A new app has revealed, or rather confirmed, a startling truth for inhabitants of big cities: we all smoke.
Shit! I Smoke, now available on iOS and Android, uses live pollution data from hundreds of air quality stations in cities around the world to calculate the equivalent daily number of cigarettes "smoked" by breathing polluted urban air.
The app was created by Brazilian designer Marcelo Coelho and French developer Amaury Martiny after they read a study that compared cigarette smoking with living in smog-infested cities. The study, authored by physics professors Richard A. Muller and Elizabeth A. Muller at California University, offers a mathematical model to calculate the number of cigarettes smoked using environmental levels of PM2.5, a cancerous microscopic particle.
“Here is the rule of thumb: one cigarette per day is the rough equivalent of a PM2.5 level of 22 μg/m3 (...) Of course, unlike cigarette smoking, the pollution reaches every age group,” the study reads.
The app simply combines your current location with live data from your nearest air quality stations to produce the number of cigarettes. Here at Highsnobiety's Berlin office, that number today is 1.9 cigarettes.
Hit the buttons below to download the app and find out the reading in your city.
In other news, the internet has a brilliant theory about Kanye West’s recent behavior.
