Isaac Newton, action and reaction hero
FEEDBACK feels the need to warn – or should that be “inform”? – you of plans by director Rob Cohen to write and direct a movie about the crime-stopping head of the Royal Mint three centuries ago, one Isaac Newton. Famed for such classics as The Fast and the Furious and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Cohen also plans a graphic novel version of his movie. The Hollywood Reporter he has teamed up with BiteSize Entertainment.
Of course, like flying cars, not all movies get off the ground. As far as Feedback can tell, BiteSize Entertainment has so far produced press releases. Another one announces the working title Untangling Rebekah Brooks. Feedback wonders how Newton would handle the problem of the erstwhile News of the World newspaper editor. And we’re now thinking of the movie business phrase “development hell”.
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That need not hinder our imagination. Of course, the idea of a film with accurate physics is ridiculous. But perhaps we could see Newton the alchemist, played by either Gandalf or Dumbledore?
Movie fans have already begun speculating who might play Newton at – with some wondering how any Newton film will handle the inevitable love interest, given that biographers describe Newton as celibate. One fan proposes the actress Tilda Swinton reprising her role as Virginia Woolf’s sex-shifting hero/ine Orlando…
Flowers look more dazzling to insect pollinators,” said Melbourne’s The Age on 12 June, “because they have evolved spectoral signals”. Peter McCarthy thinks of ghost roses
What is a Reverse Turing Test?
DISTINGUISHING humans from machines is an ever more pressing problem. The standard tool is the Turing Test, which asks whether an algorithm can emulate a human being, given a neutral channel of communication such as a keyboard. Reader Brian Oswald thinks there is a need for a “Reverse Turing Test”. This, you may not be surprised to hear, follows “being driven to rage and despair by recent exchanges with the ‘Help’ desk staff of a couple of major service providers”.
Some of these, he grumbles, “follow their prepared scripts so blindly that it is becoming hard to tell whether they are human or automata”. For example: “If you are having problems with your internet access, you’ll find all the help that you need on our website…”
Feedback’s head hurts when we try to work out what the opposite of the Turing Test would be, but an alternative is definitely indicated. We do remember that Alan Turing’s original version of the Test, the “Imitation Game”, asked whether you could distinguish a woman from a man over a text-only channel.
A refinement asks whether an artificial intelligence is better than a man at persuading you that you are corresponding with a woman.
SOFTWARE called PREP, used to count votes in Mexico’s 1 July presidential election, is “free of algorithms and irregularities”, . The headline in fact reads, of course, “PREP, libre de algoritmos o irregularidades“. Our resident Spanish computer programmer confirms our translation: and, no, “algoritmos” is not slang for “bug”.
This raises questions in the theory of computation, not to mention that of elections. For example, does the vote-reporting procedure used in Albania in the days of Enver Hoxha – “PRINT ‘99.7 per cent for the Leader on a turnout of 99.8 per cent'” – count as an algorithm? Feedback thinks not: surely an algorithm must at least include an “if” clause?
Certainly, conditionality is the whole point of an election with aspirations to democracy, and therefore an algorithm seems a really good idea.
NOT only do Feedback readers read the small print, you seek diligently to come up with constructive solutions to the conundrums it poses. Hillary Shaw pondered the London Olympic regulations specifying that drinks may not be brought into the secure areas in bottles made of glass “or any other material” (7 July).
“This may not,” she suggests, “exclude Klein bottles, which after all have no inside or outside.” Feedback can, however, imagine the reaction of a soldier hastily drafted to checkpoint duty finding a Klein bottle or any other four-dimensional object in our bag, and it is not printable.
“Even less ‘material’ in nature,” Hillary goes on, “is a magnetic torus ‘bottle’ or stellarator, used to contain the plasma in fusion reactors.” She acknowledges that this would require “a rather large battery to provide the power”. We can nearly imagine the reaction to attempts to take such technology into an Olympic Games venue.
Can I have fields of cheeseburgers?
FINALLY, Stephen Scott reports yet another unusual unit. In a talk on obesity last October, Andrew Lansley, who at the time of writing is the UK health secretary, a “national ambition” to cut 5 billion calories per day from the national diet. This is equivalent, he said, to cheeseburgers covering about 20 football pitches. Feedback wants to know: would that be soccer, rugby, Australian rules or American football?