Invisible Aliens Alert!

Apparently the Earth might be full of invisible creatures that we can't see. No, really, I haven't been at one of those Bilderberg-lizard-tinfoilhat websites, it's in a respectable paper! If you can't be bothered to read the link, (but please do) this lady has posited the theory, very seriously, that there may be life on earth made in such a dissimilar way to us that we cannot see or find it. Incidentally, the little drawings are not the creatures. The black rust stuff on the rocks might be. All this is not crank science, there are various teams of scientists looking for it. Anyway, this kind of thing is one of the reasons I like science.

One of the other reasons I like science is that, from the point of view of my admittedly eccentrically wired brain, it is becoming increasingly hard to distinguish scientists from wizards. OK, probably in more of a Terry Pratchett kind of way than Lord of the Rings, but these days scientists do increasingly resemble what, as a kid, I would have described as wizards. Messing around with the fabric of the universe. Conducting strange experiments under mountains. And finding things that even my over-active imagination would find it difficult to create.

I was watching the news the other day and a professor talking about the uneven temperature of the universe cheerfully said 'it's possible that there were two universes tangled together when they were created.' This is the sort of the thing people say in stories. Also, scientists have found a planet made out of diamond, and another so light it would float, if you dropped it in the sea.

When I was a kid, science was much duller. Sometimes it was dull to the point of oppression. People would tell you what was what in a 'gosh you're stupid' kind of way. I distinctly remember an incident in which friends of my parents' were of possession in some horrific 1970s popular science book about evolutionary biology. When I asked about it, they gleefully informed me that it proved how men were always on the prowl for sex, and women were always trying to get a man to stay with them to protect their offspring, because that's what people were programmed to do. (Think I was ten at the time - thanks for that.) I didn't much like this idea, and asked if it had to be like that, or if you could change it. 'Oh no,' I was informed. 'It's science'. At least ten years later, as a sci-fi fan, I quizzed a physics student on whether there might be other planets out beyond our solar system. He assured me, in a 'don't be so stupid, woman' kind of way, that there were absolutely none.

I remember these two incidents because on both occasions I was being told something I didn't want to believe. One, I intrinsically didn't like the ideas involved, and two, they fought in the face of what I, as a thinking observing being, considered to be likely. In the first case I could see that people's behaviour was a lot more complex than that. In the second, I knew that nature tends to replicate patterns. I grew up in the country, and had seen how fern leaves replicated themselves on the windows when it was cold. I'd also seen these patterns in the stream, outside. So it seemed to me very odd that nature would do this planet thing nine times around our sun, and not anywhere else at all.

Of course, we now know that both these assertions were, not to put too fine a point on it, bollocks. Perhaps the reason I remember both incidents is that I wanted possibility to be greater and wilder than the depressing 'facts' that were being paraded as the wisdom of the day.

The reason I now like science is that, several decades on, it has become full of great and wild possibility. This is why I get annoyed when I hear people like Dawkins banging on about 'magical thinking'. What's not magical about invisible lifeforms or diamond planets, or tangled-up universes? Most of the amazing things that have happened in science and technology in the last two decades have been as a result of people using their imagination to say 'what if?' and then positing something utterly implausible. The only people who sneer at imagination are those who don't have any.

I'm holding out for the invisible lifeforms, anyway. I'm hoping some of them might be, at least, y'know, cat-sized, but apparently it's most likely just bacteria. Of course, unless that's what the cats have really been staring at, all the time...

Headlines, reality, and how people get confused.

Dear all, I have been finding the internet a little trying this week. What I mean is, I have been finding Twitter a little trying, for a very specific reason. It's the same reason that's made me bang my head on the table on previous occasions, and my annoyance levels are now at a scale where I am being forced to rant about it, longhand, so to speak.

If you are not in the UK, bear with me. (I am sure you can find equivalent examples from your own country.) Earlier this week there was a court case in which a man was convicted of killing six children (his own) in a fire. A newspaper, which I will not link to, wrote a headline blaming this on the benefits system. Many people were very angry, because the government is currently in the middle of massively reducing benefits for all kinds of poor people, both in work and out, while giving away tax cuts to the rich.

I should point out that this twitstorm was the second twitstorm of the week. The first was when a cabinet minister (weekly pay £1800 approx) claimed he could live on £53 a week, like an unemployed person. Within hours a petition to make him do so had been signed by quarter of a million people.

Now, in my opinion his comments were plainly stupid, as was the headline. What I find bizarre is that so often on the internet, the levels of outrage over what was said massively exceeded the levels of outrage over what was done.

Now, I know we're all getting used to the new in internet age and all, but I think some people have a reality problem. I am a writer and I spend a lot of time thinking about what is written on the page in front of me. I spent hours every day in the company of people who only exist in my own head, and on the page, in front of me. Then, at a certain point, I pack up my laptop, get on my bicycle (real) cycle home through the city (real) to the house that I live in (real). Sometimes in the evening I chat to people on twitter. They are also real (although possibly, some of them are not quite what they claim to be). These things, the bicycle and the city and the house and the people who tweet at me will all continue to exist as and when I shut off the laptop and close down twitter.

But I think some people are confused. They think that these things which are written down, in newspapers and on Twitter, are the real things. I'm not denying that there is a connection between the two, and that one influences the other - I am a writer, after all. But however bad a headline is, it is still words printed on paper, and those six children are still dead. When Reeva Steenkamp was killed, a British paper printed a photo of her, in her bikini, on its front cover. Another newspaper - which was, in print, relaying every salacious detail of the case - wrote about how terrible it was. Many many people exercised a great deal of affront over this photograph, which was of a woman who had consented, while alive, to have this photograph published. Far, far more people seemed upset about the photograph, than about the fact that she was dead. Does this make sense? If I had a choice of having a bikini photo of me (I'd look a lot worse than she did) on the front page of a newspaper, or being dead, I'd choose being exposed, in all my white, wintry flabbiness, on the front of a newspaper. After all, it'd pass after a bit, and I'd get on with whatever I was doing. Which I couldn't, if I was dead. Like those six children are.

Equally - to go back to Steenkamp - the levels of outrage over this death were pretty extensive on twitter. South Africa has a murder rate of 15,940* in the most recent year I can see figures for, or a figure of 31.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, compared to an average of 1 for western Europe. I cannot see how many of those victims were women, but let us say, for the sake of argument, around a third. So maybe 5000 South African women died in the last year, by murder. Because they did not die at the hands of someone famous, we have never heard of it. And yet, it still happened.

The fact is, sometimes truth is in statistics, and not in headlines. Five thousand dead women is so much very worse than one dead woman, and yet we find it much harder to relate to. Sometimes the things that we should care about are hidden inside numbers, not in a single photograph or inflammatory headline. Sometimes, the really truly awful things are not written down at all, because no-one bothered to catalogue, count, or even notice them.

So next time you find yourself inclined to go off on one about some tabloid headline, take a deep breath and ask yourself a few questions. Remember, for a start, that the purpose of headlines is to provoke shock and outrage, and that the person who writes that headline is a skilled professional, with long experience of doing so. Second, ask yourself, is that the debate I want to have? After all, the person setting the question has so much more power than the person who can only answer it. And then, perhaps, ask yourself, what is NOT being discussed here? And think about what you would like to see questioned and addressed, and perhaps start the conversation again, your way, because if you keep on just reacting you won't have any time or energy to act, which is actually what needs to happen.


* All figures from here

Geekery is the new chicery, apparently.

I was in Debenhams the other day and spotted these T-shirts. There was one that said 'NERD' as well. Now, while am happy that geekism is a condition to be aspired to by young women, sadly, I have to offer some sobering advice. WEARING ONE OF THESE T-SHIRTS WILL NOT MAKE YOU MORE INTELLIGENT. Wearing a T-shirt that says 'Geek' will not make you a geek. Sorry, ladies.

Now, I'm aware that the definition of geek may be contested, but I am fairly clear that you will not find any true geeks in the ladies fashion dept of Debenhams on a Saturday morning. I'm not saying that fashion and geekism are irreconcilable. Its just that I wouldn't expect to find a fashion geek in Debenhams, frankly.

Places you might find a geek on a Saturday morning may include:

1. Wikipedia
2. A library
3. An obscure specialist shop in a dirty backstreet, looking for the item that will complete their collection of (insert geekism here)
4. Round the back of the enclosure at a medieval re-enactment, trying to figure out how the trebuchet works.

This is because being a geek involves work. You can't just buy it. Being a geek takes devotion. It requires time on the internet. It needs visits (pilgrimages, if you like) to the sites of your devotion. It requires some special signals that can be exchanged should you meet a fellow devotee. But more than that, sadly, it requires a little pain. And suffering. Until you have endured the ridicule of your non-geek brethren, you cannot be a true geek. Remember girls - the cruel laughter of your peers when you confess to an interest in the breeding behaviour of lesser-spotted Chilean pine-nuts - will, thirty years later, lead to you being the only world expert in said phenomenon, while they'll all be working down Tesco's. Build up that head of resentment, it's the only thing that'll get you through the wilderness years.

Yes, being a geek requires hard work, late nights, and humiliation. So why, I wondered, would people who don't naturally belong to the world of geekism, suddenly aspire to be part of it, to the extent of coughing up £10.99 for a rather horrid T-shirt?

Well this is what I figured. There used to be two kinds of people. There were thrusting, alpha-kind of people with long legs and sharp suits who did smart things with money and drove fast cars and had lots of sex and in between they kicked the other people, the small ugly people in unflattering coats who collected and categorised, say, old British Rail badges, because they couldn't get laid and needed to take their mind off it.

And then, after about 25 years, we sort of noticed that the alpha-kind of people had basically stolen all our money and sold us a load of rubbish. And then we sort of noticed that all the things that had changed for the better over that time had been done by the people who collected and categorised and invented things, and were despised and kicked by the alpha-people. And thus, there is a bit of a cultural backlash going on.

Personally, I think this is a good thing. Although if, in about ten years time, I witness a baying mob in anoraks chase a man in a smart suit down the street, and pelt him to death with World of Warcraft figures and old British Rail badges, I may have to call time and say it's all gone too far.

Anyway, I don't think we're done on this swing yet. Next step of the takeover: Prime Minister Nerd, circa 2014. Suck it up, Britons. 

Photo: http://awkwardedmilibandmoments.tumblr.com/

geek  

/gēk/

Noun

1. An unfashionable or socially inept person.
2. A person with an eccentric devotion to a particular interest: "a computer geek".

geek1

Pronunciation: /giːk/

informal

Definition of geek

noun

• an unfashionable or socially inept person.
• [usually with modifier] a knowledgeable and obsessive enthusiast:a computer geek

verb

[no object] (geek out)

• engage in or discuss computer-related tasks obsessively or with great attention to technical detail:we all geeked out for a bit and exchanged ICQ/MSN/AOL/website information
• be or become extremely excited or enthusiastic about a subject, typically one of specialist or minority interest:I am totally geeking out over this upcoming film