Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT Strips 3586-3590 (9th to 13th October 2017)

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TinPenguin:
Well, I was always skeptical about how Bubbles felt about Faye, but this week's comics have finally got me convinced that this is a Thing. And I'm in a sufficiently mushy mood right now to find this adorable. The question is how long it will take for the both of them to realise and accept the existence of said Thing.

Roborat:
Why do I get the feeling that Bubbles just went from being a bit warm to full out blast furnace mode.

Thrudd:

--- Quote from: brightwings00 on 09 Oct 2017, 04:22 ---So... it's not bad that I read the entire page and went into a ten, fifteen-second long giggle fit of glee?

--- End quote ---
Uhhhh - it's Irish humor so be warned (click to show/hide)

--- Quote from: Loki on 08 Oct 2017, 22:54 ---* Through dark magic, Sara returns from being eaten by an allosaur
(Hey, one can hope.)

--- End quote ---
Yikes that would be terrifying depending how big it was, how it consumed her and how effective it's digestive tract was.
Yeah - it is never fun for the immortals when they get swallowed whole - Sanity warning, this is disturbing on many levels but some consider it "funny"
(click to show/hide)//www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh2iyPmucFk

--- Quote from: oddtail on 10 Oct 2017, 00:39 ---Secondly: I know this is a universe with super-advanced technology, but I wonder how the chemical sensors that serve as "smell" work for AI. The human olfactory sense is very complex and (despite the popular wisdom claiming otherwise, mostly because we tend to compare humans to animals whose sense of smell is EVEN better than ours) incredibly sensitive and fine-tuned to many different substances. My mother is a chemist by education and she tested food for a living, for some time. Her claim is that a human smell or taste (if it isn't dulled by regular smoking and the like) can actually detect much smaller traces of certain substances, if you're trained for that, than many simple chemical tests. In fact, in some cases only a rather expensive and complex (and somewhat time-consuming) analysis yields more precise results for certain substances than human senses.

Granted, that was a couple of decades ago, but while technology may progress fast, it doesn't progress SO fast that I'd believe it would make a huge jump in that respect.

Since I see no reason to disbelieve my mother's experience, technology that'd provide instant recognition of smells an order of magnitude better than a human nose's would be rather impressive indeed. I'd personally peg that as much more impressive than stuff like artificial muscle/bodies.

EDIT: now that I think about it, it's perfectly possible that AI bodies feel certain smells much more strongly than humans, and certain smells weakly or not at all. It would be very difficult to notice this difference in most everyday situations, I imagine. Say, if a human and an AI had a completely different subjective experience of the same smell due to registering different chemical components, it would not likely come up in conversation, unless a human and an AI were comparing two smells ("what do you MEAN those two smell alike?").

--- End quote ---

Gas sensors on a chip have been a thing for a while now.
As for not that huge a jump in the technology, I would recon the tech has progressed about as fast as computer technology.
Mil Spec parts are usually more robust than anything commercial or used in a lab.
When you think about it, a military schnoz needs to detect various aromatic and volatile compounds used  in a combat theater - explosives, chemical agents, unwashed bodies, sepsis, decomposition - noting the levels of sensitivity required as well as the military penchant for going overboard on the specifications.
Also having a sniffer blown up is cheaper in resources and having the need to send out letters of condolence.

Humans are actually rather nose blind compared to the other species we associate with on a general level - it is only through training that we humans are able to discern faint variances and trace amounts. Add to that experience, training and a fast analysis turn around time compared to most bench-top systems the trained human almost always wins, BUT it looses on the sheer volume of samples handled, low downtime and repeatability of the tests.

St.Clair:
My understanding and/or guess is that the human sense of smell is optimized for "is this okay to eat?", "is this person healthy, of my tribe, and otherwise safe to **** be around?", "are there any predators (including other humans/proto-humans) nearby?", and "is that water/a forest fire/etc that I scent on the breeze?"

Kugai:
It's clear that Bubbles does feel ...... something for Faye at this point, though i suspect that she doesn't quite know or is unsure of what that is at the  moment is probably not clear to her.

Whether Faye is being deliberately oblivious to spare Bubbles feelings or is genuinely unaware of just what Bubbles may or may not be feeling is something that only time will resolve.

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