S-P-A-M #6 - Digital Noses, Ad Hominem Fallacy & Apocalyptica

Seeking Passion And Mastery 🦊

Hello again from your friendly neighbourhood Prince of Persia. 👋

I went to the mall the other day to buy some perfume gifts for family I’ll be seeing soon and it struck me…

This was the first time in AGES that I’d physically gone in to buy a non-everyday item.¹

And the reason for that is of course obvious: you can’t smell product descriptions and customer reviews.

We think of olfaction (the sense of smell) as the one sense that computers can never mimic, but believe it or not there are quite a few start-ups that are/were working on creating a “digital nose”. 🤖👃

I did some research on this back in 2021 and it was quite fun to revisit…

Don’t Boop

Aromyx Corp. is was working to develop a digital nose that reacts in the presence of a variety of diseases, including pancreatic cancer and malaria. Guess it didn’t work out…

Noze (formerly Stratuscent) is now working on an indoor air quality (IAQ) scent library to allow people to monitor the air within their homes.

French Aryballe, which had obtained funding from Hyundai to leverage their NeOse Advance to notify drivers about a car’s interior condition, seems to have now pivoted to “foods, flavours and fragrances”. 🤔

Japanese Aroma Bit², with their e-Nose smell imaging sensors and Aromalyzer cloud platform allow corporations to create their own digital Smell Databases.

And lastly Koniku, which at the time was using their purple nipples in many big partnerships, from helping AB InBev measure a beverage’s aromatic notes³ to helping Airbus detect bombs in airports., seems⁴ to have shifted to something like Noze for diagnosing health in homes.

Though I severely doubt, for various economical and technological reasons (which the above start-ups’ trajectories also suggest), we’ll be seeing AI software that’ll help us choose what perfumes to buy anytime soon, this is still very interesting tech.

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💡 Critical Thinking

Fallacies - Ad hominem

I know in the last issue I said that I’ll continue with examples of how to use the Question of Evidence, but all the examples I thought of required knowledge on other rhetorical concepts. 😅 So now I’ll start introducing fallacies to build a better foundation for when we tackle more real-life examples.

The first one, which many of you might have heard of, is the Ad hominem argument (a.k.a. Personal Attack).

As the name suggests, it’s an argument which is directed against a person (their character, motive or some other attribute) rather than the position they’re maintaining. This avoids genuine debate by creating a personal attack as a diversion by using a totally irrelevant, but often highly charged attribute of the opponent.

Here’s an example: Alex claims that ‘X’ is the biggest issue in their country’s economy today. Brad doesn’t agree with Alex, but instead of debating his economic theory, he points out to everyone that Alex has a history of saying racist things and thus should not be heard on anything. Thus, Brad has avoided the debate and attacked Alex’s background (whether truthfully or not is irrelevant) instead of his claim.

Politicians do this all the time. In fact, during televised “debates”, they do this more than actual debating. And of course, there’s no need for me to point out the millions of daily social media occurrences of this for any hot topic. 🤦‍♂️

Here’s a practice example – see if you can solve it:

Charlie says, "… so based on the facts presented, we should introduce tougher immigration policies immediately, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a total moron."

Does this constitute an Ad hominem argument? Yes or No? Let me know in the comments.

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🎶 Music & Art

Apocalyptical Masterpiece

Most great songs (like most songs generally) don’t get music videos.

And most of them that do are just alright.

Then there are some that are pretty good.

And then a few that are really good.

And then once in a blue moon, you get a music video that can itself be classified as art.

One such production, where audio and video intertwine to make something truly magnificent, is Finnish Cello Metal⁵ band Apocalyptica’s “Path".⁶

(For some odd reason the official YT video is missing the first 15 seconds so I’m sharing this one from a random account.)

Oh and I just learnt that Path was used in the trailer for Kojima’s Death Stranding. 🎮

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😈 Devil’s Word of the Week

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Nose, n. – The extreme outpost of the face. From the circumstance that great conquerors have great noses, Getius, whose writings antedate the age of humor, calls the nose the organ of quell. It has been observed that one’s nose is never so happy as when thrust into the affairs of another, from which some physiologists have drawn the inference that the nose is devoid of the sense of smell.

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Let me know what you found interesting today, or other things you’d like me to write about… like maybe digital ears lol.

Till next week!

Prince 🦊

If this wasn’t your cup of tea but know a friend who likes this kind of, erm, tea, please consider sharing :)

1. Popping into the local Tesco to restock on blueberries between my Ocado deliveries don’t really count.

2. Why do they mostly start with A? Is “aroma” really the first word people (like to) think of when with regards to smelling?

3. Major LOL - as if they even care what their shit beers tastes/smells like. Craft FTW.

4. Their new website is very minimal and vague.

5. Quite sure they’re still the only band in that subgenre 🎻😁

6. The first single from their third album “Cult” in 2000