Pluto and the Principle of Universality

You will occasionally hear elder Millennials opine to their beheadphoned offspring: "When I was your age, Pluto was a planet!"

Pluto being declassified as a planet was, alongside the simultaneous release of Blur/Oasis singles, one of the defining moments for our microgeneration. 

The body responsible for classifying planets is the International Astronomical Union and you probably don't need to be reminded that they downgraded Pluto from full planetary status to the lesser category of 'dwarf planet' on the 24th August 2006 at their international Congress in Prague.

That was 20 years ago this summer. In that time, Pluto has completed an 8% arc of its journey around the Sun. 

One understated reason for Pluto's declassification is the Principle of Universality. This is the principle that, broadly speaking, states that if a label is truthfully applied to an item t with qualities x, y and z, then it should apply to all items with qualities x, y and z.

The problem was that Pluto shared qualities of size, shape, constitution, orbital proclivities and so on, with an increasing number of objects being discovered in and around the Kuiper Belt. By the Principle of Universality, if Pluto was correctly labelled 'planet' then these objects would rightly be considered planets, too. And then we would have potentially dozens of planets. 

The IAU rejected this option in favour of reclassifying Pluto and its new bedfellows as dwarf planets. 

At various points people suggested just treating Pluto as a special case. But the IAU decided that taxanomic integrity was more important than the grandfather legacy of Pluto.

Like many principles (even non-universal ones) the Principle of Universality pops up all over the place. I was reminded of it when thinking about the UK government proposal for early-release of prisoners.

Prisons are overcrowded. We want to keep sending people to prison, but we don't want to build any expensive prisons. So, we select a category of prisoner for early release.

Let's say everyone who was sent down for 10 years (out in five) will be released after three years instead. Hooray! Problem solved! Lots of freed up cellspace.

But, oh no! Media finds a pair of horrible police-killers (convicted of manslaughter) among the cohort assigned for release. Justice secretary is now assigned the problem of keeping these individuals in prison and still releasing the rest.

Enjoy your summer holiday, Alex Norris! This is not a simple Pluto style problem of recategorisation. 

The crime of killing an emergency services worker has already been recategorised. But in the UK, we are not in the habit (for now) of redefining people's guilty sentences due to changes in law that occur after their sentencing. This legal principle is enshrined in international laws that it used to be a given that the UK would uphold.

What's strongest out of prison walls, the Principle of Universality, and Article 7 of the ECHR? Something's got to give. And the stakes are almost as high as that time Blur decided to release Country House the same week as Oasis' Roll With It.

Not only 'not only' but also 'also'

 

After a decade of writing the internet for local businesses, the role of educating people about garage doors and patio paving was made redundant, so I took a different job: editing the internet.

Turns out there are people and machines, and people using machines, who can churn out internet content faster than me, and, for a time, I was paid to knock their output into shape.

Believe it or not, this work chiefly consisted of deleting the word 'also'. A task I undertook with relish.

Finnginn's first rule of concise writing:

If a word can be removed from a sentence without changing the meaning, remove it.

In 90% of instances, 'also' can happily be removed from a sentence by application of Finnginn's first rule. I consider it a courtesy to the reader to excise the words 'also', 'both' and, more often than not, 'available'.

My biggest bugbear, however, is the ugly construction: 'Not only... but also...'. We have this lovely way in English of expressing the same thought in an elegant three letters. A person might write: 'Not only... but also...' But they always mean: 'and'. There's zero need to describe a restaurant as serving not only fish but also chips. Once you become aware of this hallmark of hack writing, you'll see it everywhere. 

One writer with whom I collaborated closely during this period of editing the internet confided that they caught themself editing 'also' out of a text message to their partner. 

I knew then that my work there was done. 

Which was fortunate, because head office flew in from Copenhagen shortly afterwards and made 50 of us redundant.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: one redundancy may be considered unfortunate, two: smacks of carelessness.

Blame it on a Backroad

My wise old pal Little Hannah says you should learn a new skill in your 40s. I thought I might learn to play the mandola! But for some reason that idea didn't prove too popular with the household. Then circumstances beyond my control meant that, 28 years after my last attempt, I found myself booked in for a driving lesson.

Not straight away of course. First I had to have a convoluted conversation with the DVLA to establish what my driving licence number was. Apparently, stoned 17-year old me had applied for a provisional licence - long since lost. But your number remains your number forever. And the government won't tell you what it is unless you can prove who you are. Do you know what is suggested as a satisfactory form of ID for this purpose? A driving licence. 

Naturally, they don't accept the government-issued (and slightly Orwellian sounding) Voter Authority Certificate that I use to identify myself when voting. It always makes the staff at the polling station chuckle. I imagine they have an over/under sweepstake on how many they will see that day. "Hey Deirdre, we've got another VAC...!"

So before I could get a driving licence, I had to get a passport, so I could prove that I was who I said I was, so that the DVLA would release my driving licence number. With me so far? 

This delay in proceedings gave me plenty of time to relive all my driving anxiety which I think may partially stem from the time I lived in America and my boss, Gwyn, and I took his V8 Buick to collect a pickup he'd lent to a friend of Ted Rebel Horse's. The plan was, I'd drive the (automatic) Buick back and he'd drive the manual pickup. Gwyn even threw in a driving lesson on the way. Gwyn was not a patient man. If he told you something once, he expected you to remember it forever. We had to drive along Highway 50, parts of which are basically a cliff on one side and a drop down to the mighty Arkansas River on the other. 

Here is a painting of the experience I made (at the anarchist art collective, the Granary) when attempting to deal with the trauma. That's my fearful face in the rearview mirror! See if you can change the image by switching in your head whether it is the left eye or the right eye being reflected.

Dave my new driving instructor is the polar opposite of Gwyn. His catchphrase is: "That's the gearstick not the clutch." And he seems happy to say that calmly as many times as needed.

Dave has been teaching the drivers of Norwich for so long that the Yellow Pages were still a thing when he started: his company is called '1st Choice Driving Instruction' Which got you a nice early position back in the heyday of analogue listings.

I don't want to get ahead of myself, but I'm putting together a driving playlist. Add your favourites in the comments here or in social media. Here's one to get you started...

Blame it on a backroad

Santa's Doing the Mambo This Xmas

Mambo Santa Mambo by the Enchanters is a classic Xmas cash-in. By the winter of 1956/57, the Mambo music and dance craze that had swept through the dancehalls of Latin America and the US east coast had passed its underground phase and firmly entered the mainstream consciousness. 

Mambo was everywhere and the original, largely improvised, dance style was being codified into a form of 'Salsa on 2s' that could be taught as a Latin Ballroom dance.

The Enchanters were a Doo-Wap band from Detroit led by the Holloway brothers, Alton, Gerald and Ulysses. Searching around for a theme for their next hit, they lit upon the happy idea of combining Mambo with a surefire big-selling Xmas theme. What if, imagined the brothers Holloway, Santa was doing the Mambo this Christmas?

The resulting track is one of the great forgotten Xmas songs of the 20th Century - and has earned a well-deserved place on the Finnginn Xmas playlist. But you're not going to hear it on Heart Christmas Radio any time soon.

Despite being a certified Xmas banger, Mambo Santa Mambo entirely failed to chart in either the US or the UK. And I have a theory as to why... 

Mambo Santa Mambo

Release date: January 1st 1957

Mambo Santa Mambo

Photo by Matias Eduardo on Unsplash

Reading the Nebula Award Winners - 1968 - Rite of Passage

In the universe described in 1968’s Nebula Award winner - Rite of Passage by Alexei Panshin - Earth becomes uninhabitable in 2041. So far, so plausible. Fortunately, our protagonist’s grandparents escaped in an interplanetary Great Ship in… er… 2025. In my capacity as a citizen of 2025 on the day that another SpaceX rocket exploded on the launchpad, I can only observe that our interplanetary technology is not as advanced as the science fiction writers of the 1960s assumed it would be. 

This technological ineptitude may come as a relief to the teenagers of the future, for they will not have to fear being dumped on a hostile planet to prove that they are tough enough to survive. This is something of a trope in mid-twentieth century sci-fi. I was immediately put in mind of Robert Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky, which explores the same premise more engagingly with a tighter plot in fewer pages. 

It is interesting how this trope has evolved. In more recent Young Adult dystopias, it is not enough to pit the teenagers against the savagery of an alien environment to toughen them up (and by extension create a tougher society by weeding out the weaklings). These days, we prefer to bear witness to teenagers forced to fight each other to the death as a form of  entertainment - c.f. Hunger Games, Maze Runner, Battle Royale etc.

Rite of Passage beat Philip K Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? to take the Nebula prize for best science fiction novel. Interesting that Dick’s genuinely philosophical musing on what it means to be human/android should lose out to a novel that has lots of long sections concerning the teenagers’ education in philosophy. So we get the author’s opinion on Thoreau, on Utilitarianism, and on the philosophy of power clumsily inserted and slowing the book down. As one teenage girl opines:

“But I don’t like [the philosophy of power]. For one thing it isn’t a very discriminating standard. There doesn’t seem to be any possible difference between ‘ethically good’ and 'ethically better.' More important, however, Stoics strap themselves in ethically so that their actions have as few results as possible. The adherents of the philosophy of power simply say that the results of actions have no importance…”

And so on. I’m not certain that Alexei Panshin has perfectly captured the internal monologue of the average teenager here. 

The titular Rite of Passage doesn't occur until the final few chapters of the book. Our heroine who has spent her childhood as the pampered daughter of a politician on a spaceship must travel to a colony world and survive on her wits. But will she discover that it is actually her own society that is brutally oppressive? (Spoiler alert: yes, she will. But it takes a long time to get there.)

The best bits of this book occur early on and consist of descriptions of the Great Ship, what life is like for a child there, and how the ship and society function. However, I could do without the author insert philosophical views and the finale was underwhelming to say the least.

5/10 - I won’t read again. Note to self: re-read Tunnel in the Sky instead.

 

Oranges and Lemsip

There's a tradition in English poesy that marries financial misfortune with the chiming of church bells. You may recall from your childhood the nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons, and of course that powerful indictment of 20th Century industrial capitalism, Gwalia Deserta by the Welsh poet Idris Davies (which features verses of church bells lamenting the desolation of Welsh mining in the interwar years, and was set to music by Pete Seeger as the folk staple The Sad Bells of Rhymney recorded by Seeger, The Byrds and others.)

So when I was looking to reflect on a recent rise and fall in my own financial circumstances, I had a great tradition to draw on…

“Let’s pay you in dividends!”

Said the bells of St Ninian’s.

“What does that mean then?”

Asked the bells of St Stephen’s.

“Lower National Insurance contributions!”

Explained the bells of St Lucian’s.

“Then we’ll all be rich!”

Sang the bells in Norwich.

“Actually, there’s a hole in the company finances…”

Rang the alarmed bells of St Francis.

“Redundancy”

Chimed the bells of Costessey.

“Here’s your five farthings.”

Said the bells of St Martin’s.

“But, I’ve worked here for 10 years plus?”

Argued the Bells of St Antoninus.

“Yeah, you lost some entitlements when you accepted payment in dividends…”

Reminded the bells of St Ninian’s.

Here come 17 new job email notifications to light you to bed.

Here comes a recruiter to hunt for your head.

-

Photo by John H Rhodes on Unsplash

Reading the Nebula Award Winners - 1967 - The Einstein Intervention

Samuel R Delaney’s second Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction Novel was bestowed for his book The Einstein Intersection (published in 1967). It was his last Nebula Award and having read two of his novels now, I know enough that I will never bother to tackle his famously impenetrable mid-70s bestseller Dhalgren which - as one reviewer put it “...genuinely has no plot or easily grasped points…” 

The Einstein Intersection hasn’t quite reached that level of impenetrability. It is a novel of the post human - a genre that is enjoying a renaissance at the moment with thoughts about AI singularities and so forth - but in the 1960s mostly meant post nuclear war telepaths.

The novel follows Lo Lobey through three acts that have familiar tropes: Overcoming the Monster, Containing the Beasts, and Journey into the Afterlife. Lobey is different - he can hear the music in people’s heads and his feet are hands.

The legend of Orpheus is specifically signposted in the text - what passes for a plot is driven by Lobey’s search for his dead lover Friza - but if one were looking for a mythological antecedent, the giant boar hunt in the first act put me more in mind of that part of the Epic of Gilgamesh where the titular king and his best buddy Enkidu fight and slay the Bull of Heaven - albeit the unknown author of that text took about a paragraph to describe what takes Delaney 50 pages or so.

The text is interspersed with postmodern elements - we read cuttings from the author’s journal as he travels around Southern Europe getting inspiration for a novel he is writing referred to as TEI. The characters recount myths including Orpheus and at one point the Legend of The Beatles:

“You remember the Beatle Ringo left his love even though she treated him tender? He was the one Beatle who did not sing - so the earliest forms of the legend go. After a hard day’s night he and the rest of the Beatles were torn apart by screaming girls, and he and the other Beatle returned, finally at one with the great rock and the great roll.”

Ringo and Maureen Starkey got divorced in 1975 - but I guess it was well established prior to the divorce that he was an alcoholic and serial cheat - or so the legend goes...

There are great novels examining post humanism - emphasising the other as an understanding of our own humanity. If you want to read a good one from the 20th Century, I recommend Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, or John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. The Einstein Intersection isn’t adding anything to the genre and was a slog to get through.