The Mercury Wilson’s School’s sixth-form newspaper Volume 4, Issue 5, January 2014

The end of 2014 and start of 2015 has been a time of triumph for intolerance. The Char-lie Hebdo attack was the most obvious ex-ample of this and was soon reacted to by anti-Islamic intolerance from all over the world. Following this, the previously progressive-seeming Pope stated that same-sex mar-riage was a threat to the traditional family in an apparent U-turn from his earlier stanc-es on equality. However, arguably one of the most up-setting examples of prejudice comes from late last year, when Leelah Alcorn (born Josh Alcorn) named her parents as a signifi-cant factor in her decision to commit suicide following their intolerant attitudes towards her transgenderism. Upon coming out to her parents as transgender, Leelah was reportedly told by her mother:, “We don't support that, reli-giously ,” and she soon sunk into a depres-sion, which was worsened when Leelah was forced to go to conversion therapy (treatments - linked to a rise in suicide rates- aimed at convincing trans people to aban-don their gender identity). Upon being denied the right to start transi-tioning from male to female on her six-teenth birthday, Leelah cried herself to sleep and when she came out to her class-mates, her parents isolated her for five months by taking away her access to social media and other forms of communication. Because of further intolerance from her parents (including them telling her she

would go to hell), Leelah became hopeless and took her own life on December 28 2014. It seems easy to blame Leelah ’s parents for her death; after all, it was their intolerance of transgenderism that appears to have driven their daughter to suicide. But in an interview, Leelah’ s mum stated: “We told him that we loved him unconditionally.”

From this we can see that perhaps it wasn't the actions of abusive and cruel par-ents that led to the suicide but instead the misguided actions of loving but intolerant parents. Intolerance leads to tragedies such as this and it is only through seeking a more ac-cepting society that events such as the sui-cide of Leelah Alcorn will become a thing of the past. Leelah herself, understanding this, closed her suicide note with the following state-ment: “My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the num-ber of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say ‘that’s *completely wrong+’ and fix it. Fix society. Please. ” The rights of transgender individuals in soci-ety have only recently reached the public eye. But since then, support for trans peo-ple has grown to a significant extent. On 11 January, the TV show ‘Transparent’, about a transgender father, won a Golden Globe and the show ’s writer Jill Soloway dedicated the award to Leelah in an extremely power-ful speech. She stated: “This award is dedi-cated to Leelah Alcorn and to the many trans people who died too young. I just want to thank you for coming out. Maybe we'll teach the world something about au-thenticity, and truth, and love . To love.”

INTOLERANCE: THE TRAGIC DEATH OF LEELAH ALCORN

MATTHEW JEFFREY

Want to write for the Mercury? Budding journalists, or those just passionate about a subject, are

always needed. Anyone interested in writing, be it a front page spread, or a back page sports column, should contact the editors at:

Cobainm@wilsonsschool.sutton.sch.uk MacNeillk@wilsonsschool.sutton.sch.uk

THE ECONOMICS OF ‘ULTIMATE TEAM’

Sixth Form Mercury, January 2015 2

Economics and video games do not appear to crossover in many people’s view, espe-cially those who play video games. But ‘FIFA Ultimate Team’ (FUT) is a different matter, as where money exists (whether real or not) economics exists. The FUT coin, the cur-rency in the game, cannot be bought from FIFA directly, making it difficult to convert the value of the coin into a real currency. Be-cause of this, it makes people wonder how the price of players is determined. By comparing David Alaba, the Austrian left back for Bayern Munich, and Gabi, the Spanish central midfielder for Atletico Madrid, factors which deter-mine the price of a player can be high-lighted. Both are 82 rated, but Alaba is worth in excess of 61,000 coins on PS4, completely overshadowing the 950 coins it would take to include Gabi in your team. Alaba is the highest rated left back in the German Bundesliga, whereas Gabi is the eighth-highest rated central mid-fielder in the Spanish league. If we were

to relate this to real world economics, we could say that Alaba is a monopoly, as people will buy him regardless of his huge price in order to get the best qual-ity. Gabi operates in a market with high levels of competition, and is not a mar-ket leader, meaning consumers will use Gabi only as a cheaper alternative to a better quality player, making him an ‘inferior good’. We can deduce from this that rating is less important as a factor in determin-ing price than the rating in relation to other players in categories such as the league they play in, but also nationality, card type (e.g. gold or silver ) and other key areas.

The second major determiner of price is the supply of the play-er. Economic theory teaches us that as supply increases, price decreases for the good, as there is the same amount of mon-ey attempting to pur-chase a larger amount of goods. Alaba is a rare card (he appears shiny on the transfer market), whereas Gabi is not.

This means that Gabi is given out by FIFA in packs more often than Alaba is, and so, abiding by the rules of econom-ics, Alaba’s price must be greater than Gabi’s. There are, of course, other factors that play a part in determining the price of a player, such as pace and other attrib-utes, but it can essentially be whittled down to the fundamentals of the mar-ket: supply and demand.

EDITORS’ LETTER

The Mercury returns for 2015, and with it we have the return of many previ-

ous contributors, as well as some new faces.

Matthew Jeffrey comments on the intolerant state of society, focusing on the

case of transgender girl Leelah Alcorn’s suicide, and there is a similar sense

of sadness that accompanies Kyle MacNeill’s study of the environmental

warnings of David Harsent’s poetry. Charlie’s cartoon is poignant and funny.

However, the extraordinary tale of the Philae comet landing, as covered by

Luke Peacock - and the eccentricity of Pablo Picasso, combined with an inter-

esting look at the economics of the video game FIFA - mean it’s not all doom

and gloom. Happy New Year!

Max Cobain and Kyle MacNeill

LATEEF HASSAN

Contents

Article Page

Intolerance: The tragic death of Leelah Alcorn

1

The Economics of Ultimate Team 2

Playing With Fire 3

Style Icon: Picasso 3

Philae Comet Landing and Charlie’s Cartoon

4

Sixth Form Mercury, January 2015 3

Spanish born artist Pablo Picasso is undoubtedly one of the greatest and most iconic artists of the twentieth century. However, what the cubist visionary is seldom noted for is his impeccable style. Despite often being photographed in his underwear, Picas-so’s wardrobe was extensive. He donned an array of casual pieces - effortless yet elegant, and perfectly suited to both the Mediterranean coast of his childhood and the Parisian cafés of his later life.

Often teaming silk cravats with his pyjamas, Picasso’s laid back look can be surmised in his signature striped Breton tee, introduced as the uniform for the French Navy in 1858, and made iconic by Coco Chanel in 1917. Just like his art-work, Picasso’s style possessed flair, colour, and ultimately charm.

If there’s one thing about poetry that’s agreed upon, it’s that it is gruelling to judge. It is objectively subjective, we might say, since poems deal with individual feel-ings; they are artfully mixed cocktails of emotions, and the success of their ingredi-ents and aftertaste, all so importantly, de-pend on the reader. Perhaps it is this accepted division of opin-ion that makes the T.S. Eliot Prize so treas-ured, coveted and engaging. It is does not deal with reflection, or focus on canoniza-tion; instead it zooms in on the now, judg-ing contemporary poetry on how well it can encapsulate the current human condi-tion and heart of literature. But, regardless, it is fair to say that the winner - creative writing professor David Harsent - was gen-erally seen as a surprise choice. He was neither top dog nor underdog, existing in some sort of lacuna between the two poles of deserved champion and delighted out-sider. On closer inspection, Harsent’s poetry flick-ers with a constant warmth of expression.

As Harsent has recently said himself, “If I can’t hear the music, I don’t think it’s a poem”, echoing the view of Robert Frost that the general understanding of free verse being completely arrhythmic and unstructured is like “playing tennis without a net”. His winning collection is, after all, called Fire Songs, and its musical quality certainly shines through. In ‘Dive’, for ex-ample, Harsent echoes the rhythm of someone gradually submerging themselves in a body of water, with the enjambment of ‘She sets her face to the skim / to get the last of the world she came from’ cre-ating a dichotomy of surface and underwa-ter. Even the sound of music echoes deeply within the pages that fuel the fire. The lines, ‘there was a time when the only sound / was the wind calling its ghosts’ in ‘Icefield’, for example, present an image of deathly isolation, with the staccato ending of ‘the music lost’ wearing its environmen-talist badge with burning pride. Repetition is also at the heart of Harsent’s collection, reflecting the poet’s effort to dive ‘a little deeper’ into the fleshy heart of

the human condition. ‘Ice over ice’ in ‘Icefield’ and ‘a life beyond the life’ in ‘Effaced’ work to crack through cold barri-ers that language perpetuates, into the eternal and otherworldly. As Fiona Sampson, judge of the prize, correctly iden-tifies, there is something ‘prophetic’ about the universal way in which Harsent ap-proaches the ‘depredation of the planet’. Much like the barren images in the ‘Waste Land’ – by T.S. Eliot himself – Harsent seems to project an image of stark loneli-ness and the devastating effects of egoism via a manner akin to whispered stories of the past in post-apocalyptic caves. It is not hard to imagine the times ‘when your dreams brought in a white bird’ being rem-inisced over the ‘Bramble and thorn, lum-ber and junk. Dead Stuff’ that fuels the eternal fire of humankind. Perhaps the collection’s purpose is to be a quasi-religious wake-up-call about the destruc-tion and decay of our planet - not a syn-thetic mocktail to be sipped, but a Molotov cocktail hurled at us to be ingested, digest-ed, cited - and, eventually, recited.

PLAYING WITH FIRE: THE T.S. ELIOT POETRY PRIZE

STYLE ICON: Picasso by Linden Hogarth

KYLE MACNEILL

Sixth Form Mercury, January 2015 4

LUKE PEACOCK Asking ourselves how life originated on Earth is a common, but never fully answered, question. But, finally, the answer may just be hurtling towards us, after the landing of the probe Philae on comet 67P in November! A decade ago, the European Space Agency launched the spacecraft Rosetta carrying a com-et lander with the potential to reshape scientific understanding about the origins of life on Earth. After landing on 67P, which was tumbling through space at 84,000mph, last November, Philae conducted various experiments before hibernating due to a lack of power. Problems in the landing occurred because scien-tists underestimated the solidity of the ice layer on the comet, which led it to bounce 1km from the planned landing site. Consequently, Philae was positioned tilted in the shadow of a cliff. The power availability decreased as the photo-voltaic panels could not receive enough sunlight and the lander hibernated. However, 90% of the planned research was still carried out and the data received back on Earth. The naming of the crafts is significant in terms of their mission objective, as they were named after the Rosetta stone and the Philae obelisk. Both of these artefacts played a major role in the deciphering of Ancient Greek and Egyptian

(both hieroglyphics and demotic script) as well as contributing to historic discoveries. The orbit-er Rosetta and lander Philae are hoped by scien-tists to provide similarly unprecedented discov-eries from comet 67P. Evidence supporting the Panspermia theory was collected by Philae’s COmetary SAmpling and Composition (COSAC) system. ‘Sperma’ comes from Greek, meaning seed, and the Panspermia hypothesis is one that suggests that life exists throughout the universe and is distributed via meteoroids, asteroids, comets and planetoids. The German-engineered COSAC system identified organic compounds in the gas produced by the comet but was inconclusive in its analysis of the comet’s surface composition. The COSAC system was intended to identify organic matter in comet 67P but also to deter-mine the type of molecule – either left or right handed molecules. This feature of molecules is called chirality, which is a form of stereoisomer-ism where a compound has to contain a chiral centre (a central carbon atom) of four different bonds forming a tetrahedral. In a sense the molecules are seen to be mirror images of each other much like your hands. This analysis of compounds is significant as life on Earth can only be based on left-handed mol-

ecules for amino acids, suggesting that a comet containing only the left handed type of optical isomer started life on Earth. Nevertheless, finding even traces of organic molecules is an outstanding discovery by the European Space Agency. All living organisms are formed out of these carbon-based compounds, which are fundamental in providing chemical properties to support life. In conjunction with our previous understanding that comets are comprised partly by water in the form of ice, this theory of the origins of life looks highly convincing. As Philae reboots after its recharging period,

though, the question remains as to what other

unprecedented data it will be able to conduct.

THE ORIGINS OF LIFE REVEALED?

CHARLIE STEWART