[books, academia] An Immense World, Ed Yong

[kaberett]

Okay, I have only got a very little further with this book, but Footnote Number Three to Chapter One made me make a noise with my face.

In a discussion about olfaction, and specifically quantifying how good various species are at it:

I've deliberately avoided putting hard numbers on the scale of these differences. It is easy to find estimates, and very hard to find primary sources for them;; after an hours-long search that included a scientific paper that sourced a factoid to a book in the For Dummies series, I fell into an existential void and questioned the very nature of knowledge. Regardless, the differences are there, and they're substantial; it's only a question of exactly how substantial they are.

Part of the reason it is slow going is that there are A Fair Few Footnotes; they're Good (see above); and because this is a library loan I am reading via Libby on my phone, which handles footnotes in a way I'd be (or at least think I was) fine with if my ereader weren't so much better at it.

The other part is that I keep getting distracted by following up references. e.g. a fifteen-minute trawl prompted by Footnote Number 12:

... Noam Sobel, a neurobiologist who studies olfaction, has come closer than anyone else to wrangling this complexity [of trying to predict how any given molecule will smell, and how mixtures will smell, and so on and so forth]. While I was writing this book, he and his team developed a measure that analyzes 21 features of odorant molecules and collapses these into a single number. The closer this smell metric is for any two molecules, the more similar their odors. This isn't quite the same as predicting scent from structure, but it's the next best thin--predicting scent from similarity to other scents.

This parameterisation (?) of scent is a 2020 Nature article. Earlier work, published in PNAS 2012 and covered in an informal article by Nature discusses "olfactory white", toward which mixtures of odorants tend -- think white noise or white light.

Alas this trawl also turned up a New Scientist article in which the guy is claimed to have asserted that scent has an important role to play in Women Synchronising Their Menstrual Cycles (which, uh, by 2015 -- when the NS article was published -- had... had its existence as a phenomenon called into question), but I'm inclined (having thus far done nothing more involved than skimming the first sentences of abstracts) to suspect him of common or garden misogyny, of a form that's unlikely to significantly bias the results his group reports over and above the extent to which, you know, Existing In A Society does.

So I'm heading back to Ed Yong! With some new-to-me perfume nerd thoughts sloshing gently around my head.

Comments

[steorra]

I really liked An Immense World. But I read it as an audiobook so I didn't get all the footnotes.

[rmc28]

I have this book on suspended hold at the library, I'm waiting until I'm sure I will actually read it to unsuspend, and it's great to find out you're enjoying it.

[haggis]

I understand why but I am amused that the Wikipedia article starts by saying clearly that it has not been replicated and almost certainly doesn't exist. Then the next section discusses evolutionary pros and cons of this non-existent phenomenon!

[gingicat]

I don't read much nonfiction due to attention span, but I might try for gems like that.

[wordweaverlynn]

I have to read this book.