h a l f b a k e r yThink of it as a spell checker that insults you, as well.
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What's a smell of barring obesity? |
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[Voice] I think that’s the clue to what this idea is
*really* about - a look-up dictionary of words that
might easily mistakenly replace other words in
predictive text. Any apparently garbled message
could be passed through this dictionary app to
create a list of plausible alternatives based on a
spectrum of butterfingered predictive texting |
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[hippo] - that’s a good idea. Is that what this is? |
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So this is using smells to represent and compare
numerical values? Mixing up sensory inputs sounds
fun, I like the idea of a kind of functional
synesthesia. +
But how? You couldn’t have “Lemon = 10, Cut grass
= 11…” - all the smells will blur into a meaningless
mixture. |
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//more need for canine user interface// I first
read as “need for more caffeine…” |
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Chemically communicating with dogs. Smells like a good idea to me. |
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Blending smells on a pie graph or a cloud seems to
make some sort of sense. I wonder how many
dimensions would be appropriate and how you
could rationally quantify? Would you have an
organic chemistry "decayed rotten diaper / bleach"
axis, and a "floral / salty" axis, and another axis or
perhaps hue for intensity? |
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Scents are not intuitively linked to numbers. |
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At wine tastings there's a spittoon and frequent sipping of water
to prevent the smells all blurring together. Some sort of nasal
flush might be required to separate discrete elements, such as
those of a bar chart - or it might be enough to prevent lingering
particles if everyone shaved their nose hairs before starting.
This would not apply to the pie chart, in which the different
smells would be simultaneous by design. |
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Only a small section of society can map quickly with rigidity, so not really for the general populous. |
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"Accounting, you are expected to report for smelly mathematics training on Friday at 4pm" |
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//Scents are not intuitively linked to numbers.// they're
not, but they probably could be. I can imagine
particularly prominent nodes being laid out
on a 2d map, with other smells surrounding
them depending on their proximity - perhaps arranged
using t-SNE or something similar. |
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So *discarded fish* and *dead fox* might be relative
neighbours, while *postman's aftershave* and
*grooming parlour* might appear in some other region of
2d space. As an aside, I think brain neurons
often arrange themselves in geographic layouts like these
- studies in mouse-whisker-mapped neurons I
think showed a crude example of this in practice. |
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Anyway, assuming such a layout could be generated, you
could pick two arbitrary points on the map, and
take a journey on the straight-line-path between them. If
you specified these points up-front, and
associated one with a low value, and the other with a
high value, then any smells that happened to
appear in-between *should* be recognisable as being
mapped to a kind of number-line that exists
between these two points. ( Which, I think, is what [RayfordSteele] is suggesting above) |
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This should also be applicable to people, so if I defined a
scale on the Vanilla-Ammonia axis, then you
might associate the smell of milk at the low end, while
unclean public toilets would be located
somewhere much higher up, with magnolia or swimming
pool appearing at midway points in-between. |
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You do have to specify your low/high points in order for this to work, but common
leylines and conventions would quickly be established that people could concentrate
on. Printers might offer an equivalent CMYK ink-cartridge system where each of C, M, Y
and K were some clear and unambiguous paths between pairs of various stand-out
smells. |
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Take away the communicating cloud. Maybe TMS bowlers?. easier for baselining as well. |
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I give up, [wjt]; what's a TMS bowler? |
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