Trudeau must take note of the Gettysburg Address
As a linguist, I, er, found David Robson’s article quite, uh, interesting (17 October, p 45). But, mmm, maybe starting from Justin Trudeau was, like, not a good idea.
Language has evolved with a range of expectations. We expect private conversations to be punctuated with meaningless sounds, as they are an indication that we are taking the other person seriously. They are saying: “I am processing what you said. In responding to it, I do so with some hesitation because I am still thinking about it.” On the other hand, we expect public figures standing up to speak on a major issue to have already reflected on it and to have organised their thoughts into a coherent whole. There are no uhs or ers in the Gettysburg Address.
So Trudeau wasn’t, in fact, speaking like a pro. He was treating a public occasion like a private conversation and using the wrong linguistic register.
Monoculture can create a frying pan effect
James Wong rather gently argues for the necessity, at times, of monocultures, his argument being designed to take the wind out of the sails of those who rail against them (3 October, p 24).
The contribution of industrial monoculture agriculture to climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution by agrochemicals and soil erosion by wind and water is vast and complex. Monocultures can also increase local heat. I write from southern Spain, where an enormous hectarage of land lies bare in the summer awaiting autumn sowing, its topsoil blowing away in the wind, soil life dying and releasing carbon dioxide, and causing local heat effects. These are difficult to measure, but undoubtedly contribute to why the region around Seville is called “the frying pan of Europe”.
Polycultures can be very productive 鈥� perhaps they don’t match industrial monocultures, but they are more labour intensive. In many rural areas, there are few jobs, so young people leave. A more people-intensive agriculture that is actually good for the planet can’t really be a bad thing.
Surely automation will lead to fewer jobs
Having worked in automation all my life, I hoped for a little more evidence and less speculation from your article on it (10 October, p 44).
If the interviewed experts think automation doesn’t reduce the number of staff required to produce a given amount of output, can they explain why businesses do it? Assembly-line workers are a lot cheaper than cryptographers or drone operators.
Drake equation still just a guesstimate at best
In your article on the chances of finding intelligent life beyond Earth, you suggest that the error bars on estimates of this produced by the Drake equation are huge, that we are essentially plugging best guesses into the equation and have been doing so for decades (3 October, p 36).
This is a very welcome admission 鈥� but it doesn’t go far enough. I put it to you that the Drake equation is flimflam, mummery and handwavium with no predictive or determinative value whatsoever. If you have an “equation” that is fundamentally a chain of unknown terms multiplied together, you don’t have a scientific tool, you have a science-flavoured Ouija board.
For a slice of what life in 4D could be like, try this
You write about complex electric circuits used to represent a fourth physical dimension (17 October, p 40). For a lighter take on a fourth dimension, read “鈥揂nd He Built a Crooked House鈥�” by Robert A. Heinlein. It is a story about a house built in the shape of a 4D cube, or a tesseract.
This gives an entertaining 鈥� but not necessarily scientific 鈥� view of problems when interacting with a physical fourth dimension. There are many video representations of the tesseract online, which show how a cube can turn itself inside out by moving within the fourth dimension.
Tabletop games trump video games for choice
Jacob Aron says “video games offer something unique among media: choice” (10 October, p 32). I disagree. As he points out, if you are playing a shooter in a video game, you can’t decide to host a tea party instead 鈥� but in a tabletop role-playing game, you can do precisely that.
I speak as someone who, in my first ever Dungeons & Dragons session, derailed the dungeon master’s carefully plotted story of demonic possession via a magic ring by choosing to have my character chop her finger off.
Let's talk about quantum computing
There are several points that I would like to address in your coverage, both in your magazine and online, of D-Wave’s claim that it has the world’s most powerful quantum computer (10 October, p 17).
It is wrong to characterise quantum annealing as being limited to optimisation. With more than 250 early applications, D-Wave’s systems are also well-suited for material simulation, quantum chemistry and a broad array of computational challenges known as NP-hard problems.
Though not yet a universal computer, D-Wave’s Advantage can, , be programmed to solve any classical problem. progressing towards the universal annealer.
There are peer-reviewed papers in in 2014 and in 2018 that demonstrate the quantum-mechanical effects of superposition and entanglement in our quantum systems. D-Wave has on important physics problems. Researchers have also published results showing superior performance of D-Wave quantum processors compared with classical alternatives in the journals , , and others.
It is time to move away from antiquated perspectives and work together to bring quantum computing to waiting industries.
Life on two legs is for these birds, too
You report that humans are the only species that uses bipedalism as its primary mode of transport (10 October, p 34). This must be worrying news to ostriches and their ilk.