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Nostrildamus
Scientific American has a column about a guy who has the duty of smelling materials that go into space, to make sure the astronauts won't end up gagging from odors that might disperse in the atmosphere on Earth but be concentrated in the Shuttle or space station.
I used to work with a guy who'd sniff bicycle seats for jollies. I guess he went to work for NASA...
dave
We all about these weird jobs all the time. I mean how on earth or space does one apply for a position which really takes no physical effort or mental strain? What would the previos work experiance for this person be after they left NASA.
Please list your previous positions...
I used to smell for NASA. Using my sense of smell my duty was to decide if a certain smell might cause astronauts to gag on the smell in a more concentrated environment.
Hmm ok. How will this help the janitoral position you are applying for?
I can tell you on a scale of 1 to 10 how much this shit smells?
Sounds good. Your'e Hired.
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
stainless steel
So, does this mean that along with controlling vitamins etc. in space-food they also work on the diet to make sure the astronauts aren't going to be producing their own "nefarious funk "?
I guess they can stop planning that Mexican cook off on the ISS..........
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Can you imagine the practical jokes the NASA folks could pull on these guys?
And so it goes.
news editor: we need someone to cover a story about sniffing gross things for NASA. copy editor: how 'bout old Steve Smith? news editor: nah, who else we got? copy editor: well, there's John Adams... news editor: nope, he wouldn't work. copy editor: well, what about Steve Mirsky? news editor: yea, MIRSKY sounds kinda gross.. he'll fit in. let's do it!
Somewhere on the long checklist of over one milion items, this man smells the astronauts before they can enter the shuttle.
"Wow, you smell like a man, ummm well, the others don't smell any better, you may enter"
You know, one has to be a little taken aback when one combines the words "NASA," "Safety," and "Canary." It makes me wonder if they also have tasters down here on the planet discovering if the food is poisonous or if the command screens cause permanent eye damage.
It also makes me wonder if these people are required to smell the astronauts.
The ______ Agenda
About 3 months ago, Scientific American changed formats, and I am not very impressed. It seems to have tried to pull in the Discovery and Wired audiences at the same time with "new layout", "smaller articles", and dropping pretty much all its columns from the past (Mathematics, Home Scientist, Wonders, etc etc) except for the humour one.
The biggest problem is that the articles do not seem to get the "review" that they got previously or the editing for style over content has pulled out some of the meat. Even the latest news blurbs have gone from scientific facts reported to "yet un-published papers".
I just signed up for a 3 year subscription right before the change (well thats one thing I can change this week.) Personally I would rather get Popular Science now than Scientific American. I am going to probably just have to get a subscription to Science or Nature now.
Stephen "Old Fuddy-Duddy" Smoogen
-- SJS smooge at smoogespace dot com
... because this guy must definitely be a decendant of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the great noser (and murderer *eg*) from Patrik Süskind: "Perfume" (ISBN: 0140120831).
> I mean how on earth or space does one apply for a position which really takes no physical effort or mental strain?
It must take a bit of concentration to rank smells like that, even on a scale of 0-4, as we are not really designed for it . Unlike sight or hearing, smell is really a background sense - we are not used to paying analytical attention to it.
I wouldn't want to do the job for too long at once, both from the sense of smell getting jaded, and concentration wandering.
Roy Ward.
This guy probably gets the sack every time he gets a cold, haha. Imagine if someone asks you what your job is! "I smell" you reply "I know" the other one says. lol
America: where liberty is a statue and patriotism is trusting the government.
...the guy employed at a german auto-manufacturer (I think it's BMW). His job is to smell the different materials, and make sure they smell "BMW'ish" and don't affect each other to create a bad smell.
He got famous on a german TV-show, where he was able to tell the make, model and year of a dusin cars, just by smelling them (he was blindfolded).
he can always do a carear move... some of those expert tasters make six figures and more.
Three guys in a small, sealed space for 12 days, using toilets that where essentially hi-tech plastic bags. Makes you shudder just to think aboout it.
Smelling stuff before they go to space? Yeah it makes senses. This is no different than say a wine taster, perfume tester(?) and so on. I am sure they have people to make sure the food and water taste okay, machines ain't too loud, tools ain't slippy when used with gloves etc. Things that concern every one of our senses.
What this story is really about is how difficult it is to travel to space, how many things that need to be take into account for every shuttle launch. Grow up people, this is not news for kids.
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Codeala - Just another mindless drone
After reading the article, and laughing, and laughing and laughing, I stopped and thought about it for a moment.
This would be a severe impediment to such things as a comercial public space station or that much touted space hotel idea from back in the late 60s.
Can you imagine having 200 guests paying for their week in space, then demanding their money back because the 201st guest refused to bathe, and stunk up the whole place...
Oh, and I thought security was bad when taking my liggage through customs now... "I'm sorry sir, your leather coat stinks when I spray water on it, we can not allow you to bring it into space" the agent says after sniffing all my belongings...
Oh, and a new kind of extortion: "You can rent a storage locker here for $2000 per day or I'll be happy to hold on to the coat for you."
Space travel opens up so many new possibilities...
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John Glenn passed his test.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Listen to "Panty Rap" on Tinseltown Rebellion to hear him .. uh .. requesting donations. Go to this site for actual pictures of the finished quilt.
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What do you do if Tito rips a killer "rotten egg" fart on the ISS? Do they have special "fart filters" for this sort of thing?
The problem with useing a dog for this is that dogs don't find any smell disgusting. You really need a human nose and human brain to do this particular kind of work.
Why would we need anything more than a human with a rather sensitive sense of smell? We aren't interested in making sure that no dog gags at the odor: we want the poor humans to feel OK.
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under-paid karma whore
Anyone else remember mirsky's Worst of the Web? Same Steve Mirsky?!? That site kicked ass...
Sign me up for the smell-tested Slashdot. A cadre of brave Nasalteers can prevaluate the articles in the submission queue and categorize them by odor.
This article, for example, might rate as "olidous, with a mildly mephitic aftertaste."
How are you supposed to ask the dog what he thinks?
Obviously some moderator without the slightest hint of humour read my post and decided - "Not funny, therefore off-topic". Thank you very much for this encouragement to try to make the world a funnier place. I think I'll take my fathers hunting rifle to school tomorrow anyway.. P.S. ;o)
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
I'm kinda surprised that NASA is using a human to do this. I didn't read the article yet, so perhaps this is a waste. Aren't we, as humans, one of the more under-developed species when it comes to olafactory senses?
Most of us are, yes. But then that's the trick isn't it? You can't have a dog tell you that something stinks because dogs cannot talk. You could build a sniffer machine to test the smell, but then it ends up having a wider range of detectability than a human nose, and it still can't tell you if something smells really awful.
Nope, if you want to see if something smells bad to a human being, then you pretty much are best of (economically and effectively) using humans as testers.
FWIW, companies who make personal care products like Gillette and Procter & Gamble have people who do all kinds of weird crap to make sure the stuff does what it's supposed to. I remember a Nat'l Geographic article a while back about the sense of smell in general. It featured "armpit sniffers" at a company that did research for P&G in Ohio.
But masters, remember that I am an ass: though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass.
Random Musings at Rum Smuggler
Why don't we start an OS movement in this field! Open Nose! Get the community to share the smelling duties. Maybe even distributed. Sorta a NOSEY at home project?
Okay, yeah, so these guys do their job to protect that 'stronauts. Nice. Much more important is the testing that goes on beforehand for things that could kill them. A nice story, but a bit, well, fluffy.
I work with the guys at Marshall Space Flight Center who do toxicity testing pretty regularly. Offgassing is a huge concern, up there with flammability. [Stuff that doesn't burn in Earth's atmosphere will burn in the ISS/STS atmosphere, especially ISS, which runs at 25.3% oxygen.
-- Geof F. Morris
This guy probably gets the sack every time he gets a cold, haha.
Yeah. And can you imagine how hard it is to get another job when your major qualification is telling people how much things stink?
Heck, you'd even have trouble being a bum; I don't think I need to tell you how unsuccessful wearing a " Will smell for food " sign around your neck would be...