From the mouths of children
In researching infant consciousness, has anyone sought input from people who were themselves recently babies? I no longer have direct memories of being a baby, but do recall as a 4- or 5-year-old, reviewing my infancy, including my cot and pram. I would have been a willing interviewee. Moreover, until about age 10, I had recurring nightmares, a synaesthetic melange of rhythm, colours and base emotions, which I later felt might have been a reconstituted recollection of my birth (15 February, p 38).
Quantum PCs may hit store shelves one day
The same sentiment that “you will probably never own a personal quantum computer” computers in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Current quantum computers are still nothing but proofs of concept. But once commercially viable and useful ones become available to buy, the pressure will be on to make them more powerful and cheaper. This may spur innovation in miniaturising confinement and cooling systems and in room-temperature superconductors, which may eventually lead to devices the size of today’s gaming PCs and perhaps eventually even smaller. At that point, why wouldn’t we all have one at home(Leader, 15 February)?
Perfect boiled egg is an imperfect solution
As an engineering student decades ago, I was taught that a simple empirical formula that gave a “good enough” result was more useful than a perfect, correct analysis with too many variables (15 February, p 19).
A case in point is the “best boiled egg” method you reported. It was fascinating and illuminating and involved nuclear magnetic resonance and spectroscopy, complex energy flow calculations and more. However, it requires more than half an hour of cooking. Other methods for the “perfect” egg require far less time.
Spreading rock dust to save climate is a problem (1)
You report the idea that the use of crushed rock on agricultural land to capture carbon may also alter Earth’s reflectivity. However, this geoengineering proposal isn’t practical. A millimetre-thick layer of rock per hectare weighs around 20 tonnes. Extended to 1.5 billion hectares of cropped land in the world, and that is a lot of rock dust. I shudder at the carbon emissions from crushing it, trucking it to distant fields and spreading it (1 February, p 14).
Other potential negatives include wind erosion of the dust, which would cause pulmonary problems for humans and animals that breathe in the particles, and potentially fatal effects on insects when they are coated by the dust.
Spreading rock dust to save climate is a problem (2)
I wonder if any change in reflectivity due to spreading crushed rock on farmland would only occur where there was no crop cover. And would the rock deplete carbon dioxide where crop seedlings grow, reducing viability?
I suspect this method would be only for areas with no plant cover.
This is the real hallmark of alien intelligence
The problem with recognition of alien intelligence raised in your review of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s book Shroud was also tackled in a short sci-fi story from the 1970s, in which some humans get stuck on a very warm and humid planet where every artefact they have rapidly rusts or rots. Aliens arrive, assume they are indigenous animals and take them back to a zoo. Now the humans must convince their captors they too are intelligent. Making artefacts is no good; the bowerbird does that. Then the humans find the alien equivalent of a mouse in their zoo cage, and befriend and cage it. Instantly the aliens set them free with profuse apologies. You see, only intelligent creatures imprison and feed other creatures (8 February, p 28).
Some history on new visions of the future
While Filippo Tommaso Marinetti is said to have founded futurism in 1909, in 1904 by Catalan writer Gabriel Alomar at a Barcelona conference (8 February, p 22).
His was an aesthetic movement, but also a political one, in a sense opposite to Marinetti’s. Alomar was unequivocally democrat, Catalanist and leftist and, probably, agreed with the Italian futurists only in their anticlericalism.
Alomar’s theses were echoed in the Mercure de France magazine in 1908. Perhaps this is how Marinetti learned of the term and took advantage of it.
We see evolutionary mismatch all around
Beth Morrell makes the excellent point that the modern world is grossly mismatched to the one in which we evolved. The restraints of our evolution on our thinking are there to be seen in our actions. We continue to wreck the planet, render its air toxic, pollute rivers, destroy wildlife and slaughter our own kind. Questions on, for example, the structure of space-time may be beyond us. Another order of intelligence, with means and methods unimaginable to us, may be needed (Letters, 15 February).
Never mind the horses, what about the bullocks?
You reported a study providing evidence of the origins of the Yamna culture that spread across Europe. One contention for which there is no evidence, however, is that the expansion of this cultural group involved carts pulled by horses. There is no evidence for the use of horses as draught animals in the areas concerned so early. What we do have is evidence for bullock wagons, and the word “yoke”, for the technology for harnessing bullocks, is widespread in subsequent languages (15 February, p 16).
Another view on cosmic pauses
Isn’t it more likely that the possible pauses in the evolution of the universe discussed in your look at a new cosmological model are for installing software updates(15 February, p 30)?