At the Limits of Rhino Punk

Today while reading fictional stories about the ethical implications of body modifications, I came across this passage about a man “being kept alive by the very technologies whose spiritual purpose he had so despised.”

How could his loved ones elect to replace a pulpy mess with the mere fleshy simulacrum of a nose, when rhinoplastic alternatives are available that will not only replace but upgrade the usual functioning of the sense organ?

-taken from The Modification of Eugene Berenger, Gregory Norminton/afterword Dr. Nihal Engin Vrana

I am all for speculative fiction. In fact, it was in part the imaginative meanderings stimulated by such fictions that led me to investigate the sense of smell in the first place, and mostly because its future is so unforeseeable.

This 2013 collection, titled Bio-Punk: Stories from the Far Side of Research, even takes the extra step to have scientists and ethicists write forewords for each of the stories. But upon this particular idea, I must ask – How would we upgrade such an organ? How would we modify not the cosmetic aspect but the sensory function itself?

Being that we do not fully understand the way the olfactory bulb converts aromatic molecules into meaningful electric signals, such an upgrade sounds nice, but the details of its operation are currently quite nebulous.

The only thing I can think of is to replace the epithelium patch with a vastly larger and invaginated one, like that of a dog’s. But immediately, I recall the adage of sensory psychologist and smell expert Avery Gilbert: If humans still walked on all fours sniffing each other’s butts, then we wouldn’t find dogs to be such exceptional noses.

And then, on second thought I ask – Is this even an improvement?

The trajectory of human development seems to be one of losing our sense of smell, or at least not paying as much attention to it anymore. In that case, an upgrade would be the wrong word. “Liberation from the beastly reekings of your meatbody!” reads the sign outside the local body-mod shop.

Bacteria At Work

Just a nice picture of a cell doing its job, image source

All this talk about artificial intelligence and robots taking our jobs? What about the lowly bacteria? It doesn’t sound as hi-tech as a car-building robot or a cashier-bot; in fact, it’s the opposite of hi-tech, isn’t it? These bacteria can do work previously limited to complicated industrial processes. The key thing here is replicating metabolic processes of plants to produce chemicals that are really hard to make artificially, or synthetically. What goes on inside a plant is sometimes magic to us (you know, the whole thing about light-into-energy aka photosynthesis), but this is an example where that magical process has been decrypted, and for commercial gain.

Instead of taking (rare and expensive) chemical A and putting it through a bevy of chemical reactions where it until it turns into (even more rare and expensive) chemical B, these folks have figured out how to use a different starting chemical, a much cheaper and more ubiquitous chemical, and to turn it to the same desired end product, minus the complex, expensive and time-consuming industrial processes.

What this means for the flavor and fragrance industry is that some ingredients which heretofore have been prohibitively expensive will now be way more accessible on the market.

Engineered bacteria produce rare and commercially useful compounds in large quantities

Feb 2017, phys.org

Using advanced fermentation technology, industrial biotech startup Manus Bio hopes to make manufacturing flavors, fragrances, and other products greener and more cost-effective—and maybe create new products in the process.

The MIT spinout has created a low-cost process for engineering microbes with complex metabolic pathways borrowed from plants, which can produce an array of rare and expensive ingredients used to manufacture noncaloric beverages, perfumes, toothpastes, detergents, pesticides, and even therapeutics, among other products.

...

Manus' commercial fermentation process involves engineering microbes with plant metabolic pathways, and placing them into large-scale fermentors with inexpensive sugars to feed on. While fermenting, the microbes produce large amounts of the ingredients that can be extracted with commercial processes. Manus plans to scale up to commercial levels this year and sell the products to their industrial partners.

Sociology of Smell

Figure 1: olfactory classifications in contemporary Western societies. This is taken from an essay written for Scented Pages, “the virtual library catalogue dedicated to the culture of smell.”

Cosmologies, Structuralism, and the Sociology of Smell

Marcello Aspria, November 7, 2008

[pdf]

Figure 1 is a hypothetical and exemplary sketch of olfactory classification in contemporary Western societies. It represents a (fictitious) cosmology based on smell and morality, in which the 'fragrant' category corresponds with 'virtue', and 'foul' is paired with 'vice'. The examples in each quadrant are arbitrary; they relate to (i) the public dimension of smell, (ii) the body, and (iii) definitions of femininity, respectively. This diagram implies an opposition between 'clean' (B, D) and 'dirty' (A, C), as well as between the 'natural' (A, B) and 'artificial' (C, D) realm. Both axes represent social contrasts: what is dirty or clean, foul or fragrant is as much a reflection of moral values as the opposition between virtue and vice. Hence the differentiation between 'deodorized' and 'sterile' around the center of the diagram, the latter being defined as the 'artificial' counter to the former.

...

Figure 1 may also serve as a comparative tool for collective representations and modes of cultural reproduction. Not to compare the positions of fragrant concepts in the diagram, but rather to analyze the way in which they are related to eachother, and how these positions are produced.

...

Section 3: Classifying smell: the problem of odor taxonomies 

A problem that affects laymen and fragrance professionals alike is the nondiscursiveness of smell. More than half a century ago, perfumer Edward Sagarin wrote about his profession as a "science in search of a language", pointing out that we fail to describe smell by means of exact terms (Sagarin, 1945: 137). Despite significant technological advance in the measurement of odors in recent decades, the creation of a common scientific nomenclature or universal classification remains problematic. Descriptions continue to be based on material analogies (fruity, floral, fatty, etc.) and on metaphors redolent of other senses ("green", "warm", "loud", etc.). In turn, these descriptors are intertwined with the specific cultural context in which they are produced. In a structuralist analysis of odors, one must therefore not overlook the contextual differences in which the nomenclature and classification were produced. Another problem of odor taxonomies, and one that complicates a comparative historical analysis, relates to continuing shifts in the role and meaning of smell through time.

Sagarin, Edward, The Science and Art of Perfumery. First edition. London, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. (1945)

POST SCRIPT

The term 'osmology' means 'study of odors'. It is also used by Classen (1994) as a word play on 'cosmology'.

Path Dependence and Phylogenetic Incongruity

Giuseppe Penone – The Hidden Life Within

As a thing develops, be it an organism or a building, its path follows a similar pattern wherein the available options diminish with time until it reaches a locked-in phase. At this point, path dependence becomes most evident.

Humans are complex and have many parts, many of them developed at different times in the organism’s phylogeny, or evolutionary history.*

This issue of phylogenetic incongruence arises when one feature, such as olfaction, reaches its locked-in phase before another feature, like language.

And so, it is this way with our sense of smell. Olfaction is the earliest sense to develop. Vertebrates are the first creatures to have an olfactory system. But this is confusing because we can say that plants smell too. Olfaction at its base is chemoreception, requiring only a chemical and a receptor for recognizing that chemical. To think of it, some early, old, simple organism could sense light levels and acoustic/mechanical vibrations, but we would not say they could see or hear. Vision in humans is much more than mere photoreception (isn’t it?). But olfaction is not so much.

All this is to say that the ‘network architecture’ of our olfactory system is so old, so far back to the beginning, that although humans have evolved other parts of themselves as to deprioritize its use, its structure persists. This necessitates the kludge, the chimerical retrofit that is our olfactory-language system. To talk about smells, to generate an empirical, consensual recognition of olfactory experience – which requires language – is like trying to eat an electron. Sure you can say that’s what you’re doing, but is it really?

*The sequence of these developments are reflected in the ontological development, that is the development of an individual from gestation through maturity, and are so vividly illustrated in this chart by the master Ernst Haeckel.

Post-Script:

Electron Buffet – bacteria that eat pure energy

Here is a good example of how the sequence of system-design impacts development:

Before nature selects, gene networks steer a course for evolution

Post Post-Script:

Bose-Einstein condensates, the Matthew effect, and other laws metaphysical

The Acid Test

Cooking with Dice: The Acid Test

Just when you thought a role playing game fortified with immersive scent-explorations was 'out-there' as far as gaming goes, the creator of Adventure Scents have now come up with a new idea, even more multimodal than their last.

This time we're looking at Cooking with Dice: The Acid Test, a ‘classic RPG with a delicious twist,’ and in other words, a Gamified Cookbook.

What the hell is a gamified cookbook? It’s half cookbook, half role playing game. The Cooking with Dice system uses elements of traditional tabletop role-playing games to turn your kitchen into an adventure zone

Your character tries to level up to the esteemed Chef de Cuisine by executing recipes concocted by a roll of the dice. What's interesting here is that the recipes don't use heat, but acid (like the chemical-reaction-acid, not the kind of acid that melts your face off). You make things like pickles, jam, ceviche, .... No fire-breathing dragons necessary.

If this is anything like the last offer from Jennifer Howlett, Adventure Scents creator and game guru extraordinaire, Cooking with Dice is guaranteed to be an adventure of multisensory complexities.

POST SCRIPT

I can’t help but zero-in on the way this game is ultimately played, which is by fostering chemical reactions that turn raw ingredients into edible adventures. First of all, it’s genius for a kids’ cookbook – they get to “cook” and yet they don’t even have to play with fire.

Next of all, it totally reminds me of The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz, which won the 2013 James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference and Scholarship, which pretty much blew my mind when I read it. If you think you know what it means to be human and yet you haven’t read it, maybe you should. The idea of offloading the work of digestion to bacteria that exist outside our bodies, so that our bodies can do more important things – like thinking – is nuts. (It also helps to put in perspective the development of cooking and human digestion – where fermentation is the accelerating of a metabolic process via bacteria, cooking is the same but by fire. One is a kind of biological heat, and the other a more basic, chemical heat.) Anyway, fermentation is cool, and I think Jennifer Howlett is one smart cookie for coming up with this workaround for a kids’ (gamified) cookbook.

Finally, the ‘acid test,’ as she calls it, is essential to understanding the world of smell, because smell is a bacterial thing, a microbial thing. You cannot smell chlorine, or ammonia, or sulfur (these are single chemicals and we can’t smell that kind of thing). What you smell are biological reactions involving these chemicals, and which have created through their reactions more complex organic molecules that we can smell. Metal does not smell; “the smell of metal” is bacteria that live on our hands and in our sweat, reacting with metal to create new compounds that smell “like metal.” Understanding acids and how they work is the foundation for chemistry, and this gamified cookbook is a synaesthetically satisfying way of getting to know chemistry and the smells that come from it.

Check it out!

And while you’re at it, if you’re ever looking for that perfect ‘moldy dungeon’ smell or the smell of the breath of a fire-breathing dragon, check out Adventure Scents.

Almost Brains

Dope illustration by Jackie Ferrentino for Nautilus magazine

There’s a certain kind of jellyfish that have brains way different from our own, and which diverged a long time ago on the tree of life. They diverged so long ago, in fact, that they can really be considered to have alien brains.

I’ve been seeing this come up lately (both Nautilus and Quanta magazines). Maybe with computers, and specifically neural nets, looking more and more like the human brain. (And maybe with us finding all these exoplanets.) And certainly because these jellyfish use a decentralized neural net to do braining things. The Quanta article asks if neurons evolved twice. It makes you wonder what other ways brains can be made.

If you’ve never seen one of these in real life, please do so at your nearest aquarium, and at your soonest convenience. source

Notes:

Ctenophores (Comb Jellies) also resemble cnidarians in having a decentralized nerve net rather than a brain. Genomic studies have suggested that the neurons of Ctenophora, which differ in many ways from other animal neurons, evolved independently from those of the other animals.

wiki

What Sea Slugs Taught Us About Our Brain

Circa 2016, Nautilus

Comb Jelly Neurons Spark Evolution Debate

2015, Quanta

World's Biggest Dictionary

Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Tower of Babel

All words from all languages in one dictionary

The universal online dictionary Kamusi has 1.2 million terms from several databases in its quest to translate all the meanings of every word in all the world's languages. [...] More than a translator, this dictionary delves into the words so that two meanings of the same term can no longer be confused.

The project was started in 1995 by anthropologist Martin Benjamin who could not find a good way to translate between English and Swahili. Kamusi is the Swahili word for dictionary, and has over one million terms in 20 languages.

Kamusi Project

alternate site

wiki