Some time back I wrote to my MP, Lib Dem Richard Younger-Ross, to ask why he hadn’t signed up to Early Day Motion 423 for libel law reform. I’m please to say I’ve received a reply in a bundle of forwarded mail. The news in a nutshell: Richard Younger-Ross wholeheartedly supports the campaign for libel reform!

“As a nation we have found ourselves in the position where doctors who criticise heart implants and journalists who expose corporate cynicism are being sued in our courts for libel, rather than being congratulated for trying to save lives. This has to change. While individuals need a right to redress if their reputation is damaged, our laws need to give more protection to the right to free expression.

English libel laws barely recognise the invention of the printing press, let alone the internet, and our outdated laws have become a scourge not only here, but abroad too. We see it as an embarrassment that foreigners can be sued in our courts on the flimsiest of pretexts, and that this has led the United Nations Human Rights Committee to take the view that our laws discourage “critical media reporting on matters of serious public intewrest, adversely affecting the ability of scholars and journalists to publish their work”, and that ‘libel tourism’ could “affect freedom of expression world-wide on matters of valid public interest

[...] I am pleased to inform you I have signed EDM 423, and that the Liberal Democrats will continue to support calls for a Libel Law Reform in Parliament, and will urge the other parties to follow our lead”

Kudos to Richard Younger-Ross and his brethren!

Thanks to Greg Foot for leading me to this delightful gallery of couture space fashion circa 1959 – present. I’d love to know more about the team behind each of these – did they employ seamstresses and tailors as well as materials scientists and flight suit technicians?

One of NASA’s seven original astronauts, Gordon Cooper modelling the Mercury flight suit developed by B. F. Goodrich in 1959. I love how Cooper looks every inch the dashing hero – the pose, the athletic figure, the rich Kodachrome(?) colours. He lived out that image too – after a power failure onboard one spaceflight disabled the navigation instruments, Cooper used his knowledge of star patterns and chalk markings he made onto the capsule window to correctly gauge the timing and angle for his re-entry.

Famed lunar golfer Alan Shepard wearing the suit designed for the 1971 Apollo 14 mission, which he commanded. Contrasting the bravado seen in Cooper’s picture, Shepard looks smaller and fragile. Instead of a man wearing a suit, we see an elaborate piece of equipment built to protect a precious cargo. An element of the biomechanical also creeps in, with numerous ports and tubes ferrying life-saving fluids to the demanding creature inside – hence the term “umbilical cables“.

Finally, here are NASA’s prototype suits, seen during a testing session in Moses Lake, Washington. The astronaut is no longer recognisable as human – the faceless hunched figures with cameras hanging from their necks look like strange alien tourists. Hidden inside, wrapped in a small piece of Earth’s atmosphere taken with them, the spacemen are no longer visible as such at all. It’s almost as if to get to alien worlds we need to give up a little bit of our humanity in the process. Let’s hope we don’t trade off too much.

I discovered these symbols hidden underneath my TV. Does anyone know what they mean?