Editor's pick: How different peoples use language about time (1)
“When we talk about time, we frame it in terms of space”, writes Daniel Cossins (6 July, p 32). Indeed, “we” do, and “time as space” is a common metaphor in many languages. It reflects the close link between the way the human brain processes spatial and temporal sequences. But it equally reflects the cultural and historical invention of “time” as an independent domain 鈥� “time as such” 鈥� that contains events or strings them along a mental line.
For nearly a decade, we have been documenting languages of small-scale indigenous communities in South America in which there are no spatial metaphors for time (8 October 2011, p 47). These communities don’t, traditionally, use clocks and calendars. Their members don’t conceptualise time as extended along a mental timeline. Instead, they think and talk about time in terms of events recurring in the natural and social world. Time metaphors in their languages are based on human psychological capacities such as vision and memory.
Event-based time is a human universal 鈥� we use it when we agree to meet someone at lunch or decide to have a holiday in the spring. The use of clock and calendar-based metric time intervals is the foundation of the concept of “time as such”. We believe that this invented cognitive technology is also the basis for spatial metaphors for time.
Many cognitive scientists have yet to fully take on board the challenge of representing cultural and linguistic diversity in their theories about the human mind.
Editor's pick: How different peoples use language about time (2)
Cossins suggests that people who speak different languages represent the passing of time in different ways 鈥� left to right in English and vertically in Mandarin speakers. Couldn’t this just be due to the writing systems they use? How do speakers of Arabic, written from right to left, represent time?
Hand weeding really isn't effective for most crops
Discussing superweeds, you say that hand weeding crops is effective, though costly (22 June, p 12). But it can be effective only for crops grown in narrow rows with wide spaces between rows that people can walk along. Otherwise the weeders will trample the crop.
Some vegetables are grown like this. But here in Australia, commercial crops of cereals, oil seeds, field legumes and grass for hay are grown in a way that leaves no room for hand weeding.
A wheat crop could have 100 plants per square metre and 50 seedlings of the weed annual ryegrass per square metre. Not only would the wheat be trampled by hand weeding, but I suspect it would take more energy to weed than the crop would produce. Are there enough people in the world to weed the extensive areas that the world now farms to feed us all?
Let data storage means not slip from human memory
You report researchers encoding the Gettysburg Address in DNA (6 July, p 15). This reminded me of the pilot project I worked on in the late 60s at the British Museum Department of Printed Books, cataloguing part of its 18th-century newspaper collection into a machine-readable format. We shared the project and computer time with the Bodleian Library.
Once a week, what I had typed was taken to Oxford to be entered onto the system. The raw data were stored on reels of punched tape, as in your photo (not punched cards, as you captioned it). I realise that all of this was a very long time ago, but card and tape are very different ways of storing information. I would hope that these earliest ways of storing computer data haven't passed altogether beyond living memory.
Build a better hearing aid and they will come
Michael Le Page writes about work towards hearing aids that monitor the user’s brainwaves to tell which voice they are trying to pay attention to (25 May, p 16). This is leaping to the roof without climbing the stairs.
The more urgent, and easier, task would be to redesign hearing aids so that they don’t lose the directionality given by the shape of the ear. As a user of an in-ear moulding hearing aid, I suffer from this lack. As an engineer, I can see the start of the solution but, being 86, don’t have the resources to do my own redesign.
This could be a better way to visit Proxima Centauri
John Fewster is concerned that the Breakthrough Starshot swarm of microprobes could be viewed as a hostile act by inhabitants of the Alpha Centauri system it is aiming for, as their kinetic energy is equivalent to half a kiloton of TNT explosive (Letters, 1 June). Routinely, Earth is hit by bolides with energy equivalent to tens or hundreds of kilotons of TNT, and nobody but a few astronomers and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty monitors notices.
The Breakthrough Starshot project talks of zipping past Alpha Centauri. A quick way to the nearby Proxima Centauri and its putative planet has been by astrophysicists and Michael Hippke. It involves braking at Alpha Centauri and performing a gravitational slingshot, before drifting to Proxima Centauri at a relatively sedate pace. This braking could be achieved by sending probes with light sails large enough that they can be “flipped” and so decelerate using the light of Alpha Centauri.
Successful surgery isn't just about surgeons
Ruby Prosser Scully highlights the growth of robotic surgery and questions whether it achieves better outcomes (15 June, p 20). Many factors may contribute to this growth, including profit from offering “space-age treatment” and the temptation of toys for the boys.
But assessing the outcome of surgery based solely on the skill of the surgeon hasn’t been appropriate since 1847, when anaesthesia was introduced. Now surgery is a team effort, including pre-operative optimisation, management by an anaesthetist and others during surgery and post-operative care. All these factors need to be considered when assessing putative benefits of robot-assisted surgery.
In extremis, I would be happy to accept a skilled surgeon operating at a distance via a robot, with supporting staff who are unfamiliar with the procedure. For planned surgery, however, I want to be managed by a team working in a centre where the procedure in question is carried out regularly and successfully.
Our brains may depend on a discovery of cooked food
Sam Wong writes that our intelligence was possibly enabled by the invention of cooking (22 June, p 34). But to say that we invented cooking is to suggest that someone once sat down and thought: “I could set some stones up in a ring… then rub a couple of sticks together” 鈥� and simultaneously invented fire and cooking.
Injured or slow-moving animals caught in fires caused by volcanoes or lightning provided plenty of opportunities to discover cooked meat. Tens of thousands of years later, perhaps our brains had wired up sufficiently to invent a place suitable for us to cook in.
What should get in a flap over this tiny flying robot?
The RoboBee X-wing is an amazing piece of engineering (6 July, p 16). But is it bird and bat-proof? More importantly, are birds and bats it-proof?
For the record 鈥� 27 July 2019
鈥� The primary motor cortex is nearer the front of the brain than we showed it (22 June, p 34).
鈥� Still floating in a tin can: the Apollo 11 mission to get from Earth to lunar orbit (13 July, p 37).