeners? With so much information being stored in databases these days, it’s uncertain how we can feel secure that our identities are our own. There are scams galore to try to steal your credit card numbers, social security numbers, city citizen personal numbers, neighborhood resident tracking numbers, and so on.

Not a week goes by where we don’t hear of some database being cracked open like a fresh egg on a granite countertop and personal information spilling everywhere, for identity thieves to just lap up like a dog who’s allowed to be on a kitchen counter and who likes raw eggs.

Here are some tips for protecting your identity, Night Vale. Change your computer passwords often. Most of us are not legally allowed to use a computer, but change them anyway, just in case you suddenly are allowed to use one someday. Also, wear a mask when in public, and black out your house number with spray paint.

Finally, most identity thefts occur when databases are not securely managed. So, my advice? Don’t ever end up in a database.

This has been Tech News.

Coming up after this break, some exclusive clips from my recent three-hour interview with myself, in which I interrogated myself on my motivations, where I am in life, why I’m not in a different place in life, whose fault that is, and why I said that one embarrassing thing once.

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Diane had not seen Evan or Dawn at the office for a while. Days really.

Diane rarely talked to Evan. She sometimes talked to Dawn. They were not friends. They liked each other just fine. Dawn worked in marketing. Diane technically worked in marketing too, but she just ran a database.

The database was a list of names. It was also a list of personal details associated with names. It was also a series of personalized photos and histories connected to each name. It was fun to take each life and compact it to a single numerical ID and set of subtables. Because while hugely impersonal and reductive, when combined with tens of thousands of other numerical IDs and their hundreds of thousands of sets of subtables, a database could tell you a lot about how people behave.