For those of you of a Leftpondian persuasion, Katie Melua is a British singer of Georgian (the country, not the state) extraction. Pretty in a dark way with a sweet, bubbly voice and a prediliction for slow, jazzy ballads with slightly odd lyrics. She's recently caused a minor astronomical firestorm in the UK by singing the following stanza in her recent single, "Nine Million Bicycles":

We are twelve billion light years from the edge,
That's a guess,
No-one can ever say it's true
But I know that I will always be with you.

Science writer Simon Singh fired back in The Guardian that he happened to KNOW with absolute certainty that the actual distance to the edge of the universe was exactly 13.7 billion light years, and to claim any other figure, or, God forbid, to claim it is a guess, is a slap in the face to all the astronomers who spent so many years working out Hubble's constant.

But then a second group of astronomers have apparently rushed to her defence, and though I don't have their exact quote, I imagine that they remind the general public that nothing is absolutely known in science.

It just seems so unfair. We don't hold our politicians to such a level of scientific scrutiny, why single out balladeers?

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It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.