2020 No Starch Press Foundation grant cycle is now open. Grants must be received by November 22, 2020. The Foundation will award up to $100,000 in grants, max US $10,000 each.
I lost most of my sense of smell a few years ago. I've lost much of my ability to differentiate tastes as well.
As a former supertaster, lover of bourbon (I used to be able to tell my bourbons apart by smell), serious cook, and total foodie this has been the most depressing experience in my life.
Think about the experience that you have when you walk from one room to another, or into a field of flowers. I can't smell the differences between rooms, I can't smell the flowers, I can't even smell smoke.
People love to say you're so lucky you can't smell all of those bad smells but life isn't about the bad smells. Smell is memory. We wake up and smell the air around us, the dirt, the trees, the people we love, the people we hate, even exhaust fumes. The smell of ink on paper, spices, lavender, tea, the air after an electrical storm, the subtleties in beer, freshly fallen snow, rain, grass, the aroma of wine, freshly roasted coffee. I can no longer smell any of that.
When I realized that my loss of sense of smell was permanent I was suicidal for many months. I've gotten over that feeling for the most part and now I work to make the best of it because this is just the way that things are.
We all have our challenges. When faced with things that we can't change the best way forward is to work with what we have and make the best of it. Since I can no longer tell when food is ready by the change of smell I have to pay close attention to what it looks like and use a thermometer to carefully monitor its temperature. I can't tell when something is burning.
I've installed gas sensors in my house because I can't smell the gas that comes out of my gas range but I refuse to cook on electric. I have an induction burner but it's not the same. You can't beat fire. And I'm not giving up. I've gotten pretty good at roasting coffee but mostly by eye.
My 1966 Volvo caught fire as I was driving because I couldn't smell the gas coming out of the leaking fuel pump or the smoke coming out of the engine.
Fortunately my neighbor was in the passenger seat and he pointed out that the engine was on fire. He kept telling me that the car was beginning to smell a lot like fuel and he asked me if he could open the windows. (It's an old car so things break easily.) Fortunately the car didn't explode and we got out safely.
Loss of smell is no fun. Try cooking or eating while holding your nose. You'll get the idea. Just keep in mind that it's always like that. You can breathe in as deeply as you like and you still won't get the smells. You won't create the new memories and you'll have a hard time recalling the various smells that you've grown up with. They'll fade with time.
Err... I'm not trying to sound snarky at all, and as somebody with raging un-curable tinnitus and other severe health ailments, I can definitely relate and feel awful for your loss of smell.
But like... are you sure you weren't some sort of super-smeller before hand? I don't appear to have smell issues (I believe) - but I definitely don't experience the subtleties you did, and that's coming from a person who obsesses over the fine details of things. Maybe I have some slight smell issues...
I have a lot of sympathy for you, for what it's worth. Like I said, losing my sense of taste for just a week and change was utterly terrifying. I'm very sorry for your loss.
I've been interested in sensory prosthetics for a while now. Using alternate sensory routes for balance, or sight, is a thing. I wish I were hearing more about it in mainstream science news - it seems like giving blind people 3D lidar perception through a grid of skin cells would be a good thing. Scent would be orders of magnitude more complex, but maybe still a good goal for future R&D?
Yes, definitely! It also tends to jog other memories from long ago, things that you had otherwise forgotten can suddenly be brought forward by the right smell.
I've asked our Operations Manager to look into this issue. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We'll get it sorted out. Please email info@nostarch.com so that they can help troubleshoot.
We're getting caught up on our Early Access titles. Our staff is very particular about what they release and they don't like to put chapters in until they feel like they're really final. Given the current world situation I'm making sure that we relax that policy a bit and you'll see more books moving into Early Access in the next 2 or 3 weeks. Just a little hectic around my company at the moment.
My intention was really not putting pressure on the publisher as a buyer of this book. I rather wonder why certain books have an early access option and others don't.
I probably won't be able to read it before July, anyway, because I have to finish my bachelor's degree first. But I think it's not a bad time for a financial contribution to my favorite tech book publisher, so I already bought the book "blindly".
