The skin of life

First, the following from a year ago:

Think about it.  We humans are animals.  How often do you see other mammals taking leisurely baths?  Most would rather not go anywhere near water other than to drink it.
I don't mean to suggest that we stop showering.  Hell no.  But, if we start from that point of departure that the largest organ--the skin--needs to be treated with care, then we will think about showers also very differently.

I referred to Uncle RM--remember him?--who was known for his "காக்கா குளியல்" (to mean that he had very, very quick baths.)  During one of his visits with us, when I would hang around him for his witty and insightful remarks, he said that the less we bathe the better it is.

But then in a hot and humid place, what about the stinky sweat?  I suppose that's also why women wore jasmine and other fragrant flowers on their hair, and men splashed their torsos with rose-water and sandalwood paste!

Modern science is catching up with the late Uncle RM about water and skin care.

Before I get into that discussion, let me draw a parallel.  I don't always floss my teeth.  About once a week or ten days, I work a lengthy piece of floss in between the teeth.  Initially, the dental hygienist was concerned about my "bad" habit.  I explained to her that it was all about moderation.  A healthy diet and daily brushing of the teeth should work well, I explained.  Over the years, the hygienist has stopped asking me about my flossing habit.  Hygiene is never about the flossing--starting with a balanced and healthy diet is way high on the list for dental hygiene.  If one thinks that they can floss and forget eating healthy foods, well, good luck!

I suppose the parallel has already become clear.

Skin care is not merely about the superficial showering and soap and lotion and whatever else.  Soaps, lotions, and almost everything is a whole bunch of evil advertising about stuff that you don't ever need.  Though, I did like the pomegranate face wash ;)



Even the original idea of what shampoo meant is far removed from how we now understand its supposed importance. 

So, "What is all the scrubbing, soaping, moisturizing, and deodorizing really doing for the body’s largest organ?"

In one word?  Nothing!

In fact, the scrubbing, soaping, moisturizing, and deodorizing might be doing plenty harm.

experts want us to think of hygiene more expansively—as a matter of health and balance, rather than one of sterility and purity. With all our soaps and sanitizers and antibiotics, in addition to so much time spent inside, away from dirt and animals and fresh air, we’ve created new problems for our immune systems, which miss out on the chance to encounter benign triggers and instead learn to overreact to perceived threats. Excess hygiene can also be a problem for the skin’s microbiome, which has an ecology that we’re just beginning to understand.

Though Uncle RM didn't know about the biology of the skin's microbiome, he had an intuitive understanding about taking care of the skin.

So, take a minute first to appreciate and respect your skin:

Skin is a strange little miracle. Were it removed, you would quickly lose the water in your body and die of dehydration. It protects you from deadly radiation and pathogens and helps you stay within the narrow temperature spectrum your body can tolerate, yet it is, at its thinnest, half the width of a penny.

You take good care of it, and it will take good care of you.

[The] science of skin health, as described by Hamblin and Lyman, suggests that we err when we think of skin as static or as separate, to be ministered to by surface applications of various cleansers and moisturizers, goops and goos. (Hamblin scoffs at the idea of trying to promote skin’s internal collagen production by rubbing on, or ingesting, collagen: “It’s like if you needed new tires and you put rubber in your gas tank.”) Skin is, literally, an ecosystem, in constant connection with the health of the rest of our body, as well as with the world beyond.

The art of manipulation

A long time ago, back in my California days, a colleague who was older by a decade made a comment that made an impression on me.  He said something like this: "Sriram, everybody wants to grab whatever you have in your wallet. It is up to you to protect it."

Who are they?  Not your kids. Well, sure, your kids want your wallet.  But, you can easily fend them off.

"They" are the vendors of various goods and services.  They tempt you in ways that you won't even imagine that you are being manipulated by them, all because they want to get every dollar and cent that you have.

In the movie halls, for instance, they sell popcorn.  Now, you have already been brainwashed into thinking that you should always watch movies while feeding your mouth with salty and buttery popcorn.  So, you stand in line.  You notice that the price difference between the smallest size and the huge tub of popcorn is not that much.  You begin to wonder if you are a loser when you spend money for the small size when the person in front of you got a giant tub of popcorn for just a little bit more money.

Your mind races at dizzying speeds.  It is now your turn at the counter.  The young woman asks, "what size?" You blurt out uncontrollably: "The tub, please."

They grab your wallet.

Your first mistake was to allow yourself to be brainwashed into thinking that your movie experience will be sub-par if you didn't have popcorn.  Your wallet is already out of your control.

Then, you could not manage to stay focused on ordering the small serving.  You have been robbed.  After the movie ends, you go home and it slowly dawns on you that you overspent.

 “If you frame options in a certain way, you can nudge people in the direction of higher-priced products,” says Linda Chang, a psychologist at Harvard University.

Unless we are clear about what we want, they can easily manipulate us to do whatever they want us to do.  "Marketing ethics" might as well be an oxymoron!

So, what can you do to fight them?

Just don’t be a victim of it yourself. Whether you are buying headphones or deciding on a retirement plan, deliberately ask whether you are really choosing the option you need or want, with the attributes you were originally seeking, or whether you were distracted by a deliberately unappealing alternative. Like an expert sniper trained to avoid false targets, you may find that your judgement suddenly becomes a lot more incisive.

Be very clear about what you want.  The moment you show confusion and reveal your weakness, well, they mug you and your wallet is gone!

Money stinks? Look who is talking!

There is no free lunch.  Which means, something offered for "free" has some hidden cost that perhaps we do not think about.

Think about the old days of television.  No, not in the old country, where in the old days there was only one channel--the government channel.  I am referring to the old days in the new country, before my time here.  The old days before cable.  As long as people had television sets at home, they could watch the shows for "free."  Except, well, they had to put up with the advertisements.

So, let us see how that business model worked.  A bunch of people got paid to air the programs and they made money from the advertisements that were targeted at the viewers who were paying for it with the time that they wasted watching the shows that ranged from the inane to the profound. Time is money, folks!

Now, consider a different business model that is contemporary.  There is only one thing that people need to do--sit around and waste their time.  It does not matter how they waste their time as long as they waste it.  They can talk about the food they ate, the music they listened to, the politician they hate, or watch cats playing pianos.  Or, heck, even complain about their constipation!  All they have to do is waste their time talking.  Of course, they don't have to pay anything other than with their time.  This is Facebook's business model:

Your addiction is making Facebook astonishingly profitable. Put a little more kindly, your emotional and intellectual interactions on the social network are creating a great place for companies to advertise.

Facebook does not judge you for the high-calorie food that you ate, or the expensive shoes you bought, or whatever it is that you did;  all the creators of that medium want is you wasting your time and other people's time talking about it in Facebook.  What a simple business model, right?  Highly profitable too because we humans love wasting time talking shit!

Pundits made a big deal this week about how Facebook excelled as Apple stumbled. But there was a warning for Facebook in Apple’s results. Apple has relied heavily on one product — the iPhone — for much of its revenue, so when sales of the device slowed, there was little Apple could do to keep growing. Facebook is even more reliant on a single element: advertising revenue. If people spend markedly less time on Facebook — because an enticing new network comes along, for example — the company’s revenue growth could slow.

"If people spend markedly less time on Facebook" is where everything hangs.  It does not look like the trend curve will shift anytime soon.  Which means, yep, people talking shit makes Mark Zuckerberg stinking rich.  Ah, yes, there's a sucker born every minute ;)

Full Disclosure:
While I have vastly cut down my Facebook time, my account is alive
Yesterday, I posted there this photo of the dinner that I cooked ;)

A hunter. A bear. A clever ad :)

ht

Encouraging news: Facebook fatigue setting in?

To paraphrase Bogart's Rick, I hope this is the beginning of a wonderful trend:

Have we reached the Facebook saturation point?

 I hope that inflection point has been reached ...
That news item also reports that:

the net’s dominant social networking site lost active users in the 18-25, 26-34 and 35-44 demographic ranges, while gaining users in their mid-teens and middle years.

It just keeps getting better and better ... but then, one swallow doesn't make a summer!

A creative and funny advertisement

Will have you guessing about the punchline until the end :)

The death of the newspapers.

It is not an exaggeration by any means. Megan McArdle writes:

Journalism is not being brought low by excess supply of content; it's being steadily eroded by insufficient demand for advertising pages. For most of history, most publications lost money, or at best broke even, on their subscription base, which just about paid for the cost of printing and distributing the papers. Advertising was what paid the bills. To be sure, some of that advertising is migrating to blogs and similar new media. But most of it is simply being siphoned out of journalism altogether. Craigslist ate the classified ads. eHarmony stole the personals. Google took those tiny ads for weird products. And Macy's can email its own damn customers to announce a sale.

We could herd every new media type into camps and force them to become shorthand/typists, and newspapers would still be in just as bad shape as they are now. We could take down Google News, and it would barely register in their bottom lines. Even if every newspaper and magazine in the country entered into a binding cartel agreement not to put more than a smidgen of free content on their websites, newspapers would still be losing money, and closing by the dozens. It's the economics, stupid.

We're not witnessing the breakup of a monopoly, in which more players make more modest incomes providing more stuff, and everyone flourishes (except the monopolist). We're witnessing the death of a business model. And no one has figured out how to pay for hard news. Hard news stories take a great deal of time to write--more time than most amateurs can afford, which is why blogs tend to do opinion rather than journalism. Moreover, they are at least greatly improved when their authors are not worried about losing their jobs if what they write pisses off a local power broker.

This is a genuine loss for the American public.

Yes, it is a genuine loss. Papers, particularly local papers, if they do good work, can be wonderful for the local communities. And, many of them do. As they close shop, I wonder what will happen.

Probably? Come on!

Pepsi ad in India

The Super-Bowl ads in the US are practically nothing compared to some of the fantastically creative and entertaining ads that I watched in India when I was growing up there. If the following ad is an indicator, it looks like they are even more wonderful than before