Pranab Ray

When in India, I did end this podcast early due to the bad air quality. @nikhilkamathcio was a gracious host and we were having a great time. The problem was that the room we were in circulated outside air which made the air purifier I'd brought with me ineffective. Inside, the AQI was 130 and PM2.5 was 75 µg/m³, which is equal to smoking 3.4 cigarettes for 24 hours of exposure. This was my third day in India and the air pollution had made my skin break out in rash and my eyes and throat burn. Air pollution has been so normalized in India that no one even notices anymore despite the science of its negative effects being well known. People would be outside running. Babies and small children exposed from birth. No one wore a mask which can significantly decrease exposure. It was so confusing. The evidence shows that India would improve the health of its population more by cleaning up air quality than by curing all cancers. I am unsure why India's leaders do not make air quality a national emergency. I don't know what interests, money and power keep things the way they are but it's really bad for the entire country. When I returned to the U.S., my eyes were fresh to see what is normalized to me. I saw obesity everywhere. 42.4% of American are obese and because I was around it all the time, I had been mostly oblivious to it. In many contexts, obesity is worse than air pollution in the long term. Why wouldn't American leaders declare a national emergency on obesity? What interests, money and power keep things the way they are but are really bad for the entire country.

This week we are launching a user experience update to Google Earth across web and mobile platforms. This update is designed to make it easier to create, collaborate, and organize maps and geospatial data. Read more here: medium.com/google-earth/a…