January 30, 2010

WHAT DO YOU HEAR WITH YOUR NOSE?

In this comic strip, a space alien who can sense gravity waves though a rooster's-comb-like feature on his head gets asked "what do you see with your mohawk?".

The little guy had trouble answering, and it occurred to me why. He doesn't "SEE" with his mohawk. The comic doesn't go into it, but he'd have another verb entirely that means "to detect gravity waves with your mohawk".

It'd be like having a blind alien ask, "what do you hear with your eyes?". After stammering for a bit, you might come up with either "light waves", or "electromagnetic radiation vibrating in the 400 to 790 trillion cycles per second range."

Which would make you a complete alien freak to them, if the Blindanarians had the normal human hearing range of being able to dectect atmospheric vibrations of 20 to 20,000 cycles per second.

Oh, and to answer the title question, you hear "airborne chemicals with concentrations as low as 1 part per million"

God, humans are such FREAKS!

posted by Harvey on January 30, 2010 at 08:47 AM | Permalink | 0 Liars | TrackBack | Ponderings
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