Category: General Interest

Items of general interest – for mass consumption

Global dimming

You’ve heard about global warming, but did you know about the (possibly more serious) issue of global dimming?

The sun keeps us (i.e. the earth) warm. And gives us all energy and life. And over the last 50 years, the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface has reduced by about 1 to 3% per decade.

And the culprit is air pollution. Some of the pollutants absorb the sunlight before it reaches us, while others reflect it back into space.


Golden Gate Bridge with California‘s characteristic brown cloud in the background — the most likely cause of global dimming. Photo CC 2004 by Aaron Logan

There are a number of interesting issues related to this:

  • Global dimming might be masking the effects of global warming.
  • For the few days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, temperatures were 1 to 2 degrees higher than average in the US. Due to fewer jet flights, resulting in fewer aircraft contrails (aka vapor trails).
  • There exists something called the Asian Brown Cloud which sits over India and much of South and South-East Asia which is being blamed for a lot of things.

I found out about this from this Straight Dope article.

Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality

These guys bought a whole bunch of fast food items, took photographs of them, and then compared them to the photographs of the same items in ads.

A reader over at boingboing has this to say:

I worked (briefly) in the photogoraphy studio of one of the biggest ad agencies in NYC. They paid a professional “food stylist” around $2000 a day to make the food look like that. Every golden sesame seed or drop of crystaline dew was hand placed. That maoynaise isn’t mayo, it’s hair gel and that chicken looks so good because aparently everything looks yummier when it’s been sprayed with laquer. A lot of that “food” isn’t food at all and the stuff that is food has been treated with more chemicals and “tricks of the trade” than most super models.

I like what you like

The New York Times has a very interesting article about herd instinct. The main point it makes is that people tend to like things that they think other people like (or will like). In other words, Himesh Reshammiya is popular because he is popular. Of course, people do have intrinsic likes and dislikes which are independent of what other people think – but equally, if not more more important role is played by the “social” aspect.

And of course, there is research to prove this point.

They created 9 different websites of music by unknown artists. Users of these websites could download and listen to the music. On 8 of those websites, the users could see how often a song had been downloaded by others in the past (from that website only). And on the last one, they had no idea of the popularity of the song. And a bunch of interesting results emerge:

First, if people know what they like regardless of what they think other people like, the most successful songs should draw about the same amount of the total market share in both the independent and social-influence conditions — that is, hits shouldn’t be any bigger just because the people downloading them know what other people downloaded. And second, the very same songs — the “best” ones — should become hits in all social-influence worlds.

What we found, however, was exactly the opposite. In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.

On an average, they found that a song that was was a top-5 song in terms of intrinsic quality (the 9th website), had only a 50%
chance of making it into the top-5 list by popularity.

So that should explain why shakalakalakalakalakalakalakalaka shakalaka boom boom is assaulting my ears everywhere. And why Aap ka Suroor is even happening.