You might think we don’t need confirmation of the obvious, but we do. In October, 1948, a smog event in Donora, Pennsylvania, killed 70 people and sickened about 7,000 others. Twenty people died during the event, and the rest died of respiratory failure by the end of November. The incident is infamous in the annals of weather and pollution events, but it was surpassed by an even deadlier smog that killed thousands in London four years later. One might think that there’s little need to convince anyone that dense smog is unhealthful.
 
Now, we get another study, this one of the Fangshan District by Jun Deng.* The conclusion:
“Understanding the causes and impacts of smog could help people to build the awareness of how serious the situation is [,] and the situation in [the] future can be more terrible if the smog cannot be reduced.” Could you have guessed that?
 
Hold on a sec. I’m still trying to grasp the concept that smog is bad for me. Okay, got it now. Smog is bad for me. I think I understand, and I’m appreciative that Jun Deng conducted this study and arrived at his profound and enlightening conclusion.
 
Am I being too sarcastic? Shouldn’t I realize that within a very short time memories fade in a culture, so studies like Deng’s are worth the effort? Those born in the late 1940s and early 1950s don’t remember the smog. What they know they know from history lessons, from records of those events, from talk around the family campfire. And deaths attributed to smog in both Donora and London have been discussed in science, history, and geography books for decades.  
 
Apparently, however, we need to be reminded that smog is bad for our health. Now what else? Truth is, every generation needs reminders, even reminders of the obvious.
 
What should we teach? What should we learn? We live on a planet of dangers. We can’t prepare for all of them because many dangers creep like spiders nesting in a garden shoe. We don’t have 360-degree vision, but even if we did, it wouldn’t reveal what lies around a corner, and to be truly effective, we would need to see spherically, not just in a single plane. And new dangers occur without notice, such as an occasional newly evolved virus or an old one carried from afar by travelers. Novel dangers aren’t easy to avoid, but old dangers should have left their marks on humanity’s memory.
 
Should we have a course in schools called Life’s Dangers? Or would such a course be too frightening for little kids? The alternative is to keep doing what we do. What’s that? As we see a danger, we teach a danger. Unfortunately, we have short memories. We rebuild next to rivers when floodwaters retreat. We move into the shadows of potentially violent andesitic volcanoes and onto quiet but unstable slopes. We even build in seismically active zones. We let past dangers fade from generational memories.
 
Occasionally, some circumstance makes an old danger relevant. The polluted air of the Fangshan District is an example. The product of attitudes and ideas not much different from those that led to the Donora and London smog events, Fangshan’s dirty air reveals that we humans often don’t find relevance in history. It’s 2018, just 70 years after Donora and 66 after London. That’s within a human lifetime on a planet with texts, trade books, magazine and newspaper articles, movies, and videos that record those events. Did the Chinese not have any access to western history? Did they have to wait for a study by Jun Deng to learn that severe air pollution is inimical to their respiratory health?
 
No one can account for all of nature’s dangers because we can’t see around real corners. All of us will trip or slip at some time in our lives, will contract an illness of some sort, either minor or major, or will just be in the wrong place at the wrong time, say on December 26, 2004, on an overpacked train along the coast of Sri Lanka just as a tsunami from across an ocean hits the coast.
 
How long will the memory last before people rebuild in the tsunami zone? What happens when Liguvariyal Daveed, a tsunami survivor who lost relatives, dies? She said, “Whenever we see the ocean, we get reminded of how this same ocean took away all these people…You can’t even imagine how much we fear the sea now. We didn’t even want to stay close to it, so we moved…away from the sea….”** Will the next generation save her memory of the event? Or, like the Chinese who built an industrial society without regard to smog events, will the next generation build by a seafloor given to seismic activity on the largest of scales? Remember, the people of London repeated the disaster of Donora just four years later.
 
Some of the children alive during the Donora and London smog events are still alive. Those who were too young at the time to form memories of the events learned of those smoggy days the same way they learned algebra or Roman history. For any generation, old disasters not personally experienced can be irrelevant disasters, “ancient history,” so to speak. If we can’t remember what happened just decades ago, can we expect people to remember the eruption of Vesuvius almost two thousand years ago? Look at the development of Naples; its 3,000,000 people live in the “danger zone.”
 
Now come the arguments: 1) Old dangers are not necessarily current dangers; 2) People have to carry on with their lives without feeling a constant threat that would instill a paralyzing anxiety; and 3) People are aware that dangers exist, but the economics of life demand accepting them—i.e., if you want to live an industrialized life, you have to take the bad with the good.
 
Do you make any of those arguments to justify where and how you live? Do you make any of them to justify what parents and schools teach? When you look on your own education, do you see any parallels to Jun Deng’s discovering what is either obvious or historically significant? Is there a way to teach anticipation without instilling anxiety?
 
 
*Jun Deng, Smog can Cost More than What We are Earning Now: A Case Study of Fangshan District in Beijing, China, World Environment, Vol. 7 No. 1, 2017, pp. 23-29. doi: 10.5923/j.env.20170701.03. Online at http://article.sapub.org/10.5923.j.env.20170701.03.html#Sec4 Accessed on December 13, 2018.
​ 
**Francis, Krishan. Associated Press. 10th anniversary of tsunami is marked with tears. December 27, 2014. Online at https://www.concordmonitor.com/Archive/2014/12/Tsnami-cmnw-122714
Accessed December 15, 2018.

There you are, a relatively mind-my-own-business kind of male or female. But you have to peek. You just have to open the newspaper, turn on the TV channel with pundits, or open an online news service. You cover your eyes with fingers open. You pretend to block the view. But like sunlight on a cloudless day, the radiation of news, gossip, and opinion burns through like strong UV light. You want some peace; some shady spot for rest. But you live in a desert beneath a cloudless sky. Very little shade except for that which you provide with a raised, protective hand.
 
Now you know what traveling across Death Valley, the Sahara, or the Great Sandy Desert was like for pre-industrial pioneers. Sure, everyone faces the problem of little available water and rapid dehydration, but that almost seems minor beneath the wash of uninterrupted daylight. You just want some shade, just want to close your eyes and not have translucent eyelids keeping you from rest. And here’s what makes it worse: This radiation is 24/7. At least those rainless regions get some night.
 
We might be able to tolerate the incessant light if, just occasionally, it enlightened. Maybe it seems to for some, but generally, the radiation blinds us. As in all things human, perception is the driver. Enlightenment is inferred. The ostensible enlightenment of news and opinion seems itself to be reminiscent of the lyrics of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s “Blinded by the Light” lyrics.
 
As in many popular—and even in operatic arias—songs, the rhythm requires syllables and words that fit regardless of their sense. So, also, “Blinded by the Light” contains some nonsense lines whose meaning is only subjectively inferable. However, three lines in the song might reveal why so many are so addicted to the blinding light of the incessant 24/7 cycle:
 
            Mama always told me not to look into
            The eyes of the sun
            But mama, that’s where the fun is.
 
We know our response when someone says, “Don’t look.” We look.
 
I’ll give you an example. I was in Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, with college students on the day of an eclipse. We were there for the geology, and happenstance gave us an eclipse in that beautiful setting, a valley filled with tall trees beneath towering walls of granite. I told the students to use the holes of their three-ring-binder paper held over the white hood of the van to observe the eclipse. Sunlight through each of those holes revealed the eclipse on the van.
 
Of course, I said, “Don’t look at the sun; look at the hood of the van. You’ll experience the eclipse without jeopardizing your retinas.” You know without my telling you that they looked upward.

I know that if I say shield your eyes from a light that blinds rather than enlightens, you’ll look because constant exposure has convinced you “that’s where the fun is.”

On the ocean surface no wave trough exists without accompanying crests.
 
You and I and everyone else peaks here or there, each of us a combination of crests and troughs of every characteristic, each of us a bouncing surface on a human and personal ocean.  
Most of us want to be viewed as wavelike: If we have our troughs of failings, we also have our crests of successes. We want others to see our personal troughs in the context of our crests.
 
Try this. Picture others as ocean waves. See each of their actions and characteristics as momentary crests and troughs. Thinking of others as waves is how we want them to think of us: Variable with more crests than troughs.
 
Recognize that no one’s personal trough exists without accompanying crests.  

The Good Place is a comedy series about people who die and go to Hell disguised as Heaven. In the episodes, “Michael,” the architect of the Faux Heaven, and “Janet,” his all-knowing and robot-like assistant, eventually conspire to assist the four humans in an escape and a journey to the actual “good place.” It’s a clever show, and it poses some serious questions about good, evil, identity, and scoring a life quantitatively. Presumably, a high score gets one into Heaven, though in one episode we discover that no one has entered the real Heaven in the past 521 years. 
 
I recently had the opportunity to see a writing rubric from an Ivy League school that served as a basis for grading, or scoring, a paper by quantifying five components: Ideas, Organization, Word Choice, Sentence Structure, and Mechanics. I guess the professor determined that those five were sufficient for determining a grade objectively. 
 
One could argue that certain of those components don’t lend themselves to an objective assessment. Take ideas, for example. Part of that rubric uses as a criterion the student’s inclusion of detailed “thoughtful ideas.” Thoughtful, of course, requires a judgment on the reader’s part. So, say a graduate assistant is in charge of reading and grading in one instance and a tenured professor is in charge of reading and grading in another. Experience and knowledge determine whether or not any idea is “thoughtful.” One expert’s thoughtfulness is another’s cliché. 
 
Say you were the writer of The Good Place and you had to produce a script on quantifying life-points. What are the components of your rubric? Could you use any of those that the Ivy League professor lists? 
 
You might say you could definitely use “Organization.” Indeed, there’s something to be said for the organized life, especially in the context of so much randomness. Chaos appears to underlie all order and organization. As I have said elsewhere, give me chaos, and you make me a god. I get to impose or discover order when I am enveloped by chaos. I make from chaos my own cosmos, or I fail to do so and live a chaotic life. If I do impose an order, I still have the problem of maintaining that order. As we all know from the constant interruptions to our plans, such maintenance is a very difficult task. So, we all fail at times in organizing, even if we are obsessive-compulsive. Truth be told, we’re all a little disorganized, sometimes through our own fault and sometimes through no fault. Entropy is the way of the universe, and it’s bigger than any of us. No one has yet figured a way to reassemble Humpty Dumpty. How many points, then, do we attribute to our living an imperfectly organized life? 

There's yet another aspect of organization to consider, one seen not from the organizer's perspective, but rather from those whose lives an organizer organizes. Parents, teachers, and religious leaders, for example. All do quite a bit of organizing the lives of others. Legislators and dictators, also. Do we include in our analysis of life-points not only how we organize our own lives, but also how we organize--or disorganize--the lives of others?
 
What of word choice? I don’t think we need to worry about our use of colloquialisms. It isn’t our failure to speak the King’s English that loses points in the assessment of a life. Rather, it’s the use of words that uplift or those that degrade that gain or lose us points. What do we say to others in all the contexts of our interrelationships? What do we say to make a peaceful world?
 
And words fit into sentences, those whole thoughts laid out in an understandable syntax that we deliver with a implied mood. Do we speak, if not plainly, clearly? Are we purveyors of the double entendre? Are we pent up with the pride of an obfuscator? Isn’t the way we communicate a valid point category? Remember, we’re trying to assess a life in a manner similar to that used by a university professor in judging a student’s report.

Think of any report. Unless it is followed by a meeting between or among interested parties, a report--or book, or editorial, or tweet--stands on its own. It is also, even as a draft, somewhat "final." Once out, it is beyond revision, though it might undergo some emendations for clarification, defense, or even apology. It's through those sentences that we can communicate anonymously with people both around the world and into the distant future. Be careful what you inscribe on a clay tablet; some have been around for thousands of years.  
 
And then there are the mechanics. In the professor’s criteria of assessment lie the nagging errors that distract a reader from knowing what the writer intends to communicate. Little things like spelling and bigger things like punctuation make a paper readable. In our lives we, too, exhibit care and carelessness in our dealings with others. We never know how astute our readers are, so we have to be careful about all the details of our language. And in life, we never know everything about those around us, so we have to be careful in our approach to them. Even little errors seem to be magnified these days. Not that we should lose points for the unintentional mistakes. It’s just that we live in a world of “professors” who make it their task to give points or deduct them from our life report.
 
Back to The Good Place. Ted Danson’s character Michael keeps bringing up the subject of points that the four dead people accumulated during life. There’s no acquisition of points after death, he explains. While we are alive, we accumulate, so it’s a good idea to take a moment to examine our scores according to a life’s rubric. Adding up life’s good points is usually something we do for ourselves, believing that we are objective accountants. Truth is, we all fudge a little on our own behalf as personal bookkeepers and bean counters. But with regard to others, we act like IRS agents on the hunt for people to audit. 

Think there's no way to rid yourself of the bitterness you feel toward others over past transgressions? Think again.
​
Part of every continent gets an occasional wash over by the ocean. Right now, Hudson Bay and the submerged continental shelves of North America are part of the sea’s inundation of the land. By comparison with the open, or deep, ocean, such seas are shallow and are called epicontinental (epi = on) or epeiric (epeiros = mainland) seas. The seas are also called transgressions, and they have several causes, including the melting of glaciers whose waters run off the land to increase the volume of seawater. Transgressions also result from the subsidence of the land in response to tectonic processes, such as seafloor spreading and the ripping apart of continents. The latter is what’s going on right now in the Great Rift Valley in eastern Africa and the Basin and Range system in Nevada, both sites of future epeiric seas. 
 
Transgressions of the sea are generally slow in human terms, taking not just a lifetime, but thousands to millions of years.* So, don’t get out your scuba gear or life vest because  you won’t be sailing out of the Port of Las Vegas any time soon. For geologists, however, the formation of epicontinental seas can occur relatively rapidly against the backdrop of land more than a billion years old. Typically, the more rapid transgressions occur as glacial ice melts during interglacial warming periods like the current one that began about ten millennia ago. But there’s a back-and-forth cycle here: The opposite process, called regression, can be relatively rapid as climates turn cold and snow accumulates to form glaciers. Locking up Earth’s water in ice on the land causes sea level to fall without a balancing return of water through river runoff. You could also think of the Mississippi Delta as a regressive area because just 8,000 years ago, much of it didn’t exist. Sediments from the mighty river and its distributary rivers filled in areas adjacent to the coast, making new land.
 
Of course, the transgressive-regressive cycle is a bit more complex than the above explanation, but there is a point to be made here. The processes of ocean water covering and uncovering the land leaves behind a sequence of sediments that geologists use to identify periods of inundation and drying. Typically, as the sea covers the land, its leading water line is marked by beach materials with which we are all familiar: Sands, some coarse, some medium, and some fine. As the sands migrate inland, they are followed by silts, and they, in turn are followed by muds (clays) as deeper and deeper water migrates over the land. Given sufficient time and deposition, a transgressive sequence is one of muds overlying silts overlying sands. The differences in the particle sizes reflect the differences in turbulence, with nearshore water having a violence not associated with quiet deeper water, where tiny mud particles can settle. When the sea leaves the land, the sequence of sediments reverses, with sands overlying silts overlying muds. Over long periods, the sequences can reverse many times, building thick sequences of sediments that can turn into sedimentary rocks.
 
So, what’s the point I hinted at? In a way, the transition of deposits from transgressions and regressions reflect our own past with others. Our personal histories are complexes of transgressions and regressions, mostly minor, but some major. At times we merely lap over the edge of another’s life like water over the continental shelf. At other times, we are like widespread epeiric seas. And every one of us is also like a continent. Just as we have intruded on the lives of others, so others have intruded on ours. That interpersonal history has left a sequence of transgressive and regressive sediments.
 
We know the causes of ocean transgressions and regressions from the work of geologists. We have a bit more trouble determining the causes of our own transgressive and regressive sequences. Maybe we should take a hint from geological studies first to understand the interlayering of sequences in our lives and second to identify our current phase. Are we inundating another’s “land,” or are we retreating. In either case, we are leaving lasting deposits on personal history because, just as geologists can read the history of transgressions and regressions from the sedimentary deposits, so can read personal histories by what remains from the fluctuations in interpersonal relationships.
 
We live dynamic lives on a dynamic planet. So, both kinds of sequences can be eroded as the land rises in a mountain-building episode. With increased elevation comes increased erosion of rocks once laid down as the sediments of fluctuating seas. Raising those products to higher elevations can flush their products out to sea. Like the changing surface of a continent, humans can also change. It just takes a bit of uplift to wash away the products of old transgressions. 
 
 
*You can, if you’re interested, research ancient epicontinental seas like the Sauk, Tippecanoe, Kaskaskia, Absaroka, and Tejas.

Remember Darwin’s finches. Different beaks, different habitats, different ecological niches. Definitely different diets. The adaptive radiation of some finch species might be in the process of reversing; a future Darwin might find one ground finch where there were four. It seems that different species of Darwin’s finches have become addicted to human junk food in urban areas of the Galapagos.* There’s a potential blending going on as the finches eat a common diet. If you recall, it was their adaptation to different foods that separated the species Darwin studied. 
 
And what about us? Yes, unlike the finches, we’re a common species worldwide. But we do have some physical differences based on diet, and definitely have cultural differences based on geographic separation and historical social influences. Now, our interconnectedness through the WWW has the potential to erase differences. We might be headed toward a world society that science fiction writers have long described, a society of mono- or near-mono-thinking. Just as our thousands of years of intermixing led to an extensive blending outside our African roots, so now our WWW-mixing might make us less adaptive and more convergent. 
 
Junk human food is changing the finches physically. Junk WWW is changing humans culturally and philosophically.
 
*De León, L.F., Sharpe D.M.T., Gotanda K., Raeymaekers J.A.M., Chaves J., Hendry A.P., and Podos J. 2018. Urbanization erodes niche segregation in Darwin's finches. Evolutionary Applications. https://doi.org/10.1111/eva.12721. Accessed December 3, 2018. 

Why have you learned what you know?
 
Brain or mind? How is it that after campfire educational systems from the time of the first hominins to contemporary universities’ high-tech classrooms, that we still can’t decide on what system of learning works? 
 
From November 2 through 4, 2018, professional educators met at 108 Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris under the auspices of de l’Universite Paris-Sorbonne to exchange information on just about everything educational. Two decades into the 21stcentury, and we’re still struggling with methodologies. Here’s some pessimism: All the ostensibly new stuff has been tried. Sometimes it worked; often it didn’t.  
 
Think Plato had willing students with undivided attention? Think Alexander the Great paid attention to all of Aristotle’s lessons? More pessimism: We can study neurons in action, implant devices into brains, do statistical studies till cows do circus tricks, and we’ll still come up against barriers to learning emplaced by the mind. We can try any method we want from rote learning to the supposed scientific but somewhat free-wheeling Montessori methodology, only to find that learning still is a matter of relevance recognized by the mind.  
 
And the individual mind makes its own parameters for relevance without much regard for anything other than personal logic. See meaning; learn. Find no meaning; disregard. Isn’t that your personal experience? Random interviews about history, science, and even current events conducted with students and the “man-on-the-street” reveal the failures, also.  
 
That we probably run into the same problems in educating the next generation that the professors at the University of Bologna encountered with the world’s first “college” students centuries ago, is indicative of the failure of all educational systems to reach large numbers of people. 
 
No doubt there will be yet another education conference in which the research elite will pull out their graphs and statistics and explain the efficacy of their “new” methodologies. But the ultimate reality is that unless any educator, from parent to professional, can convince a young mind that specific knowledge has relevance, little learning will occur. And I can apply the principle to myself: I have little to no interest in learning about needlepoint, the anatomy of caribou, or Beat literature, and although I think they are cute, I have no compulsion to learn about growing little trees in a container.
 
Yet, the professionals won’t cease experimenting with educational methodologies in hopes of getting all of us to learn whatever. A few decades ago a system called Outcomes Based Education began to ooze like  backed up sewer water through public education in the United States. One of the principles of the system was that individual student success could be tied to class success. As a result, if something like 70% of a class failed to achieve 70% on a test, then all in the class had to retake the test. Yes, students who had perfect scores had to retake the test. Call it educational socialism. Think of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s story “Harrison Bergeron.” It’s about a time when “equality” isn’t about opportunity, but rather about leveling. The government has a “Handicapper General” whose office oversees handicapping all who have “above average” abilities. Harrison is one of those “above average” individuals (very tall, athletic, strong, and exceptionally bright) whose talents the government needs to quash. That, in essence, was the outcome of Outcomes Based Education. Educators were the handicappers. 
 
Having spent years in academia, I have come to the conclusion that only personal interactions and unidentifiable penchants coupled with abilities result in the “education” of individuals or small groups. Think otherwise? Then why do so many Americans struggle with functional literacy and math? Why under the educational assault of those who “know better,” do contemporary youth still have members who spiral down the path toward a culture of inhibitory drugs?  
 
Let me give you a summary of anecdotal evidence that would not have been acceptable at the Paris conference in November, 2018. Numerous colleagues have told me that after delivering what they thought was an inspiring lesson, no one in the classroom seemed to respond. On other occasions, when those colleagues gave what they called a rather mediocre lesson, some student or students would seek them out after class to ask where they could get more information on the topics or to say “That was a good lecture.” 
 
All of us are a bit whimsical, aren’t we? Regardless of the so-called science of learning, learners learn what they want to learn. And no one has yet discovered a universal principle of shaping the mind to enthusiastically seek learning outside its interests. What works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another. That difference, I believe, is what distinguishes mere neuronal learning from a mind’s lifelong obsession to learn.
 
Learning around those ancient campfires probably involved personal survival. Eventually, we added history and myth. Today, the campfires are classrooms and online programs that cover topics too numerous to mention. We’ve tried every method for hundreds of thousands of years. We try and abandon, repeat and abandon: Still a universal method eludes us.
 
Take heart, however. The desire to learn in others manifests itself as a surprise for everyone else. Lacking predictability, learning occurs at odd times in those we least suspect as interested individuals. Maybe the people at the Sorbonne conference and at every similar conference should spend their time simply relating how they were surprised by someone who learned and by the extent of enthusiasm that accompanied that learning. Obviously, all past methodologies appear to be hit-and-miss at best.      

Have you felt that satisfaction, as Mick Jagger has explained, is difficult to acquire? In fact, immediate satisfaction is easy, and we’re all relatively good at acquiring it, contrary to the singer’s complaint. Staying satisfied is difficult, and anxiety over filling our insatiable desires is what makes it so. You don’t have to take my word for it; Old Sid –Siddhartha, also known as the Buddha—told people that 2,500 years ago. Nevertheless, as I say “anxiety over filling our insatiable desires,” I can hear the psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, counselors, and neuroscientists, and neurologists objecting to my simplification. 
 
Maybe they have a point, but maintaining satisfaction is akin to what happens after perfume or hot-bread molecules waft in a Brownian movement toward olfactory neurons. The first collisions between molecules and neurons send intense signals to the brain. Then the experience of aroma fades with continued immersion in those molecules. Seems that the brain just gets fatigued trying to maintain interest in a particular smell after just a few minutes.    
 
You achieve, and then you fail or succumb to a setback or to the mere fatigue of success. It’s something the Buddha warned us about: Desire is the cheat. Success breeds anxiety over its potential discontinuation or future unfulfillment. Winning a championship is invariably followed by “What’s next?” 
 
Is there any way around the ennui and disappointment that ensues success? Sure, find another spiral stair; head toward the top of another cone. It won’t be the same, of course. Once one gets to the championship, the season is over. And going for the next championship the following season isn’t really a continuation because the parameters change. 
 
However, in our lives outside any arena, we just don’t go from season to season seeking the same kind of championship without becoming bored that all we are doing is “more of the same.” Why? The process of achieving is the focus in anticipation of success. Anticipation stretches time and increases intensity. As children on the way to an amusement park express: “When are we going to be there?” And all of us in receiving that first freshly baked bread molecule seem, in anticipation, to be driven in the direction of that bakery.  
 
And that’s why those who push themselves toward every new success might see as lazy those who don’t. The tireless are worthy of more emulation than the tired. For the olfactory sense, the next smell is the next intense moment.   
 
Take a lesson from your nose. If you notice, it leads the way as you walk from bakery to candle store to flower shop and beyond. You are finite, but you live in a world with an indefinite number of potential successes. This isn’t mere figurative speech. Apparently, we have not only a nose for success, but also a nose for a trillion smells, as Leslie Vosshall of Rockefeller University in NYC seems to have demonstrated.* The number is significant not because it is so large, but because it bespeaks of everyone’s potential. 
 
Follow your nose. As long as you can breathe, you can experience if not a trillion then at least an indefinite number of successes. Mick Jagger was wrong. You can get many satisfactions. 
 
*Williams, Sarah C. P., Human nose can detect a trillion smells. Science. Mar. 20, 2014. Accessed December 2, 2018. Online at https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/human-nose-can-detect-trillion-smells