From "Why in-person friendships are better for health than virtual pals/Simply having good friends isn’t enough. Research suggests that to truly thrive, we need to physically meet with our friends on a regular basis" (WaPo).
1. I have almost complete anosmia so does that make other people less useful to me? I guess I would have more friends if the potential to smell them was part of the allure.
2. Apparently, you have to go to Europe to find people who volunteer to take electric shocks and attempt to succor themselves with smelly T-shirts.
3. We're not hearing about experiments that made people smell the sweat of unhappy people, but wouldn't that change the inferences? If you can smell and you go out and about where you can smell people in person, then, presumably, the smell affects you, but the effect could be negative or positive, depending whether the smellees are happy or unhappy.
4. On the internet, nobody knows you're a smelly dog....
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This one goes into two drawers -- the first for, "I don't believe it" and the second for, "I don't care."
Woof.
physically meet
Bad form. Redundancy.
One wonders if anosmia prevents the subconscious perception of pheromones.
Well, according to this study, the answer is sadly yes.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19235878/
The only thing that they could get the anosmics to detect were certain strong smells like acetone which are detected more by facial nerves than by the traditional sense of smell.
I couldn't understand the abstract either until ChatGPT broke it down for me. Supposedly Musk is working on an LLM that will read those multi thousand page bills that Congress passes before they can be read or understood, even by the people voting on them, and summarize them for us nearly instantly. That would be cool.
I'm a cat in a bag, and I'm feeling found out here.
Put the treats on the floor and just walk away. They'll be gone when you return. Beyond that, don't ask. I'm a cat - I don't explain and I don't apologize.
”…when our noses pick…”
That gave me a nice good morning laugh. The proximity of nose to pick and the accidental Germanic syntax gave me a vision of Goethe with his index finger shoved up a nostril, not to make light of Althouse’s deficit of olfactory pleasure, but still…
PDQ Bach: My Bonnie Lass, She Smelleth
A good rule for serious writing is to avoid using pick when adjacent to nose; detect is better for tone, unless actual booger mining is the subject at hand. In this case we can all make sport of WaPo’s louche editing.
The buried story in a couple years will be how the results were not able to be reproduced.
Mate selection is often driven by olfactory clues, indicating genetic compatibility, physical health and nubility.
The growing use of perfume, cologne and deodorant ("full body" wink, wink, is the latest fad) is believed to confuse and compromise our primal pheromone detection and evaluation.
The scent of a woman! Ooh-waa!
I doubt this is Boswell, but the story goes that a refined lady took a seat on the omnibus next to Samuel Johnson. Before long she experienced the odor of neglect that often wafted from the lexicographer’s attire.
“Doctor Johnson,” the bluestocking cried, “you smell!”
“On the contrary, madame, you smell. I stink.”
"Bad form. Redundancy."
It's like "snail mail" and "acoustic guitar."
Retronyms.
Smell the racism inherent in the system?
…people who had previously watched either happy video ('The Jungle Book')…
Wasn’t The Jungle Book declared racist years ago?
WK nails it. One can hardly trust scientists these days, and MSM science reporters not at all.
Are they waging a war on truth, or are they just absurdly credulous?
I love my husband's scent. He doesn't wear cologne or aftershave, and he doesn't sweat except under the most sweaty conditions, but he has, to me, a distinctive and indefinable smell.
Imagine meeting up with someone in person — maybe for coffee and a chat that takes up over an hour — and at some point you realize that you're both doing this because you read some article and thought it would help you live to a very old age. But why?, you ask, simultaneously. What are all these extra years of life for? Just look how we're using our time right now, enduring sitting here having a conversation with someone I only wanted to use for life extension. You both get up and leave, resolved to do what you actually want with the time that will be left to you if that's what you do.
In the optimistic version of the story, this realization and resolution opens up the relationship to genuine friendship and you sit back down and, for the first time, have a really great conversation with each other... and, when the coffee's gone, you get up to go for a walk together, and you walk and talk for 50 more years of your richly rewarding life.
Or you step outside the café and get hit by a bus. That's the ironic version.
"Wasn’t The Jungle Book declared racist years ago?"
I'll bet they played "Bare Necessities" (by the Sherman brothers, whom we discussed yesterday) and they just assumed this would produce happiness.
This is not a controlled experiment. There's no telling what emotional response that video might produce in any given person. Whether it was "declared racist" or not, some viewers might feel there is something off about this Disney material in the "jungle." Do bears live in the jungle? Why is the boy banging his own head with a coconut? There too much confusion.
"I love my husband's scent. He doesn't wear cologne or aftershave, and he doesn't sweat except under the most sweaty conditions, but he has, to me, a distinctive and indefinable smell."
This reminds me of Meade's Lesson #24 for young males looking for a girlfriend:
"Lesson #24: if there is a guy or gal you like who you hope will like you, 1. ask her for a study date, preferably at her house, when her mom and/or dad will be home. 2. Take a thorough 3 min. cold shower, apply no product whatsoever, put on absolutely clean clothes. 3. Run or bike to her house 10-15 min. at a high enough intensity to break a sweat. 4. show up exactly on time. 5. Smile, be cheerful and friendly towards her family members. 6. Study well enough to get an A on the exam. 7. PROFIT!!!"
Great advice that seemed unimportant to those pushing social distancing 4 years ago.
On Ann’s hypothesis at 7:27AM, it has been an interesting morning to date. I’m doing a normal early morning work routine for being in the office early. I get up about 4:30, leave the house an hour later, get breakfast at a local diner.
This morning, I had a young homeless woman approach me, the lone diner that early, and demand I let her use my phone that she spotted in my left pocket. I have social interactions with people all the time at this diner, but usually about an hour or two later. I would help this person if not for the demand and the admitted observation that she had been studying me before approaching me. She was wrong about the phone and pocket. She saw the bulge in my pocket, but it was my headphones for my iPad that I was using to read Althouse at the moment. The iPad also has a digital phone capability that allows me to call anyone in the world, but she was looking for a phone she could use. The wait staff had her leave. All of us would have bought her breakfast, but she used the wrong social approach. I suspect those mistakes are related to her homelessness.
Then I leave and oh my the traffic was crazy. From a safety perspective, I consider two times a year to be most dangerous for driving. The winter holiday season is one, because people are out and about heading to unusual events and places and doing so at night and typically running late. That makes for distracted and uncertain driving, the second is the beginning of summer, as the school year ends. Lots of new and energetic drivers on the road. For the old drivers, some new routines not bound by school schedules. This shakes things up. Sure enough, the truck next to me slammed into the stopped car on the freeway this morning. That close to an accident.
I think it isn’t necessarily the social routine of meeting people that extends lives, but the routine and familiarity of it. It allows us to notice things that don’t fit and adjust to them with out the additional stress of other chaos, such as a bear living in the jungle.
My daughter had a dog, an intact male, that she showed in competitions locally. No great success in competitions, but a very well trained and lovely animal. We bred him three times in his early years with a female I owned, and the puppies were well accepted by people wanting intelligent and handsome pets. Then we fixed the female, as we wanted no more puppies. For the next decade, until his inamorata's death, that dog spent every waking hour following her around the house and yard, smelling her backside again and again to see if she was again in heat. He wasn't horribly unsavory, he'd just give a quick poke of his nose under her stubby tail and fur to sniff, and she didn't seem to mind. But he did it literally every few minutes, for years and years.
When my son grew into his teen years, I often thought of that dog and what I had learned about how smell works, and how males go through life. Odor is a powerful thing.
Smell ya later!
Is this some attempt to explain away Joe Biden's woman sniffing behavior?
In Deadwood, Al Swearengen detected liars by their smell of cat piss.
I dont remember smelling anyone except maybe their perfume or colonge. Oh wait, on our trip to Africa, we could smell the African porters a mile away. If they got close, carrying their load, it was so strong, you wanted to throw up. That's because they had a different diet and we weren't used to their smell. Supposedly, vegatitarians think Meat eaters stink if they're too close when they get all sweaty. Bill Walton in his vegatarian phase used to complain about the "Stink" in the locker room. So, human smell and diet seem to be linked.
Quaestor (7:08am):
Not Boswell or Johnson, and it was a stagecoach (for long journeys), not an omnibus. It was Richard Porson, great classical scholar and hopeless alcoholic, and the woman did not know who he was. As I recall, the exact lines were:
"Sir, you smell!"
"No, madam, you smell. I stink."
or neutral videos (the weather forecast.)
HOW IS A WEATHER FORECAST A NEUTRAL VIDEO?
Oops. Sorry for shouting :)
A weather forecast is always an interesting and happy video!
Dogs have anal glands whose function is to impart a unique scent to poop, as a social marker. Which is why dogs sniff butts and poop, to see who this is and who's been around. If your anal gland stops working, it's a social disaster.
Okay, Weevil, dueling anecdotes is it? Then it’s ironic metaphors at thirty paces.
This morning, I had a young homeless woman approach me, the lone diner that early, and demand I let her use my phone that she spotted in my left pocket.
The diner probably has a landline she could have used. I've read too many warning posts in r/Scams to trust a stranger with my phone.
There must be something to the pheromone thing.
AA forced by anosmia to apply cruel neutrality when picking up the emotions of others.
“Don’t wash Josephine, I’ll be there in three days!” - Napoleon
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