Combinatorics works in your favor when trying to make a smell library.
You don't have to be that precise. You don't even have to know which receptors sence which compounds. Enough trials followed by less chemistry will get you there faster. You are probably better off relying on discriminating noses, as do perfume companies, and tell the chemists to shut up, sit down, watch and learn.
Receptors counts probably don't differ that much, but individuals might have different sensitivities.
As for your first question, Google found this in under a second:
There are a large number of different odor receptors, with as many as 1,000 in the mammalian genome which represents approximately 3% of the genes in the genome. However not all of these potential odor receptor genes are expressed and functional. According to an analysis of data derived from the human genome project, humans have approximately 400 functional genes coding for olfactory receptors and the remaining 600 candidates are pseudogenes.
...
The reason for the large number of different odor receptors is to provide a system for discriminating between as many different odors as possible. Even so, each odor receptor does not detect a single odor. Rather each individual odor receptor is broadly tuned to be activated by a number of similar odorant structures.
Even the right library of molecular signatures, which would be needed to interpret the output of the GC/Mass Spec is in the neighbourhood of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ah but think out of the box (lab).
You probably wouldn't need a mass spec, what with the newer chem-lab-on-a-chip that they are coming out with these days. Remember, you are not trying to identify the elements involved so as to faithfully reproduce them. You merely want something that smells like them. Coffee tasters and perfume smellers have been doing this by nose for decades.
In other words, you don't care what elements are actually there, you only care what they smell like. Given the human sense of smell, you need only isolate what combinations and ratios we can actually smell, and approximate it with a basic set of cheap and versatile chemicals. I doubt, at the end of the day if humans actually have smell receptors for everything. And I bet smell, like taste, comes down to various combinations of 10 to 20 different molecular structures.
Emit those in the right proportions, and you're good.
In a special lab, that formula can then be inscribed on a bronze disk to artificially reproduce the smell. The smell can also be recreated in small vials.'"
Neither of these sound optimum. What you would want is the building blocks of those scents stored in little plastic ink-jst like cartridges, each holding half a dozen or so different molecule mixtures. It would be vitally important to size these cartridges so that the most common components would be in the smallest cells, such that it would run out first, requiring you to buy the entire cartridge well before the rest of the compounds were exhausted, You also want to be sure it isn't refillable.
Then you can almost give the smell generator away, and make a fortune selling smell-cartridges. This would allow you to sell the entire patent structure to HP, and retire on your profits, and thumb your noses (figuratively and literally) at the world by releasing the first Olfactory Goatse.
But when you see that at print time, why would anyone expect that to survive? Steam coming out of your printer is a pretty significant clue if you ask me.
I have boxes of normal 20 pound office bond (nothing special) circa 1985 containing old listings. Its as crisp and intact as ever, and it got no special treatment, simply sitting in boxes on the shelf. I have continuous forms from old IBM mainframe 3800 printers that looks rattier. Probably the paper. But even these show no signs of print flaking off.
I've simply never seen print flaking off. I've seen it wipe off with just finger pressure, but that was because the fuser roll had died and was no longer heating.
Actually, fire safes are a lot better for paper than CD/DVD media, which will be destroyed faster than paper chars.
So wrap the DVD with 4 inches of paper on all sides.
You can buy fire safes that are rated for 1, 2, ore 3 hours of fire which will maintain internal temperatures no hotter than 125F and humidity no less than 80%. But expect to pay big. North of $8000 bucks at wholesale.
Relying on "fire safes" that are stored on-site is pretty silly anyway unless you have a concrete building with sprinklers. Given the ease of moving it off site, the cheapest solution is off-site backup.
I have already noted that laser prints can come off in flakes from the paper it's supposed to be attached to leaving unreadable text, and that's only after a few years.
Can come off, but in actual use doesn't.
Paper laying around loose, maybe. But l have laserjet printed output bound in binders since the first laser printers became available on common shelf storage which is not exhibiting any degradation over all these years. And, no, the paper isn't rotting out either, just to head off that old fud.
Without a computer he will have no need of this data. It's account data! What good is that without a computer? (Left unsaid is what kind of accounts we are talking about. If computer accounts you simply don't need it. If financial accounts you might temporarily need to work with paper till you restore the computers).
Why not a second or third or fourth backup at a different location all in common computer readable form? Planning to scan in paper is far more complex than just a conventional backup on common media with a copy off site.
According to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA Ike does indeed have a none profit foundation, like Microsoft, Google and Ford. But ikea itself is very much a For Profit Dutch Corporation.
But you have to admit, even it its heyday, Laserdisks were even more nerdy than booting Linux on your Laserjet printer, just to see if you could do it.
Word of mouth is meaningless, no better than top 20 radio unless you happen to hang around with people who just happen to like the same music as you.
YouTube has nothing that I need except endless miserable covers, each worse than the last. Its a wasteland of bad remixes and stupid screensaver videos. Its impossible to find anything new or unique unless you have some external links.
Can you translate into and out of 50 different languages? Google Translate and the Systran engine can.
Let me fix that for you: Can Humans translate into and out of 50 different languages? Why yes, yes we can, and we do a far better job of than Google.
But we can't program a computer to translate a language we don't know. And if we can't distinguish between a parody of extremism, or subtle sarcasm reliably as humans without visual or written clues, how would you propose to tell a machine to do so?
Or perhaps simply to overlook the CO2 (and by the way, it is C oh 2, not C zero 2) issue completely, in their quest to blame some specific activity.
Since CO2 levels have recently pass the 400 ppm level for the first time in "recorded history" (ignoring for the moment that nobody recorded this until last 50 years or so), the source of the clouds could be a natural reaction to the increased CO2, and the claimed increase in world temperatures.
Since the article says:
'A team of researchers looking for an expected decrease in the number of clouds in this layer, as solar activity and heating have ramped up,
Yet in years past they were predicting increases cloud cover at all altitudes as one of the outcomes of increased temperatures. So why were they expecting a decrease?
It seems far more likely to me that they have their model wrong than it is likely that the puny number of launches of late have dumped that many tons of water in the mesosphere.
The ability to rapidly consume books and music using the internet contributes to shitty efforts being pushed out of the market at an proportionally
rapid rate.
There was always shitty music and shitty books. You find the latter in every honkytonk in north america, and every pub in europe. The books, well you never really saw any of that stuff.
We had gate keepers you see. The publishers and recording industry were filtering what we were allowed to hear and read. Somewhere along the way their tastes were separated from ours. Their aim became simply to make money, and artistry and talent be damned.
We don't need that any more. We have better tools.
But if their filters still suit you, you can still use them. Just keep reading and listening to the best seller lists and you will have the same benefit of filtration working for you. But don't complain when all there is to read is yet another vapid Vampire story and the only instruments you ever hear are guitars and drums.
There is no way you will go to a record store, find an artist that no more than a few thousand people know about, hope you will like it and spend 10$ on buying the record. All without actually supporting the artist.
This is where Google Music, Amazon Music, and Apple have it all over records, or concerts, or even word of mouth.
If you like a certain style, any of those services will show you similar artists and similar music, and let you listen to a bit of it by click the sample button.
With a few minutes of spare time, you can, with each exploration branching our wider and wider, discover things you might never find any other way. Not since my days in the college dorm have I seen such an elegant engine for exposure to such a wide variety of styles and tastes.
The 45 and the CD may be considered the Gutenberg press of the audio world. But the Play Sample button is the equivalent of the card catalog in the library, or the Encyclopedia Britannica (before its demise). Exposure to everything, quickly, with enough depth to decide whether or not to pursue it further.
Yes, in many instances, its still tied to the music publishing business, but more and more indi music is showing up. This tool is probably the ONE thing needed to set indi music in motion, much to the demise of the recording industry.
The same is true of books, although the random sampling feature works much less effectively.
s an American, while in an abstract way I care what the French are doing to their people, my opinions are really only applicable to my own country - in other words, as far as NSA spying, what the French are doing is not relevant.
When the French spy on US citizens and feed it to the NSA, how is that different, or some how not relevant? I'm sure the NSA returns the favor. Each side claiming they are protecting their citizens from the Rest of the World.
Perhaps we as Americans, still clinging desperately to tatters of our Constitution, which, in our hearts, we know is already a joke, have a harder time than the rest of the world getting our head around one single question:
Where did this entire Idea that Governments were authorized to spy on its citizens come from?
Perhaps the German, the French and the Russian never even thought to ask that question, having never had a time in their memory (if not their entire history) where they were ever free of such government snooping, because Government was always a Right excersized over citizens, and citizens were never in control of government.
Who (besides soccer moms) would watch (even for free) a team fat fat out of shape largely incompetent pretty much clueless players? In any sport? In any country?
However, when you're paying for a train fare, you've paid for the transit
No, you've paid for half the transit. Advertisers paid for the other half. It's little different from newspapers or pay television.
Tax payers paid for the other half. Interior advertising pays very little on a train, or bus. (The outside of buses bring in some revenue, but not as much as you might think).
So between fares and Tax Money, virtually ALL of the cost of train, subway, bus transport is paid by the users, or taxpayers in the appropriate jurisdiction.
If fares went down, or service improved with more routes and frequency, advertising on trains might be warranted. But I still don't want bone conduction or loudspeaker advertising that I can't shut out.
Specifically, advertising needs to be prohibited from all situations where a person has paid for access or entrance to something. More ideally, it would also be prohibited from any context where the person hasn't explicitly agreed to be subjected to ads in exchange to some product or service.
What would that ball game cost if all advertising was eliminated from inside the stadium? Could the fans afford it? Could the team afford to fly to their next game, or would they all be taking the train?
Most likely these things drive the inflated contracts we pay athletes these days.
Is a train, or an airplane or even a bus is a different proposition?
Major airlines don't seem to advertise anything, except themselves. Every city bus I've ever been in has advertising. (Some of it left over from the Pleistocene.) New York Subways have always had advertising in the trains. Seattle light rail, none. (Although the cars are configured for advertising, it appears not to be in use yet).
You can close your eyes, or read your book, listen to your music and shut out all the ads, but bone conduction seems a little over the top.
Slashdot Mirror
Combinatorics works in your favor when trying to make a smell library.
You don't have to be that precise. You don't even have to know which receptors sence which compounds.
Enough trials followed by less chemistry will get you there faster.
You are probably better off relying on discriminating noses, as do perfume companies, and tell the chemists to shut up, sit down, watch and learn.
The shelf life is FAR longer than Slashdot nerds would have you believe.
No one specified a time frame here, certainly not the original story.
As far as I'm concerned, 100 years is more than adequate. Beyond that its someone elses problem.
The technology will change and people will have to move the data to another media well before then.
Receptors counts probably don't differ that much, but individuals might have different sensitivities.
As for your first question, Google found this in under a second:
There are a large number of different odor receptors, with as many as 1,000 in the mammalian genome which represents approximately 3% of the genes in the genome. However not all of these potential odor receptor genes are expressed and functional. According to an analysis of data derived from the human genome project, humans have approximately 400 functional genes coding for olfactory receptors and the remaining 600 candidates are pseudogenes.
...
The reason for the large number of different odor receptors is to provide a system for discriminating between as many different odors as possible. Even so, each odor receptor does not detect a single odor. Rather each individual odor receptor is broadly tuned to be activated by a number of similar odorant structures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_receptor
So if you could narrow it down to 400 chemicals you might be able to fine tune it manually (by nose) to even fewer that are "good enough" matches.
When is google maps going to have this? I want to trace where my house was back then.
Google???
I would have been happy just to have the Summary link to the actual map instead of something several clicks removed.
The actual story is HERE
and a video of the breakup is here
Why do posters link to things that are simply Click-Frauds for some advertiser campaign? And why do editors let them?
Even the right library of molecular signatures, which would be needed to interpret the output of the GC/Mass Spec is in the neighbourhood of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ah but think out of the box (lab).
You probably wouldn't need a mass spec, what with the newer chem-lab-on-a-chip that they are coming out with these days. Remember, you are not trying to identify the elements involved so as to faithfully reproduce them. You merely want something that smells like them. Coffee tasters and perfume smellers have been doing this by nose for decades.
In other words, you don't care what elements are actually there, you only care what they smell like. Given the human sense of smell, you need only isolate what combinations and ratios we can actually smell, and approximate it with a basic set of cheap and versatile chemicals. I doubt, at the end of the day if humans actually have smell receptors for everything. And I bet smell, like taste, comes down to various combinations of 10 to 20 different molecular structures.
Emit those in the right proportions, and you're good.
Actually it said:
In a special lab, that formula can then be inscribed on a bronze disk to artificially reproduce the smell. The smell can also be recreated in small vials.'"
Neither of these sound optimum. What you would want is the building blocks of those scents stored in little plastic ink-jst like cartridges, each holding half a dozen or so different molecule mixtures. It would be vitally important to size these cartridges so that the most common components would be in the smallest cells, such that it would run out first, requiring you to buy the entire cartridge well before the rest of the compounds were exhausted, You also want to be sure it isn't refillable.
Then you can almost give the smell generator away, and make a fortune selling smell-cartridges.
This would allow you to sell the entire patent structure to HP, and retire on your profits, and thumb your noses (figuratively and literally) at the world by releasing the first Olfactory Goatse.
But when you see that at print time, why would anyone expect that to survive?
Steam coming out of your printer is a pretty significant clue if you ask me.
I have boxes of normal 20 pound office bond (nothing special) circa 1985 containing old listings. Its as crisp and intact as ever, and it got no special treatment, simply sitting in boxes on the shelf. I have continuous forms from old IBM mainframe 3800 printers that looks rattier. Probably the paper. But even these show no signs of print flaking off.
I've simply never seen print flaking off.
I've seen it wipe off with just finger pressure, but that was because the fuser roll had died and was no longer heating.
Actually, fire safes are a lot better for paper than CD/DVD media, which will be destroyed faster than paper chars.
So wrap the DVD with 4 inches of paper on all sides.
You can buy fire safes that are rated for 1, 2, ore 3 hours of fire which will maintain internal temperatures no hotter than 125F and humidity no less than 80%. But expect to pay big. North of $8000 bucks at wholesale.
Relying on "fire safes" that are stored on-site is pretty silly anyway unless you have a concrete building with sprinklers.
Given the ease of moving it off site, the cheapest solution is off-site backup.
I have already noted that laser prints can come off in flakes from the paper it's supposed to be attached to leaving unreadable text, and that's only after a few years.
Can come off, but in actual use doesn't.
Paper laying around loose, maybe. But l have laserjet printed output bound in binders since the first laser printers became available on common shelf storage which is not exhibiting any degradation over all these years. And, no, the paper isn't rotting out either, just to head off that old fud.
Exactly.
The whole premise is flawed.
This is silly.
Without a computer he will have no need of this data. It's account data! What good is that without a computer? (Left unsaid is what kind of accounts we are talking about. If computer accounts you simply don't need it. If financial accounts you might temporarily need to work with paper till you restore the computers).
Why not a second or third or fourth backup at a different location all in common computer readable form?
Planning to scan in paper is far more complex than just a conventional backup on common media with a copy off site.
According to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA Ike does indeed have a none profit foundation, like Microsoft, Google and Ford.
But ikea itself is very much a For Profit Dutch Corporation.
Hard to pack in boxes, and they make inefficient use of limited land, that's my guess.
Might also be harder to assemble.
Since Ikea Already uses one percent of all the processed wood in the world, i suspect they also know that other designs are more resource demanding.
Nerve hit. Duly noted.
But you have to admit, even it its heyday, Laserdisks were even more nerdy than booting Linux on your Laserjet printer, just to see if you could do it.
Word of mouth is meaningless, no better than top 20 radio unless you happen to hang around with people who just happen to like the same music as you.
YouTube has nothing that I need except endless miserable covers, each worse than the last. Its a wasteland of bad remixes and stupid screensaver videos. Its impossible to find anything new or unique unless you have some external links.
Perhaps you should look up Poe's Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
Can you translate into and out of 50 different languages? Google Translate and the Systran engine can.
Let me fix that for you: Can Humans translate into and out of 50 different languages?
Why yes, yes we can, and we do a far better job of than Google.
But we can't program a computer to translate a language we don't know. And if we can't distinguish between a parody of extremism, or subtle sarcasm reliably as humans without visual or written clues, how would you propose to tell a machine to do so?
to confuse the C02 argument even further.
Or perhaps simply to overlook the CO2 (and by the way, it is C oh 2, not C zero 2) issue completely, in their quest to blame some specific activity.
Since CO2 levels have recently pass the 400 ppm level for the first time in "recorded history" (ignoring for the moment that nobody recorded this until last 50 years or so), the source of the clouds could be a natural reaction to the increased CO2, and the claimed increase in world temperatures.
Since the article says:
'A team of researchers looking for an expected decrease in the number of clouds in this layer, as solar activity and heating have ramped up,
Yet in years past they were predicting increases cloud cover at all altitudes as one of the outcomes of increased temperatures. So why were they expecting a decrease?
It seems far more likely to me that they have their model wrong than it is likely that the puny number of launches of late have dumped that many tons of water in the mesosphere.
The ability to rapidly consume books and music using the internet contributes to shitty efforts being pushed out of the market at an proportionally
rapid rate.
There was always shitty music and shitty books. You find the latter in every honkytonk in north america, and every pub in europe. The books, well you never really saw any of that stuff.
We had gate keepers you see. The publishers and recording industry were filtering what we were allowed to hear and read.
Somewhere along the way their tastes were separated from ours. Their aim became simply to make money, and artistry and talent be damned.
We don't need that any more. We have better tools.
But if their filters still suit you, you can still use them. Just keep reading and listening to the best seller lists and you will have the same benefit of filtration working for you. But don't complain when all there is to read is yet another vapid Vampire story and the only instruments you ever hear are guitars and drums.
There is no way you will go to a record store, find an artist that no more than a few thousand people know about, hope you will like it and spend 10$ on buying the record. All without actually supporting the artist.
This is where Google Music, Amazon Music, and Apple have it all over records, or concerts, or even word of mouth.
If you like a certain style, any of those services will show you similar artists and similar music, and let you listen to a bit of it by click the sample button.
With a few minutes of spare time, you can, with each exploration branching our wider and wider, discover things you might never find any other way. Not since my days in the college dorm have I seen such an elegant engine for exposure to such a wide variety of styles and tastes.
The 45 and the CD may be considered the Gutenberg press of the audio world. But the Play Sample button is the equivalent of the card catalog in the library, or the Encyclopedia Britannica (before its demise). Exposure to everything, quickly, with enough depth to decide whether or not to pursue it further.
Yes, in many instances, its still tied to the music publishing business, but more and more indi music is showing up.
This tool is probably the ONE thing needed to set indi music in motion, much to the demise of the recording industry.
The same is true of books, although the random sampling feature works much less effectively.
s an American, while in an abstract way I care what the French are doing to their people, my opinions are really only applicable to my own country - in other words, as far as NSA spying, what the French are doing is not relevant.
When the French spy on US citizens and feed it to the NSA, how is that different, or some how not relevant? I'm sure the NSA returns the favor. Each side claiming they are protecting their citizens from the Rest of the World.
Perhaps we as Americans, still clinging desperately to tatters of our Constitution, which, in our hearts, we know is already a joke, have a harder time than the rest of the world getting our head around one single question:
Where did this entire Idea that Governments were authorized to spy on its citizens come from?
Perhaps the German, the French and the Russian never even thought to ask that question, having never had a time in their memory (if not their entire history) where they were ever free of such government snooping, because Government was always a Right excersized over citizens, and citizens were never in control of government.
All your mems are belong to us.
Why would you expect the software to be any better at this than the humans?
Who (besides soccer moms) would watch (even for free) a team fat fat out of shape largely incompetent pretty much clueless players? In any sport? In any country?
Even as comedy, that fails.
However, when you're paying for a train fare, you've paid for the transit
No, you've paid for half the transit. Advertisers paid for the other half. It's little different from newspapers or pay television.
Tax payers paid for the other half. Interior advertising pays very little on a train, or bus. (The outside of buses bring in some revenue, but not as much as you might think).
So between fares and Tax Money, virtually ALL of the cost of train, subway, bus transport is paid by the users, or taxpayers in the appropriate jurisdiction.
If fares went down, or service improved with more routes and frequency, advertising on trains might be warranted. But I still don't want bone conduction or loudspeaker advertising that I can't shut out.
Specifically, advertising needs to be prohibited from all situations where a person has paid for access or entrance to something. More ideally, it would also be prohibited from any context where the person hasn't explicitly agreed to be subjected to ads in exchange to some product or service.
What would that ball game cost if all advertising was eliminated from inside the stadium? Could the fans afford it?
Could the team afford to fly to their next game, or would they all be taking the train?
Most likely these things drive the inflated contracts we pay athletes these days.
Is a train, or an airplane or even a bus is a different proposition?
Major airlines don't seem to advertise anything, except themselves.
Every city bus I've ever been in has advertising. (Some of it left over from the Pleistocene.)
New York Subways have always had advertising in the trains. Seattle light rail, none. (Although the cars are configured for advertising, it appears not to be in use yet).
You can close your eyes, or read your book, listen to your music and shut out all the ads, but bone conduction seems a little over the top.