site banner

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

1
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I don't know the answer, but I think the first step would be to try to quantify smell and taste as precisely as sight and sound can be quantified.

Sight and sound are relatively easy to quantify. You can quantify sight as a function that maps (x, y, time) tuples to (r, g, b) color value tuples for example. You can quantify sound as a function that maps (time) tuples to (amplitude) tuples.*

As far as I know, no-one has managed to quantify smell and taste in such a way. However, I could be wrong about that.

*(time) and (amplitude) are tuples with only one item each in them, but I am calling them tuples for the sake of consistency. In mathematical parlance, it's still a tuple even if it has 0 or 1 items.