Concerning issue number 2 above, one can consider so-called weave states. Ordinary measurements of geometric quantities are macroscopic, and planckian discreteness is smoothed out. The fabric of a T-shirt is analogous: at a distance it is a smooth curved two-dimensional surface, but on closer inspection we see that it is actually composed of thousands of one-dimensional linked threads. The image of space given in LQG is similar. Consider a very large spin network formed by a very large number of nodes and links, each of Planck scale. Probed at a macroscopic scale, it appears as a three-dimensional continuous metric geometry.