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A comment on Sand dunes can 'communicate' with each other. Parent comment

Re:Sand dunes can 'communicate' with each other by jessriedel on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @11:53AM (#22237830)
Physicist use this term, but always with the understanding of "communication" in the sense of Shannon information, i.e., two initially uncorrelated systems can become correlated only if they "talk" to each other. It's never intended to suggest planning/agency, and it's a useful intuition pump, properly used.

What's happening here is that the journalist is keying on that phrase used by physicists and repeating it in a popular setting where the reader doesn't know the more precise meaning. It functions as effective clickbait, but the journalist can maintain plausible deniability by quoting the researcher. (Sometimes, the physicists is guilty of doing this purposefully and the journalist is duped.) This is actually a pretty big source of popular-physics clickbait.

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Re:Sand dunes can 'communicate' with each other by thdrdt on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @01:40PM (#22239301)
But why not use the word 'interact' instead?
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Re:Sand dunes can 'communicate' with each other by jessriedel on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @02:40PM (#22240034)
If I were to speculate, and say it's probably because (1) they might not be interacting directly, and saying "(possibly indirectly) interacting" is a lot more syllables than "talking"; and (2) "talk"/"communicate" emphasizes the information-theoretic content, whereas "interact" is somewhat more likely to be interpreted in terms of interaction strength. (If two systems are "barely communicating", they are transferring a small number of bits, whereas if two systems are "barely interacting", the influence in displacement/impulse/temp/whatever is small.)
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Re:Sand dunes can 'communicate' with each other by asdfman123 on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @04:39PM (#22241284)
Shannon's original paper was "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," which actually studied radio communication, it's since been generalized, and there's no reason to rename jargon so outsiders can better understand it.
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Re:Sand dunes can 'communicate' with each other by eric190 on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @04:48PM (#22241378)
It was actually "The mathematical Theory of Communication," where communication was studied over any channel not just radio.

The paper(s) revolutionized several fields!

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Re:Sand dunes can 'communicate' with each other by xhkkffbf on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @01:53PM (#22239471)
That's because that's about the level of "communication" that most physicists can manage with other humans.

Sorry. It's a lazy dunk. And an unfair one. But when someone tosses it up, I need to slam home the lob.

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