Know your onions
Let’s get one thing straight. Feedback would fail at being a pro chef.
Not just because we hate high pressure or fear Gordon Ramsay. We’d just cry. Every time. Cutting onions isn’t a skill issue. It’s biology.
Syn-propanethial-S- oxide flies into the air when you chop. It hits your trigeminal nerve. Your tear ducts kick in to wash it away. Annoying. Basic. Also totally unexplored in science.
Until now.
Thomas Hummel and team dropped a paper on 25 May. It’s in Laryngoscope Investigative Otlaryngology, a title that sounds like a mouthful of gravel. Good luck to the audio readers. They asked 1,001 volunteers about their lives. Did their eyes water? Could they smell well? Was their nose irritated? They ran psychophysical tests too. Sticks with smells. Identify the odor. Simple.
The result? A contradiction.
People who swore they cried over onions also swore they had a great nose. The tests said otherwise. No correlation. Those cryers smelled exactly as badly as the non-criers.
So what gives?
These findings are consistent with previous research…
Humans are terrible at judging their own senses. Like thinking you’re an above-average driver. Or a hilarious person. Or good at interpreting complex data. You probably aren’t. Feedback knows this because Mrs. Feedback smelled a dead mouse long before I did. The cat had hidden it behind the sideboard. I walked through a living room of mild decay for weeks. Humility. Learned.
Tidy-up time
We’re late to the party again. But this trend? It makes sense.
Forget space battles. Forget fantasy quests. People want to organize things. Animal Crossing proved it. Now someone went further.
Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane dropped on 30 April. Your job? Shelf 3,072 books. A fairy made a mess. You fix it. It costs £5.29. I didn’t buy it. Budgets are tight. But I watched the clips. Weirdly soothing. Like Sudoku. You find a category. You place the item. It clicks.
Categories include “Romance Novels” and “Destructive Magic.” No Dewey Decimal here. Just chaos into order.
Nineteen hundred fifty reviews by June. 94% positive. Why? Because real life isn’t like this.
Real life involves towels on the floor. Food wrappers missed by inches. Pigsties in the living room. Maybe the problem isn’t us. Maybe reality needs a progress bar. Or XP rewards. Who knows?
Think of the children
Last week grads booed speakers. Again.
If the commencement speaker mentions generative AI, the crowd hisses. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt? Booed. Scott Borchetta? Booed. Gloria Caulfield? Booed too, though she’s barely a household name. Why do kids hate progress? Or power?
Gen AI eats electricity. It fakes voices. It threatens entry-level jobs. Valid reasons to be mad. But booing feels dramatic. A bit juvenile.
Seymour Skinner had the right idea once: Am I so out of touch? Probably not. The children might be wrong. Or just tired. Or both.
Got a tip for Feedback? Send it over. Or don’t. We’re still sniffing out mice.
