SHOOT! I SMOKE!

YOUR PORTABLE AIR MONITORING SERVICE. Free | shootismoke.github.io There’s nothing more irritating to your humble reviewer (today, at least) than having a plume of cigarette smoke waft in her face at 8am in the morning while walking to work. For someone who has never smoked, this app is a disturbing reminder of the effects of passive smoking and general bad air quality. Its premise is as simple as it comes — boot up the app and give it permission to know your location and it will then load the local air quality data and translate that into number of cigarettes smoked in a day. Why do it this way? It’s more potent than giving a general ‘high’, ‘moderate’ or ‘low’ reading on air pollution, isn’t it? While some places won’t have as precise a reading as others, due to the distance from the nearest air quality metering station, the locations we tested were all within 10km, so fairly accurate. (Some user reviews made online, however, suggest that accuracy could be an issue with some locations being as far away as 200km from the nearest meter.) Apparently, our office at TechLife Towers is situated in a two-cigarette-per-day average area, which is a bit worrisome, especially for one particularly pregnant colleague. We’d have liked the app to have included some sort of map and graph to visualise the data, though, and to perhaps link that to weather conditions (wind, especially) to give predictions of pollution levels across the day and week. The app was inspired by Berkley Earth’s research ( berkeleyearth.org/ air-pollution-and-cigarette-equivalence) and uses their rough equivalent of 1 cigarette = 22μg/m3 PM2.5 (22 micrograms per cubic metre of particles of pollution, both solid and liquid). Scary. Let’s all move to the country, yeah?