Essays on AI, perfumery, and engineering.
If you build domain-specific AI, there's a question you usually skip: does your embedding still earn its keep against a frontier model that has read everything?
What does a molecule smell like? You mostly can't tell from its shape — and that's not a gap in the chemistry, it's a property of the sense.
Homer calls the sea wine-dark and fresh honey green, and the words are not mistakes — they track the state of a material, not its hue. A look at how color vocabularies actually work, from the Greek palette to the murex snails behind Tyrian purple to the Japanese light that is green but called blue.
The standard assumption is that an iced drink is the hot one, colder and weaker — a compromise. It isn't. Temperature and dilution are thresholds, and crossing them doesn't subtract from the drink. It releases a second one hiding inside the first.
Body odor is one of the most complex sensory signatures a body produces — a function of ABCC11 genotype, skin microbiome, hormonal profile, diet, and age, all interacting.
Medicine smelled disease before it could measure it. Hippocrates described the breath of liver failure patients. The nose was right — it just lacked a mechanism.
Sesame, cumin, and coriander are food ingredients before they are perfumery ingredients — which is what gives them the power to evoke a specific place rather than the idea of one.
Most ingredients are locatable: rose in the heart, vetiver in the base. Saffron doesn't occupy a phase. It veils the entire fragrance, coloring everything rather than anchoring anywhere.
What reads as expensive in a fragrance — dry, refined, slightly austere, the smell of a very good face cream — is often black pepper doing the work.
Most people think of a perfume in terms of the brand on the bottle and the perfumer who created it. That's two layers of a system that has six.
Of the five senses, smell is the oldest — and the only one that bypasses the thalamic relay and talks directly to the parts of the brain that handle memory and fear and desire.
Apple Music's playback changed around April. The audio files are identical. What shifted is the frame they're presented in — and the cost lands on production built around blending.