Gimmicks

Here's something for you to do: watch the new 7-Up ad (click "Check out our TV Ads" right there on the front page). Now think back to the Dr. Pepper ads you've seen... if you haven't, check out their website (Products->Dr Pepper), where you can get the gist of their message.

So here's 7-Up saying they're all natural, only 5 natural ingredients... and there's Dr. Pepper boasting of the bold, complex flavour of 23, an "authentic blend of 23 flavours". These two drinks have exactly opposite advertising strategies.

The kicker: 7-Up and Dr Pepper are the same company, the "Dr Pepper/Seven Up, Inc."

It seems that they are involved in a social experiment. Over here at the observers' corner, I'm shaking my head and cheering at the same time. I predict that both ad campaigns will be equally successful, proving once and for all that (a) consumers are MORONS and (b) publicity - ANY publicity - always works. It may be good to have hard evidence of that.

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• misc

Dumbass Newscasting: Morgellons Disease

If there's one outstanding trend I've noticed in newscasting lately, it's how often the news report fails to live up to the hype of its "ad".

Example: An "ad" for an upcoming news segment features the newsreader saying, "A new virus may be causing mysterious symptoms in children across the region. Find out more on the news at five."

The actual news segment will tell us that the "mysterious symptoms" are an increased number of cuts and bruises. A concerned parent talks about how he heard of a rare virus that makes skin extremely sensitive. Then they show a local doctor saying, "Hey, it's summer! Kids are out playing more, and falling more! Duh!" The End.

See?

At least, in the above example, the actual news report gives a balancing opinion as well, so the viewers aren't misled. Just this morning, though, I saw a bogus item that made me really sit up and listen, the way they sold it.

Mogellon's disease, they call it. NBC's news coverage said, essentially, that -

1. There's this disease that causes lesions and makes fibres come out of your skin


2. It's caused by some parasite and bacteria co-operating to eat up human flesh


3. Here's a DOCTOR who has this disease


4. BUT, most experts think this disease doesn't exist!


5. Medical community says "it's all in your head"!


6. Cut to a shot of the diseased doctor saying, "That hurts, dude."

My immediate thought was: hey, it seems to be affecting people, so it's at least a valid mental disease. It deserves some attention, surely.

Then it starts to occur to me... how can anybody say a disease doesn't exist? It's a case of simple facts, right - either you have fibres coming out of your skin, or you don't. Either you have that bacteria/parasite duo slumming it out in your body, or you don't - a blood test would show it in black and white. But they've got one doctor telling me this disease exists, and another saying it doesn't. What the hell?

I looked it up, and here's a few very important pieces of information NBC decided to leave out of its news segment:

1. Many "sufferers" of Morgellon's share certain symptoms, but not one single symptom is shared by all of them.


2. People only started to talk about the fibres after websites describing that symptom began to appear on the internet


3. The fibres shown by "patients" as evidence have been quite multicoloured: red, black, blue, green, yellow. In other words, evidence points to LINT rather than MYSTERIOUS DISEASE.


4. Most important: the lesions, the fibres and all other symptoms visible to the eye simply vanish when doctors put a cast over the affected area, preventing the patient from getting at it.

I can't believe a respectable news agency would treat this seriously, let alone give the impression that there's any merit to the sufferers' claims. Sheesh, what's next, crop circle theories on BBC?

Tags:

• rants

Wikimapia

Now this is a cooool toool.

Notice that India is by far the most filled-in place. There's lots of - I guess you gotta call a spade a shovel - vandalism, though. Some dude has marked out the whole of Jayanagar 9th Block in Bangalore (where I grew up, plus one of my favourite places in the world, period) for himself: "Jayanagar 9th Block [Residence of Kishore Kumar]"

Not to be outdone, I have left my stamp on my alma mater: "Carmel Convent Girls School
[School attended by Nandini (the Weird) from 1989 - 1994.]"

:P

Fun!

Protect Yourself

Thinker Beware

I had a bizarre moment today when I couldn't remember if I'm 24 or 25. I forced myself to pick a number without thinking about dates, so I am still not 100% sure. I think it's 24. For weeks now I've been telling people I'm 25.

There is some profound significance to this, surely. Is it just ageing? I always thought I'd grow more sensitive to my age, though, you know?

In any case, the age thing started me on an introspective turn. One thing I've always been aware of is how quickly time passes. I used to have very adult thoughts about moments fleeting by and sands pouring away through fingers etc. when I was ten years old. At thirteen I started keeping a diary for a strange reason: to be able to remember what it was like to be thirteen, fourteen, fifteen - "when I'm twenty or something". (The diary plan fell through when my parents got hold of it. I was seventeen, and my parents were like the CIA stumbling into a room holding Osama bin Laden and Kim Jong Il. Major fireworks.)

But see, even as a kid I realised that even though I felt the same as last year, I wasn't really. Memory is a deceptive little thing that whitewashes a lot, and tries to convince us that we were always as wise as we are now, of course we always knew this or that, we'd never do anything that stupid for those motives. My diary was a way of setting my own record straight.

After the diary plan blew up I try to remember. It's not easy. It's been two years since my move to USA, and I've just about convinced myself that life in Singapore was one long, buoyant party of thrills. I've forgotten the claustrophobia, the yearning for a freedom of movement that went down to my soul. Here in the backwaters of suburban USA, my soul has room to spread out, lie diagonally across the bed contemplating its own obesity. Space is not all that it is cracked up to be. It's only in books that people retire to the countryside and live the quiet life happily ever after. And you start thinking - that claustrophobia was quite something! What's suffocation compared to this state of too much knowledge of my navel-lint?

Introspection is a funny thing. It gives you a sense of revelation without knowing exatcy what was revealed; you feel worldly and wise without knowing why. As I write this, my face holds a look of weary, but noble contemplation. I nod to myself once in a while, eyebrows raised and mouth turned down, when I type something I think is of consequence. I sit up straighter, shoulders dramatically squared: I am writing naked truths. That's pure wisdom dripping from my fingertips.

No wonder I feel older.

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• misc

Colour Me FANATIC

Just about every review of Pirates of the Caribbean starts with "Never take a pirate movie seriously", and goes on to express such sentiments as "It's pretty good for a movie with cannibals and floating bone cages and undead monkeys." Why so shy? I'll say what nobody seems ballsy enough to admit: Pirates is just fantastic.

Like its predecessor, Dead Man's Chest features delicious visuals, a plot that's actually quite complicated, cool action sequences, marvellous acting and Johnny Depp. What more could you possibly ask for in a movie? Well, maybe some editing (read: cutting), but I'm sure, being moviemakers of such high calibre, they had very good reasons to leave those extra scenes in (perhaps the editor died). I did not mind watching Johnny Depp for all that additional time.

SPOILER ALERT

We pick up a short but indeterminate amount of time after The Curse of the Black Pearl ends, with Will and Elizabeth facing the gallows for helping Jack Sparrow escape. The new bad guy (prissy-British bad guy, not sea-monster bad guy) is willing to offer free pardons in exchange for Captain Jack's magic compass, so off Will goes to find Jack.

Who is, of course, in a uniquely Jack-like pickle. That gem of a line from the first movie, "And then they made me their chief", takes on a whole new meaning. This tribe of cannibals loves Jack, has made him its king, and wishes to eat his flesh to free his spirit. The captain's escape from the would-be diners is nothing short of epic, involving flying leaps, steep falls and human fruit-kebabs. At the end of that chase, hanging from the cutlasses of the Black Pearl, Jack makes his little speech: "My friends, you will always remember this as the day you almost caught Captain -" Enter big wave, reducing him to a sputter.

Jack's soon in worse trouble than mere cannibals, though. Davy Jones, that tentacle-faced devil figure, is after his soul, which Jack bartered for the Black Pearl 13 years ago. The only way out is to find the heart of Davy Jones, locked in an unseen trunk in an unknown location with an unavailable key. In order to find that, he has to go to this voodoo high priestess who seems to scare him (scare Jack!) for some reason. You wouldn't blame him for being confused at this point. He doesn't know what he wants. His compass doesn't work for him any more.

So he sets about solving problems the way he always does: sends Will off as bait onto Davy Jones's ship, steals trinkets from the voodoo priestess, manipulates the hell out of everybody for his own ends - and this time, he loses. Spectacularly.

*sigh* :)

Johnny Depp.

Was there ever an actor the camera loved more? True, Jack Sparrow is not as fresh as he was in The Curse of the Black Pearl, where his every step, his every expression was an unexpected delight. But he's still here, and he's still undoubtedly the star of the show. He reduces Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom to "also appeared in this movie". He holds his own against a bad guy who, Phantom-of-the-Opera-esque, plays a gigantic organ with the tentacles coming out of his face.

In the first Pirates movie, when Jack Sparrow throws sand in Will Turner's face in a swordfight, Will is stunned. "You cheated!"

Jack shrugs and says, "Pirate."

It's the only word for all of this. What's filling up my chest with glee to even think of it? What makes me want to chuck popcorn at people who try to trivialise this experience, as if it wasn't something rare and precious? How could I laugh all the way through an overlong movie - and overlong action movie - and come out feeling, of all things, exuberant?

Pirates.

Tags:

• movies

Goddamn Terrorists

So Reuters says there're "at least 100 dead", others say it's 135, while the official figure is 40.

My immediate family members don't normally use the Western line and are probably safe (touch wood). We're worried about people in the extended family, who might have been on the trains at rush hour. There's no way to know, the phone lines are jammed.

Everyone in Mumbai, everyone with folks in Mumbai - please check in when you can and let me know you're fine.

Audio Blog!

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• audio

Hike!

Hiked up Mt. Greylock in Massachusetts yesterday. Result: the knowledge that I am ridiculously out of shape. Or rather, I'm in perfect shape - if I was aspiring to be round.



That's the summit, people, at 3,491 ft. The view is hardly even worth the drive up, let alone 5 hours of walking through a buggy jungle, uphill. The only reason I'd ever do this again is for bragging rights, and who gives a fig about that?



Let's just make it official. I felt no excitement on having reached this puny peak. That smile on my face springs from the knowledge that the hike back is going to be downhill. (I was to be disappointed. The laws of physics seem to apply only marginally to hikes.)

My legs hurt. My whole body hurts. Bah.

Tags:

• misc

My Latest Rollicking Read

Bill Bryson's A Short History Of Nearly Everything is such a good read, I almost don't want to review it - I just want to talk about it. When you suddenly find yourself in possession of a brain teeming with fascinating facts about the universe and our world, you don't want to sit and think critically. I mean - look - let me just give you a sampling of my newfound knowledge:

• The human body consists of about one quadrillion human cells and 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. We're really just a small part of the bacteria that inhabit us.


• Deep inside oceans are ocean vents that release huge amounts of heat into the water. The temperature of the water immediately around these vents is some 40F hotter than the water just a few inches away. Some species of worms live near these vents, such that their heads are in hot water while their tails are in cold water.


• If your pillow is just six years old, then ONE TENTH of its weight comes from dead skin, live mites, dead mites and mite dung. Clean pillowcases make no difference.


• Nobody knows how many species of anything there are. Insects? Estimates range from 50,000 species to 600,000. Fungi - 20,000 to millions. They can't even agree on the number of species of hominids. Not only that, people don't even agree on how many known species of anything there are. There isn't one single claim that isn't contradicted by someone else. This stuff is batshit.

Now tell me how to think critically about this book while I'm busy freaking out about my definitely-older-than-six-years pillows. Ah, the lot of a writer. You take a deep breath (well away from any pillows) and move on.

Ever read a book that was ridiculously entertaining, highly informative and just all-round fabulous - and then wondered at the end of it, "Now what was that all about?" That's ASHoNE for you in a nutshell. I will rave about this book till the day I die, and yet, I am uncomfortably aware that what the book really is is not what it pretends to be; it contains more cocktail-party anecdotes than actual science.

At the beginning of the book, Bryson talks about the first time he got excited about science - which was when he saw that familiar illustration that graced all our science text books: the one that shows a cross-section of the earth, complete with cutaway layers all the way down to the core. Bryson eagerly opens his text book looking for more information. Instead:

[H]ere's the thing. It wasn't exciting at all. It wasn't actually altogether comprehensible. Above all, it didn't answer any of the questions that the illustration stirred up in a normal inquiring mind: How did we end up with a Sun in the middle of our planet? And if it is burning away down there, why isn't the ground under our feet hot to the touch? And why isn't the rest of the interior melting - or is it? And when the core at last burns itself out, will some of the Earth slump into the void, leaving a giant sinkhole on the surface? And how do you know this? How did you figure it out?

He laments -

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a longdistance phone call from the frankly interesting.

And yet, throughout his own mammoth tome, he fails his own test. Bryson is a master at ferreting out interesting personalities in the history of science and painting us colourful little portraits of them, so unlike most text books his work is anything but boring. But at the end of nearly 300 trade-paperback-sized pages, our science questions remain fundamentally unanswered. All too often, Bryson is happy to gloss over the details with a breezy, "It's not altogether comprehensible, but it's splendid, splendid stuff. Trust me." Dude, enquiring minds want to know!

It seems there are also certain factual errors in this book, though most reviews by scienctists suggest that the numbers of errors is not overlarge for a book that is not a book of rigorous science.

The deficiencies all pale in comarison to the sheer awesomeness, however. In any case, all my problems with the book could be remedied by simply changing the title, or perhaps adding a subtitle like: The FUN Way To Look At It All. It's full of brilliant nuggets of information that I find wildly amusing... and it certainly doesn't hurt being able to impress people at cocktail parties.

Tags:

• reading

Update

The title of this post is quite redundant, of course. In any case, here's an update. During a slump, my blogging takes earth-shattering occurrences to get jolted back to life - and I guess this certainly qualifies: an asteroid is right now - that's right, as you read this, if you're reading today - doing the cosmic equivalent of threading a needle. For all that Apollo Asteroid "2004 XP14" sounds like a new release from Microsoft, this smokin' piece of rock hurtles by today at just 1.1 times the distance to the moon away! It's a bullet that's passing through the sleeve of our collective shirts without grazing our arm. Whee haa.

I'm currently reading A short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson's definitive work of genius. Here's what it has to say about asteroid impacts. I might as well warn you to forget everything you know from Armageddon and Deep Impact.

An asteroid or comet traveling at cosmic velocities would enter the Earth’s atmosphere at such a speed that the air beneath it couldn’t get out of the way and would be compressed, as in a bicycle pump. As anyone who has used such a pump knows, compressed air grows swiftly hot, and the temperature below it would rise to some 60,000 Kelvin, or ten times the surface temperature of the Sun. In this instant of its arrival in our atmosphere, everything in the meteor’s path—people, houses, factories, cars—would crinkle and vanish like cellophane in a flame.

One second after entering the atmosphere, the meteorite would slam into the Earth’s surface. The meteorite itself would vaporize instantly, but the blast would blow out a thousand cubic kilometers of rock, earth, and superheated gases. Every living thing within 150 miles that hadn’t been killed by the heat of entry would now be killed by the blast. Radiating outward at almost the speed of light would be the initial shock wave, sweeping everything before it.

For those outside the zone of immediate devastation, the first inkling of catastrophe would be a flash of blinding light—the brightest ever seen by human eyes—followed an instant to a minute or two later by an apocalyptic sight of unimaginable grandeur: a roiling wall of darkness reaching high into the heavens, filling an entire field of view and traveling at thousands of miles an hour. Its approach would be eerily silent since it would be moving far beyond the speed of sound. ...

Within minutes, over an area [of the whole of USA], nearly every standing thing would be flattened or on fire, and nearly every living thing would be dead. People up to a thousand miles away would be knocked off their feet and sliced or clobbered by a blizzard of flying projectiles. Beyond a thousand miles the devastation from the blast would gradually diminish.

But that’s just the initial shockwave. No one can do more than guess what the associated damage would be, other than that it would be brisk and global. The impact would almost certainly set off a chain of devastating earthquakes. Volcanoes across the globe would begin to rumble and spew. Tsunamis would rise up and head devastatingly for distant shores. Within an hour, a cloud of blackness would cover the planet, and burning rock and other debris would be pelting down everywhere, setting much of the planet ablaze. It has been estimated that at least a billion and a half people would be dead by the end of the first day. ...

The amount of soot and floating ash from the impact and following fires would blot out the sun, certainly for months, possibly for years, disrupting growing cycles. In 2001 researchers at the California Institute of Technology analyzed helium isotopes from sediments left from [a mid-sized asteroid thought to have caused dinosaurs to become extinct] and concluded that it affected Earth’s climate for about ten thousand years.

We can only guess how well, or whether, humanity would cope with such an event.
And in all likelihood, remember, this would come without warning, out of a clear sky.

But let’s assume we did see the object coming. What would we do?

Everyone assumes we would send up a nuclear warhead and blast it to smithereens. The idea has some problems, however. First, ... our missiles are not designed for space work. They haven’t the oomph to escape Earth’s gravity and, even if they did, there are no mechanisms to guide them across tens of millions of miles of space. Still less could we send up a shipload of space cowboys to do the job for us, as in the movie Armageddon; we no longer possess a rocket powerful enough to send humans even as far as the Moon. The last rocket that could, Saturn 5, was retired years ago and has never been replaced. Nor could we quickly build a new one because, amazingly, the plans for Saturn launchers were destroyed as part of a NASA housecleaning exercise.

Even if we did manage somehow to get a warhead to the asteroid and blasted it to pieces, the chances are that we would simply turn it into a string of rocks that would slam into us one after the other in the manner of Comet Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter—but with the difference that now the rocks would be intensely radioactive. Tom Gehrels, an asteroid hunter at the University of Arizona, thinks that even a year’s warning would probably be insufficient to take appropriate action. The greater likelihood, however, is that we wouldn’t see any object—even a comet—until it was about six months away, which would be much too late. Shoemaker-Levy 9 had been orbiting Jupiter in a fairly conspicuous manner since 1929, but it took over half a century before anyone noticed.

This book is a constant revelation... exhilarating, really. Just this morning, I was very, very pissed off to find out that a mind-bendingly amazing piece of information was left out of all our Biology text books in school. I remember learning drearily by heart the parts of an animal cell in junior college. I remember being remotely puzzled while learning about mitochondrial DNA and RNA - why on earth do we have two sets of DNA in every cell in our body, one in the nucleus and one in the mitochondrion? Anyway. My puzzlement faded, I suppose, because I had more presing things on my mind, like trying not to flunk the test tomorrow etc., and I had put that strange piece of info simply out of my mind.

Here's what the teacher never hinted at: mitochondria are practically separate organisms! Not only that, they're invading organisms. Here's the illuminating quote from A Short History Of Nearly Everything:

One reason life took so long to grow complex was that the world had to wait until the simpler organisms had oxygenated the atmosphere sufficiently. ... It took about two billion years, roughly 40 percent of Earth’s history, for oxygen levels to reach more or less modern levels of concentration in the atmosphere. But once the stage was set, and apparently quite suddenly, an entirely new type of cell arose—one with a nucleus and other little bodies collectively called organelles (from a Greek word meaning “little tools”). The process is thought to have started when some blundering or adventuresome bacterium either invaded or was captured by some other bacterium and it turned out that this suited them both. The captive bacterium became a mitochondrion. This mitochondrial invasion (or endosymbiotic event, as biologists like to term it) made complex life possible. (In plants a similar invasion produced chloroplasts, which enable plants to photosynthesize.)

Mitochondria manipulate oxygen in a way that liberates energy from foodstuffs. Without this niftily facilitating trick, life on Earth today would be nothing more than a sludge of simple microbes. Mitochondria are very tiny—you could pack a billion into the space occupied by a grain of sand—but also very hungry. Almost every nutriment you absorb goes to feeding them.

We couldn’t live for two minutes without them, yet even after a billion years mitochondria behave as if they think things might not work out between us. They maintain their own DNA. They reproduce at a different time from their host cell. They look like bacteria, divide like bacteria, and sometimes respond to antibiotics in the way bacteria do. In short, they keep their bags packed. They don’t even speak the same genetic language as the cell in which they live. It is like having a stranger in your house, but one who has been there for a billion years.

Would it have killed educators to put nifty stuff like this in our text books? I suppose it would get in the way of - oh - blind memorisation. :P

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• misc