Two instances of recognition this evening — and they were as different as night and day.
Part one
I got to play with a digital camera besides mine this evening. Some people are really into digital cameras; I am not. I have one from five years ago which does everything I need it to do, and I have one even older which does fine as well. On top of these, I have one built into my phone which serves the purpose, goes everywhere I go, and is as good as the five-year-old camera. I'm not interested in having more megapixels than last year (a myth anyway, from what I understand), I'm fine with the default resolution I get (2048 by 1536), and since most of what I photograph is either for my personal use or the web, that's more than enough for me. I do have a healthy respect for professional photographers who require that high level of performance from their equipment, I'm just not one of them. Knowing your limitations is good and can sometimes save you money.
Anyhow... being far behind the curve on camera technology, I enjoyed looking at and playing with this little jewel. The feature I immediately discovered was facial recognition. Basically when the camera detected a face, it drew a square around it on the LCD display. I played with this for awhile and was surprised by its accuracy. It recognized every real face I showed it, but drawn or painted faces (from one of Katie's drawings and a one dollar bill, respectively) were rejected. If it saw multiple faces, it drew multiple squares. Pretty damned neat.
It occurred to me this was a consumer-level product with this level of technology, and it probably cost under $100. It can pick out faces from a blur of color and light (which, if you think about it, is all vision is) and draw squares around them. Now, the all-important question: If you were an organization like, let's say, the CIA... or MI6... or Mossad... with a budget much greater than $100, how much better would your cameras be?
Part two
I got in some good quality time with Olivia this evening, and got to hold her for an extended period of time. It was nice — I'd forgotten the soothing effect just holding a baby can have on a person. Andrew is now rough, rowdy, and all boy, while Katie is a semi-sullen teen who'd rather socialize with her friends.
Olivia is.
I've already discussed one sense of recognition I had when I saw her. I'm pretty convinced now it's something at the animal level. After holding her awhile, my neck started to get tired, so it was time to pass her along to the next set of waiting arms. This is what we do with babies, pass them around and around. After she was taken from me, I could still smell her on me. It wasn't like soap or baby powder or anything like that, and it's not like she'd peed on me or something. It was just — well, a baby smell. It was the essence of her, if that makes sense. And it wasn't even an odor at all, really, at least not one I could identify. Yet somehow, the sense of her — the sense that she'd been there — was completely olfactory.
I seem to remember a similar phenomenon with my own kids, and at some point I don't remember, it was gone. I have no genetic ties to Olivia. So assuming this sensation was real, maybe it's something at the species level.
The knowledge we've lost over the eons could fill volumes, I suspect, and the things we no longer pay attention to — the things deemed important to our inner animal — slip away daily.