Announcing the Pollen API

We had a lot of trouble with the IoT Core shutdown.

People often plant more male than female trees in cities to avoid having to pick up fruit, which perhaps doubles the pollen load. So it's a cultural problem that overlaps with the homelessness crisis, because the status quo applies pressure to keep everyone working within the system to feed themselves rather than adopting stuff like permaculture and no-till agriculture.

Also the immune system can get confused by two or more simultaneous stressors. So maybe a child has a cold while pollen is present, and develops too many antibodies to the pollen. I saw an animation once showing a normal immune system destroying cells covered in viruses. Then it showed a confused immune system destroying cells covered in allergen molecules. Which releases histamine and triggers a positive feedback loop. Multiple triggers may also be a root cause of many cancers, which can be thought of as autoimmune disease in the extreme. So for example, rheumatoid arthritis responds to methotrexate the way cancer does. Western medicine is often blind to this because it's too hard to do root cause analysis without large epidemiological studies, which are funded through the government and vulnerable to anti-government spending sentiment. Nobody wants to pay for it so we self-medicate rather than solving the underlying mystery.

In my case, I never had seasonal allergies until I was about 11-12, when my elementary school sprayed broadleaf herbicide to kill the dandelions. By coincidence, a family friend had me mow a lawn overtaken by dry cheatgrass, and all I had was a weed eater, so I was out for hours breathing the dust. From that day forward, I had flu-like symptoms for the entire month of May in my hometown, until I reached about 40 and grew out of it. I believe that the herbicide was the second stressor. So my quality of life was impacted by someone else's judgment call which categorized dandelions as weeds instead of, say, bee food. I finally found peace with this when I realized that saving the life of a child who is deathly allergic to bee stings is worth the other students suffering a lifetime of allergies.

I feel now that all questions that seem unanswerable, even with our considerable economic advantage, speak more about our cultural failings than our technological limitations.

> Has anyone yet figured out why so many humans suffer from an allergy to many natural plants which we have lived around for millions of years?

For those of us in the Americas most of us aren't living in the same places our ancestors lived for millions of years and so are living around a different set of plants than humans evolved with.

For example I've lived all my life in the western United States, about 30 years in California and 30 years in Washington.

According to DNA testing I have very little Native American ancestry, so it is very likely that almost all of my ancestors from more than around 300 years ago were not from here. The DNA tests say my ancestors were almost all British and German, so almost all of my ancestors from 600 or more years age weren't even on the same continent that I am.

How many generations does a population have to live in a new area before they adapt sufficiently so that the native plants don't give them allergic rhinitis?

I get that defining an endpoint Tom all and managing a token is some overhead but is it that much to manage that using Google offers that much benefit? my point is that this is trivial to setup

Thought Pollen was going to be another bad Google product name, but it's actually just a very literal name.