Consumers required to make sure they are paying sales tax?

Today at PAX (gaming convention in Seattle, WA) I bought some glasses that are supposed to reduce eye strain (I'll give a review later after I've thoroughly tried them out).  When I bought them, they didn't charge me sales tax. That got me wondering. There is no way that the government would consider these potentially snake oil glasses a 'necessary/non taxable' item (like food).  And this was being sold in Washington, so they can't circumvent the sales tax by saying it was out of state. The only thing i can think of is conventions having special rules on sales taxes.

Does anyone know if I, as the consumer, am required to ask these questions to make sure these guys aren't cheating the system?  I know no one reads this blog, but that's kind of why I'm asking this now. I'm hoping to get my answer after the statute of limitations is up on prosecuting me. Just in case that I am, in fact, admitting to an offense ;^)

Cold Water

I've been reading a lot lately on the negative effects of cold water.  Now, most nutritional studies seem to just be poorly constructed data sets bent to find something 'interesting', but I think this one might hold water.  To main points:

1) Cold water may trigger your body to think that it is getting cold and you should store fat, thus slowing down your metabolism.
>Now, I'm not sure how much I buy that.  In many places, spring glacier runoff actually keeps water cold well into spring, and bodies of water take a long time to cool. I don't know that drinking cold water would be a signal of winter for your body.  But I thought it worth noting because you can see that water would cool toward winter in the majority of places. That may be enough to have an evolutionary effect.

 2) Cold water solidifies oils, grease and such from foods you've just eaten.  This makes the food harder to digest.  This added trouble to digest will cause the release of more acid, and still not all gets broken down properly. Well, there are a litany of problems involved, but you get the idea.

IMO, this is enough info to at least consider.

My new blog, kinda

I've been trying to think of a title for a while now, titles matter. tamgros.blogspot.com was definitely my desired URL because it would be easy to find. What I didn't realize is that I already set up a blog "tamgros" under that URL more than 3 years ago, and never did anything with it. Haha, procrastination much?

Anyway, "tamgros" isn't exactly the most exciting title, but it's efficient and saves me time from having to think about an awesome title. I'm all about efficiency and not thinking, so the title is actually very appropriate :^P

What I plan to do with this blog is just post random thoughts about whatever, from gaming, to academic stuff, to life stuff . Being able to translate thoughts into speach is a good skill to learn. Who knows, maybe in the mean time I'll have a post or two that's actually interesting.