“Blink, motherfucker.” (h/t, Damian) || Brew of note. || Today’s word is suboptimal. || Toothbrush of tomorrow. || Dicycle. || Dude. || Turn your desk into a touchscreen. || “Makes drinking water fun.” || Stormy weather, somewhat distant. || White women bad. || Whale heart. || New legs. || Photographing lichen. || Small claims. || Scenes. (h/t, Obo) || “This teacher had to tell her deaf students that people can hear farts.” || Flat-Earth gravity and other fun facts. (h/t, Elephants Gerald) || Jigsaw of note. || “Jigsaw companies tend to use the same cuts for multiple puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable.” || Parallel universe detected. || Florida man sighted. || And finally, behold ye, a party trick of note.

With space exploration, we have to consider how we are using language, and what it carries from the history of exploration on Earth. Even if words like “colonisation” have a different context off-world, on somewhere like Mars, it’s still not OK to use those narratives.

In the pages of National Geographic, Nadia Drake and Lucianne Walkowicz competitively fret about how terribly problematic the language of space exploration is:

I think the other [word not to be used] is “settlement.”

I’ll give you a moment to process that one.

That comes up a lot and obviously has a lot of connotations for folks about conflict in the Middle East. I think that’s one that people often turn to when they mean “inhabitation” or “humans living off-world.”

Apparently, notions of our species expanding into space are “born from racist, sexist ideologies that historically led to the subjugation and erasure of women and indigenous cultures,” and must therefore be corrected by the lofty and woke. And so, “government agencies, journalists, and the space community at large” are “revising the problematic ways in which space exploration is framed.”

Numerous conversations are taking place about the importance of using inclusive language, with scholars focusing on decolonising humanity’s next journeys into space, as well as science in general.

You see, any attempts to colonise other worlds, or to explore and exploit astronomical objects, will have to be pre-emptively “decolonised” and purged of gender by the neurotically pretentious. Lest our astronauts and astronomers instantly start oppressing their black or female colleagues, rendering them tearful with the words unmanned probe, while spitting on the floor and shouting about the merits of Arcturian poontang.

Needless to say, the word frontier is also deemed “problematic,” due to “narratives… based around European settlement.”

Yes, an open thread, in which to share links and then bicker about them.

Our previous free-for-all included the abolition of clapping at the University of Manchester Student Union; the hazards of genital steaming; and the joys of waiting 30 seconds for 26 adverts to load on a 200-word story on a local newspaper website. There was also the question, as yet unresolved, of what to tell relatives who politely ask what this blog is actually about.

If all else fails, you can always poke through the reheated series and greatest hits.

No messy hand. (h/t, Julia) || He lives on as a pair of shoes. || Unnatural passions. (h/t, O&G) || It could happen, people. || The humans have some kind of force field. || False economy. || Conflicting definitions. || Disgusting Food Museum, Malmö, Sweden. || On Cerenkov radiation and travelling faster than light. || A bit of a kick to it. || Ice crystals in the sky. || Hatchlings of note. || He does this better than you do. || Skillz. || Scenes. (h/t, Dicentra) || Think good thoughts. || A project for the weekend. || Mascot of note. || More scenes. (h/t, Damian) || 10 robots. || Aerial refuelling. || And finally, “When it became clear that Trump was going to be president, silence descended over the mostly naked crowd.”

I bring saucy celebrity news, which we don’t often cover. The catch is, it’s from the Guardian: 

The US magazine People has crowned Idris Elba the sexiest man alive,

A handsome chap, and popular, so not entirely surprising. Indeed, the author of the piece, Mr Caspar Salmon, refers to Mr Elba as “incontrovertibly loin-tugging.”

It’s heartening that Elba, long held to be a favourite to become the next James Bond, has cracked another predominantly white institution.

So far, so Guardian. But it could, I think, be a little more Guardian.

Elba fits squarely into an amusing pattern that People has been building up over the years, which sees them plump for decidedly masculine, established, patriarchal figures. The award, in other words, is relentlessly straight.

There we go.

The prize tells us a good deal about the cult of masculinity still prevalent in the world, which equates male looks with “sexiness” rather than beauty. This emphasis on sexual attraction brings power and dominance into consideration alongside mere aesthetic qualities.

“The cult of masculinity.” Now we’re cooking. And a trashy magazine that once a year ranks famous men by sex appeal tends to favour men who strike its readers as sexy, statusful, and manly. Shocking stuff. They even – brace yourselves – put “emphasis on sexual attraction.” Despite the aforementioned loin-tugging, I suspect this may prove problematic: 

[The magazine’s] museum-like display of strong, mostly white, straight-acting men does tell us something about the dominant culture, and is, let’s face it, funny.

What’s funny, apparently, is that the largely straight and female readers of People magazine – readers whose average age is 38 – often rate as sexy men of roughly similar age:

Elba is the fourth man in his 40s in a row to win the award… The average age of winners is 38.7 years old.

And which, it turns out, is also problematic: