In the newspapers

Have been browsing the Daily Mail site - a British tabloid much given to grumbling about the state of the nation, generally from a conservative angle. The article I was linked to wasn't too interesting - apparently women prefer hairy men; except that it's only a bit over half who so prefer, so not such an overwhelming majority that you can necessarily woo any woman by growing your hair until you resemble Rasputin.

A news presenter declares that 'TV is poisonous and evil. Audiences are being cheated and treated like idiots by a bunch of intellectuals' - sounds about right; I have no idea if it was ever any better, though, as I wasn't really paying attention in the 1980s, let alone in the 70s before I was born.

Woman jailed for marrying an illegal immigrant with forged papers involved - this story puzzled me for a bit, as it's blatantly nonsensical for the government to criminalise marriage. But it seems that it's the immigration fraud that's the problem, and using fraudulent papers was what got them in trouble. Hurm. She still should have been able to marry him if she wanted, though she seems to have decided otherwise since, so it clearly wasn't some passionate but forbidden love that the English state has decided to crush out of that hatred for life and love and laughter and all good things that always lurks in the heart of Man (and, since we are politically correct these days, the heart of Woman too).

Also, how things change: once a church was a sanctuary, and now... "A spokesman for the UK Borders Agency said the Church of England was working with the department to stop immigration fraud." And what's with presenting church officials with (forged) documents trying to prove you were living together already...? That's ridiculous - (a) you'd think that people who cohabit might be slightly quiet about it before the vicar - "living in sin" might be hard to avoid these days, but still; (b) I'm appalled at the idea of proving a real relationship by proving cohabitation, because this leaves people who are trying to keep it in their pants until marriage with a serious disadvantage. I'm not C of E so it's not my business, but this jumped out at me. Also, immigration fraud bothers me less than the fact that Western governments these days will actually interrogate you about your relationship and how long you've been together and so forth. I know someone who had to submit a 20-page scrapbook full of photos of her and her husband (fiancé at the time, I think) to Canadian immigration, to prove it was a "real" relationship. Fie upon such a mindset. (Also, it's unfair to those people who marry for practical reasons rather than because they have a relationship and wish to express their love and commitment, but we live in the age of "marriage is love", so... meh.)

Finally, this is mildly amusing: Oxford students' shame: Women's lacrosse team dress up as babies and 'chav' mothers in degrading initiation ceremony. Naturally Oxford officials declare embarrassment, and so they should - initiation parties? Oxford is supposed to be in England, not the US. It's depressing we've imported that particular bit of cultural worthlessness over the ocean. But it's hilarious that all these posh kids are dressing up as chav welfare mums - it's like a modern day version of Marie Antoinette pretending to be a shepherdess.

Of course, the Daily Mail calls it a "shocking scene", because expressing arch church lady-style outrage[*] is basically part of the job description of a Daily Mail journalist. I think if I were a father and my daughter were doing the lacrosse-fratgirl thing, I'd be annoyed, but a lot less shocked and bothered than if she was sleeping around a lot, and then getting accidentally pregnant, and then dealing with it by hopping off down the hospital to get my grandchild dissected in utero so as not to crimp her career. Or if she was doing crack, or pushing old ladies around. All of which go on all the time, and generally with a lot less protest. (Although pushing people around sometimes goes viral and gets a lot of outrage when recorded with a mobile phone, I guess.)

[*] I refer to the standard church-lady archetype, who is always shocked at the state of things and always wanting the local vicar to do something about it, usually in some drama or murder mystery set in rural 1950's England. I have never met one of these in real life, however, despite going to church quite a bit. (This has generally been my experience of a lot of religion-related stereotypes - although this being the 21st century, I guess I'm not going to meet too many Grand Inquisitors... at least, not within the Church.)

Lastly, an article from elsewhere (Popular Science) about 100-year ships going to Mars to colonise. (The ship would have to support its crew for 100 years while they got the colony up and running; it wouldn't take 100 years to get there.) I read a comic once about monks and nuns going off in a ship to evangelise aliens, and I think the monastic approach could probably be adapted pretty well to space exploration; although you'd need members of the third orders in tow to reproduce, and also a bishop or two to keep things going. In the comments section there's naturally one or two people mentioning how space colonisation would allow people to get away from all the psychoses of human existence - crime, war, belief in God, power, &c. - even talking of bringing up children without knowing their parents just so as to send them off on a voyage of space exploration and restart humanity without the current hang-ups. A ghastly idea. I'd ask what these people's parents did to them to make them talk of such horrors, but it's not my experience that the victims of actual bad parenting come out with such insane ideas. In any case, the interesting question would be: if people really tried to live cut off from a previous culture (an idea utterly impossible as well as appalling), how long would it take them to reinvent all our psychoses? Were I some long-lived extraterrestrial observer watching such an experiment, I'd start a betting pool on how long it would be to create the first new established religion, and then how long till the first religious war. Really, you need to give the colonists at least a few hemlock seeds just so they're prepared for the eventuality.

And while on the subject of science: Fermilab is Building a 'Holometer' to Determine Once and For All Whether Reality Is Just an Illusion. A misleading title - "reality" is still real under this hypothesis. What's illusionary is its three-dimensional nature. There's a theory - apparently, with some tantalising experimental indications in its favour - that the world is actually two-dimensional, but the intertwining of the two dimensions with time creates an effective extra dimension. What's awesome is that someone's figured out a way of testing this. I have to say it'd be even more awesome if it turned out to be true - not to mention, very weird - it'd mean that the flat-earthers are actually right, in a way, they're just insufficiently radical: it's the entire universe that's flat, not just the world...