Do Bachchon Ki Ma: Patch, the dog – I mean – Patch, the baby

The Mad Momma has this heart-breaking post about dealing with her baby’s medical problems. Very nicely written.

We took her home with the prescribed medication and sat down to bathe her, moisturise her and apply the medication. And the Brat came along and kept kissing her – big, wet open mouthed kisses all over her body, ingesting the ointment. I tried to stop him and gave up. Let him love his little Beanie baby as much as he wants.

Worth reading, if for nothing other than to just see how well she captures the anguish she feels.

Source: desicritics.

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.