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