The Return of an Olfactory Memory

Raymond Leon Iddings died November 14, 2014 at the age of 93. He grew up on a small farm in Putnam County, Indiana, and, like so many Americans of his generation, joined the army and fought in World War II.

Here’s a passage from his obituary:

His combat experienced forever identified Raymond Iddings as a professional soldier, and left scarred stories that he never told. Daughter Cheryl was recently told a final story while helping him eat some chicken soup. A few weeks after crossing the Rhine, on April 4, 1945 the United States Army liberated the first concentration camp prisoners from Ohrdruf, Germany. The conditions were so appalling that words fail description; the smell of feces and rotting corpses overpowered the senses. General Eisenhower, Patton and Bradley were all sickened during their tour and Eisenhower actually vomited. In his memoirs, Raymond wrote of the “foul odor that blanketed the area,” but said he never entered the camp. While Cheryl recently helped father eat some soup he began to cry and apologized to her for never telling this story before: He then shared with her a memory from that camp . . . a day that he held a spoon of chicken broth for a severely starved prisoner at this camp; the starved man was too weak, the man took a deep breath and died. Raymond told Cheryl that for all these years he repressed this story as his most painful memory — a war memory he was never able to talk about.

Trauma and repression, war and compassion, the great events of history—all brought to the surface by the aroma of chicken soup fed to an elderly man by his loving daughter.

With Raymond Iddings goes a small but infinitely valuable piece of the American experience. We salute him.

Scent of Mystery Comes to Video

The New York Post’s Lou Lumenick has the story: “Elizabeth Taylor’s forgotten Smell-O-Vision adventure arrives on video.” He’s talking about Scent of Mystery, the first (and only) film to use the revolutionary Smell-O-Vision process promoted by Mike Todd, Jr. and his father. Elizabeth Taylor (then married to Todd, Sr.) was an investor in the technology and makes a cameo appearance in the movie. (Your Hollywood trivia of the day: Mike Todd, Sr. coined the word cameo.)

I researched the story of Smell-O-Vision—and its rival, AromaRama—for my book. Along the way I interviewed inventor Hans Laube’s wife and daughter, and saw a prototype of his scent-generating device, along with all the promotional material for the film’s premiere. It’s a great story in the history of technology.

Until now, Scent of Mystery was only available in a badly butchered VHS of a television mashup version. I’m looking forward to seeing the newly restored re-release. Sure, it was slightly corny even for 1960, and unspools at the leisurely pace of that time. But I look forward to viewing it end-to-end while imagining all the odors (there are lots of them).

ISDP: Foul Odors from Foul Deeds

It's the thirteenth of the month and therefore time to offer up our periodic collection of macabre episodes triggered by the detection of the uniquely disturbing smell of bodily decay. We're typing as fast as we can; the wind is picking up ahead of another Polar Vortex that shortly will force its way through the poorly insulated windows of FirstNerve Manor and cause our gnarled fingers to stiffen in place on the keyboard.

An employee at a storage facility in Winnipeg, Manitoba, noticed a foul smell coming from inside one of the lockers. Investigation showed the source to be the bodies of four small infants.

Police in Brownsville, Texas, were asked to investigate the source of a foul odor. They discovered the bodies of a woman and her 4-year-old son in a pile of rubbish in the backyard of a home. The woman's husband has been arrested and charged with murder.

In the trial of Charles Hicks Jr. who is charged in Pennsylvania with the 2008 murder and dismemberment of Deanna Null, Hicks' former landlady testified that

she was cleaning the house in preparation [for his departure] when she noticed a foul odor in a bedroom closet area. She dismissed it at the time as maybe a mouse that died in the walls.

According to further testimony, the smell was likely from "severed hands, later identified as Null's, which had been wrapped in old newspaper inside baggies, and large socks containing detergent."

As we like to remind readers here at ISDP--Always Trust Your Nose!

A woman in East Memphis, Tennessee, would have saved herself a lot of grief had she sniffed around a bit before renting a house (she only looked in through the windows). Turns out it had been the scene of murder a couple of months earlier, in which a man had killed his roommate and butchered his body. Despite the blood stains and foul odor, the landlord was under no obligation to reveal the home's history as a crime scene. 

Premonitions

Rurik Jutting, a 29-year-old British investment banker in Hong Kong, has been arrested in connection with the murder of two women whose bodies were found in his apartment after a neighbor complained of a foul odor coming from the unit. One of the bodies was found stuffed inside a suitcase on the apartment balcony. 

It appears that shortly before she was killed, the second woman

had texted a friend to raise concerns over her visit, saying: 'Something smells really bad – I want to get out of here'.

The smell was evidently from the body in the suitcase; that victim had been murdered five days earlier.

Twin Paradox: The Olfacto-mathematical Delusions of the Varshney Brothers

Like movie stars wearing prop glasses to make themselves look smart, pop media outlets this week splashed themselves in eau de science, trying to out-cool each other with superficial coverage of a new paper in olfactory signal theory. [That’s a thing?—Ed.] [It is now!]

What had the click-bait crowd all aquiver was an abstruse theoretical paper by a pair of electrical engineers who happen to be twin brothers. Kush and Lav Varshney both received undergraduate degrees from Cornell in 2004 and doctoral degrees from MIT in 2010. They’re obv very smart and good at math. (They are also the third generation of their family to become electrical engineers.) Kush is now at IBM’s Watson Research Center in New York, while Lav is at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Their new brainstorm-in-common has the dry title “Olfactory signals and systems.” As befits a theoretical engineering paper, it contains a lot of equations; like Einstein, they leave the actual data-gathering and experimental validation to others. That’s cool—everyone enjoys a good theory, especially if it makes outrageous claims. And there’s been a market opportunity since September when Luca “Vibes” Turin got peevish and flounced off the Twitter stage.

The claims made by the Varshney bros are indeed click-worthy. They claim to set out the theoretical basis for “odor cancellation” technology as well as “food steganography.” [Stega-whaa?—Ed.] [Go look it up yourself.]

While mere mortals have struggled for centuries to characterize and quantify smells, and to analyze their chemical basis, the V twins achieve their theoretical breakthrough in three deft strokes of matrix algebra. First, assume an array consisting of all the physiochemical properties of every odor molecule (molecular weight, functional groups, yadda). Next, assume an array consisting of all the perceptual vectors in odor descriptor space (ratings of strength, pleasantness, green, floral, yadda). [One is inevitably reminded of the old punch line about spherical cows in a vacuum.] Finally, produce a matrix that maps molecules from the chemical to the perceptual space. Now all you have to do is solve for



and, voilà! You can now predict the smell of any molecule from its physical properties or vice versa.

The V bros helpfully point out that the problem “is convex and can be solved by interior point methods and a variant of Nesterov’s smooth method.” [Of course. Why didn’t I think of that?—Ed.]

Lest it be said that electrical engineers lack a sense of humor, note that the physicochemical array is denoted R^k and the perceptual array is R^l. Get it? Those guys are a laff riot.

The first big claim made by the Varshneyii concerns “active odor cancellation,” an awesome outcome in which their system identifies a small number of unobjectionable compounds that will negate a particular nuisance odor or stink—knock it right out of your nose! At least that’s what normal people would think, given the analogy with active noise control. Noise cancellation systems deploy a sound wave with an inverted phase to that of the noise wave; the perceptual result is no sound at all.

Unfortunately, that’s not exactly what Tweedle-Kush and Tweedle-Lav are selling. Instead, their matrix solution spits out a set of odors that, combined with the stink at issue, produces a standard jumble smell known as “olfactory white.” True, olfactory white may be less obnoxious than the malodor in question, but it is still a smell, not the absence of smell. This is not the equivalent of active noise cancellation. When I use noise cancellation headphones on an airplane, the steady roar of the engines disappears. It is not drowned out by the addition of white noise.

Oh, well. On to the second claim: food steganography. In this application, the matrix solution provides a set of other odors that effectively masks the objectionable aroma of a particular food item. The Varsity Varshney say “nuclear norm-regularized multivariate linear regression.” I say, think bacon-wrapped chicken livers.

I’m not sure exactly what it is about olfaction as a scientific field that attracts charlatans, nitwits, poseurs, and grandiose humbugs. But I’m sure someone will come up with an equation for it.

The paper discussed here is “Olfactory signals and systems,” by Kush R. Varshney and Lav R. Varshney, published online October 17, 2014. It can be downloaded here.