Belief Bias:The coke myths

A long day at work, a game of cricket, a movie, a dinner or just a long walk ...the best thing to have by your side would be a tin of coke or pepsi...

But every time we sip it, we see thousands of people waitin to tell us that its injurious to our health...for a miliion reasons...anything they can cook up before u ask why...

These people have an unmistakable knack of misunderstanding things, fooling themselves and workin at their level best to fool others too...

Lets first try to crack one big myth that widespread in the Indian community...its not a myth though...it is true...but the way it is explained to ignorant people by 'experienced and knowledgeable ' persons is utter crap...

"A tooth dissolves in a bottle of coke in (each guy chooses his own span of time) 2 days"

And yea...it has been tried and tested and proved beyond doubt...but why does that happen?..an 'experienced' researcher(who might not even be one) comes on TV and tells u "It contains some toxic chemicals that are capable of dissolving the hardest part of your body....so be careful"

That would be enough to convince the unsuspecting society, makin sure the company runs out of business in no time...hardly any of them would have thought about people who drink a coke everyday and live healthy...No one would wanna know what 'toxic chemicals' the guy is talkin about...the word is just too convincing by itself...

Then a team starts to crack the myth...find the true reason....out of rational thinking...sixth grade chemistrty rather...try to recollect the first of the facts u learnt in chemistry...about acids...
"ALL ACIDS ARE CORROSIVE"
Ring any bells?
The cool drinks we consume are acidic...so naturally corrosive..and sure a tooth wud dissolve in it as it would in a glass of lemonade(a stronger acid...proved) or even a bowl of curd(lactic acid)... The acids produced by our digestive track are far far stronger than lemonade or coke but that's what does our digestion...but why did such researches never reach people?

Here comes the concept of belief bias...
People will tend to accept any and all conclusions that fit in with their systems of belief, without challenge or any deep consideration of what they are actually agreeing with.
People will tend to reject assertions that do not fit in with their belief systems, even though these statements may be perfectly logical and arguably possible.

Coke is too new for the third-world...metal tins had never been a part of their dinner table, a hundred years back...and they don't wanna change their ways....thats why people tested tooth in coke and pepsi but not in lemonade...even if u try to explain it to them, they are not gonna agree...

So if lemonade and curd are perfectly harmless, so is coke...c'mon a huge proportion of out daily diet is acidic in one way or the other..


Then....the recent buzz....COKE + MENTOS= DEATH!

Now, doesn't that sound stupid?
The image u see here is exactly what happens when u drop a couple of mentos candies into a bottle of diet coke...The shower rises to about 6 feet i guess...quite a strange thing to happen...and surely somethin u wouldn't let happen inside your digestive track...but to say that it wud lead to death without anyone actually tryin it real time? And i gues the explanation as per those most learned people in our society would have sounded somethin like "This just goes on to show how damn toxic coke is...see! a 6 foot shower! What more proof does one want?"

I'm sure u'd bet the guy had no idea why it happened...

But there were people who cracked this one too...they call themselves "The Mythbusters" and rightly so...they explain it to be the result of a phenomenon called 'nucleation'

See...if u look at a mentos candy closely(or maybe through a magnifying glass) u wud be able to see that its surface is actually not smooth...its surface contains millions of microscopic pits, which we call here as the 'nucleation sites'...Now..I'm sure u'd be aware of the fact that coke contains dissolved carbondioxide...In each of these pits or nucleation sites, a carbondioxide molecule can change into gas(bubble)...and naturally as they are formed, they escape to the surface...since the surfae of mentos is so pitted, millions of bubbles are formed in a fraction of a second...as the candy sinks down to the bottom of the bottle, all those bubbles(millions of them) tend to rise up and the force causes some of the liquid to rise along with them...as a result...u see somethin like the picture above...

If u dropped a couple of a particular variety of flavoured mentos into coke, u wud find that this shower thing doesn't happen...this is because the flavoured version of the candy has a waxy coating that is smooth and nullifies the possibilities of nucleation sites...

When u have actually eaten(not swallowed) a mentos candy, the nucleation sites(the pits on its surface) get distorted...so if u drink coke after that, nothing will happen because only microscopic pits can enable the liberation of a dissolved carbondioxide molecule...

So the next time u sip a tin of coke or pepsi, i suggest u enjoy the moment rather than thinkin of its possible unpleasant outcomes...coz there'll be none...break the belief bias...

The 80:20 rule

twenty20 is full of life and drama...as i type this post, curtains are being drawn on this year's edition of the IPL...anyway what I'm gonna say is quite different...commonly referred to as the 80:20 rule...

This is another theory...more of a practical thing...given by Parato(hope i got the name right...am really bad with them..)

Anyway the rule is quite simple and is best understood through examples...

Take any two related entities in life and this rule will hold good...

Lets take students and courses...
80% of the students opt for only 20% of the courses...

Now...income-expenditure
80% of our income is spent on only 20% of our expenditures(food, shelter)

Say...elections-contestants
80% of the people vote for only 20% of the contestants(or parties)

80% of our time is spent on just 20% of our activities

80% of e-mail users prefer only 20% of websites( say yahoo, google)

.........

Hope u've got it...keep comin up with entities and apply this rule...it has worked out well for everything I've tried so far...

Feel that this is too ordinary? Well i don't...think this one rings some bells in our head that have rusted over the years....

LIVIN ON ENTROPY

Well here's a scientific theory on entropy and life which was given by (forgot his name) and explained to me by my friend....I'll try to explain it to u...I swear tiz an awesome theory

If u are not quite used to the term entropy, one may define it as "The degree of disorder or randomness of the molecules of a system"

So lets come to a human body...When we live, our entropy is less as our body is quite rigid...when we die and decay entropy increases enormously as our body gets decomposed(randomness increases)..

Even when we live, in our younger days our entropy is less and it increases as we age(loosening of the skin and stuff like that)

Take food now...it has less entropy before we consume it(remains intact) and its entropy increases with digestion(it gets broken up)

Now, the second law of thermodynamics...
"All spontaneous processes proceed in a direction that leads to an increase in entropy "

So life(less entropy) proceeds towards death(more entropy)...(hope u can relate it)

But how do we prolong our life?

We consume food and increase its entropy thereby conserving our entropy (as an increase in entropy is inevitable..its natural, spontaneous)

So this theory lays it out that all living beings, in order to conserve their entropy, increase the entropy of their surroundings and the more they do it, the longer they live.

Weird guitars

Great news...Ray Kurzweil Supercomputers will achieve one human brain capacity by 2010, and personal computers will do so by about 2020...
But i seriously wonder if any of them would get even close to thinkin of stuff like this...(the last one and the sword-like one are my favorites)


























For now lemme just tell you I'm an intermediate guitarist..i'll share more on my guitar experiences later...in the meantime i thought u cud take a look at some weird guitars

Ignition

So often I end up deletin stuff i've typed for about twenty minutes....but never again...i'm typin my first blog, come whatever may...

This may sound too formal but for the greater good I'll first let u know what u will find in this blog...

U wud find a hell lot of crap about me, my god damned interests, a lot on music, even my own album reviews, some stuff on cricket, F1, maybe tennis, science, a few paradigms which i'll try to make interesting, some philosophies, theories, contras....and more that i might think of in the days to come...

So if u think u hav nothing to do with any of this(includin me), its better that u walk out right away coz u'd just be wastin ur time...

For the rest of u who have stayed on...do understand that I'm new to all this bloggin, but hey thats the only reason why i sound so formal...u wud understand the the other colors of me as we keep travellin together..so...here we go!

And by the way, keep posting comments to help me improve