26 | New Scientist | 27 July 2019
Editor’s pick
How different peoples
use language about time
6 July, p 32
From Chris Sinha and Vera da Silva
Sinha, Norwich, UK
“When we talk about time, we
frame it in terms of space”, writes
Daniel Cossins. 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 – “time
as such” – 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 – 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.From Phil Ball,
London, UK
Cossins suggests that people
who speak different languages
represent the passing of time indifferent ways – 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
22 June, p 12
From Mary Rose,
Goolwa, South Australia
Discussing superweeds, you
say that hand weeding crops is
effective, though costly. 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 weedthan 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
6 July, p 15
From Judith Phillips, Swansea, UK
You report researchers encoding
the Gettysburg Address in DNA.
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 come25 May, p 16
From Alan Gordon,
Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, UK
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. 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
Letters, 1 June
From Aidan Karley,
Perth, UK
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 aimingViews You r le t te r s