News Roundup

International terrorists are now becoming so effective that they can disrupt the life of nations simply by getting themselves caught, as recent events in Pakistan, Britain and the USA showed. This diverts world attention from more important events, such as the Messenger Mercury probe, Halle Berry's problems with being beautiful, and the impending National Underwear Day.

National Underwear Day is on August 11th, at least for Americans. I don't know if other nations are celebrating their underwear, but presume not, otherwise it would be International Underwear Day. Unsurprisingly, the event is sponsored by a company which makes underwear. Equally unsurprisingly, Bill Johnson of the American Decency Association has condemned it, largely because it will be encouraging people to flash their underwear. I was about to make a sarcastic comment about how in that case they should have protested against Madonna, then realised that the ADA almost certainly did.

Another person with whom I sometimes find it hard to distinguish underwear from overwear (to make an extremely strained paragraph transition) is Halle Berry, who has recently said that beauty is over-rated: "Let me tell you something - being thought of as a beautiful woman has spared me nothing in life. No heartache, no trouble. Love has been difficult. Beauty is essentially meaningless and it is always transitory." The transitory nature of beauty has been mourned by poets since, well, I'm not sure exactly which poem, but it was probably in cuneiform. Few, however, would go as far as to say that it confers no benefits whatsoever on its possessor, unless that person is bent on becoming a reclusive mystic, which as far as I know Halle Berry is not. It may not have spared her heartache, but as a winner of several beauty pageants and a not entirely cosmetically neutral Oscar, it has certainly spared her poverty. I have also heard that incredibly beautiful women are rarely condemned to lives of celibacy (unless their families lock them in nunneries). Then there is the claim (most recently reiterated by Satoshi Kanazawa and Jody Kovar at the LSE) that there is a correlation between beauty and intelligence. Both beauty and intelligence show a correlation with popularity. So beauty goes with money, sex, brains and popularity. Must be really tough.

Of course, as I tell my students frequently, correlation is not the same as causation, so it doesn't mean that the upper echelons of NASA look like T'Pol or Savik (in fact, they look like these people). And speaking of NASA (yes, it's another completely stupid paragraph transition!) the Messenger probe is on it's way to Mercury. Personally I prefer manned spaceflight because it is more exciting and romantic, but I can see that in this case an unmanned probe is probably a better idea, unless you want conversations like "Houston, we have a problem. It's hot. It's very hot. In fact it's so bloody hot that our shielding is starting to melt."

Now I am feeling embarrassed because it has taken me a full ten minutes to realise why a probe to Mercury is called Messenger. Shame on me.