New Mexico Might Declare Pluto a Planet 328
pease1 writes "Wired and others are reporting that for New Mexico, the fight for Pluto is not over. Seven months after the International Astronomical Union downgraded the distant heavenly body to a 'dwarf planet,' a state representative in New Mexico aims to give the snubbed world back some of its respect. State lawmakers will vote Tuesday on a bill that proposes that 'as Pluto passes overhead through New Mexico's excellent night skies, it be declared a planet.' The lawmaker who introduced the measure represents the county in which Clyde Tombaugh, Pluto's discoverer, was born. For many of us old timers, and those who had the honor of meeting Clyde, this just causes a belly laugh and is pure fun. Not to mention a bit of poking a stick in the eye."
Who cares (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Is that even possible? (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they're voting a friggin' name. Pluto is a big round ball of matter that orbits the sun at a mind-boggling distance, and no one's questioning that. NM just wants to call it a "planet", which is well within their prerogative. they could also pass a law whereby you would be referred to as "the one who does not understand the law", and that'd be just fine as well.
One of the basic functions of government is naming things. (Don't believe me? Go look at a street sign. And then pick up any package in the grocery store. The words on those things have meaning, essentially, only because the Government says so.)
The saddest thing (Score:5, Interesting)
That... that's super. (Score:2, Interesting)
"I'm right and everyone else is wrong! I'm going to believe it MY way, and that's that."
I mean cripes... I wonder how many of them still believe the world is flat? Just because you say that it's true doesn't mean that it is.
Re:Pluto (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Fine (Score:3, Interesting)
No, because marbles didn't (and wouldn't) naturally form themselves into spheres in space. I'd just call them "artificial debris."
There are lots more things, but most are pretty much unchanged - only the debate about what a planet is has really been stirring things up. For instance, if an object was formed by intelligent beings rather than nature, then it gets prefixed with "artificial." I also like "planetesimal" for planets too small to walk on, "planetoid" for planets that are very low mass (specifically, if you can jump off it and reach escape velocity, it's a planetoid), James Blish's "gas giant" for planets that are gaseous and transition from a gas to a solid of the same material at some depth based upon pressure, "spacecraft" for anything that was under its own power or let go inertially from something else under its own power, "satellite" for artificial moons, and "debris" for anything in space that that intelligence is responsible for, that doesn't currently perform some useful function.
Thank you New Mexico (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The saddest thing (Score:2, Interesting)
Tombaugh is a local hero (The "do it yourself" guy that found a planet) to people there and having his discovery "watered down" is akin to going to someone that has three purple hearts and taking them away because of an "oversight".
So, the saddest thing is your complete lack of details as to WHY they want to do this. It is to honor someone.
Re:Great (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fine (Score:4, Interesting)
In my view, debris is the result of the actions of intelligence, so no, planets aren't made of debris. They are generally made of materials condensed out of a stellar (or proto-stellar) accretion disk, or otherwise naturally found in space.
Not only in France (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, there are some Representative jackasses in my country (Brazil) trying to push this etymology-purity agenda, forbidding any use of foreign expressions where a translation is available. Before anyone says that would violate freedom of speech, I should inform that this agenda is mainly lead by a Communist Party of Brazil representative. 'Nuff said.
I remember once a crappy CHI teacher I had, who said foreign/loan-words should be written in italics or quoted (this is right) and gave "deletar" as an example. "Deletar" is how "to delete" was adapted into Brazilian Portuguese computer-related lexicon, and its use is widely accepted and understood. I argued with him that this word was already officially accepted, and was even listed in Brazilian Literary Academy latests dictionary updates, to which he replied the Academy is not defending the purity of Portuguese well enough. He then mentioned that there at least seven good translations for "to delete" in Portuguese but, as it turns out, all translations he suggested fail to capture the computer-semantic of deletion. I proceeded to show how successfully loaned words from other languages like French and no one seems to bother: "capô" (vehicle hood/bonnet) is derived from "capeaux", just like most car parts in Brazilian Portuguese (maybe because the first cars were brought here by French people). He just shut up.
Completely OT: This same teacher also was against CSS because it made impossible to the user to enlarge fonts, against PDF for text because it is an image format. He also said that human adaptability to absence of light increases with time (this is right) and that if you remained 60 minutes in a dark room, you'd be adapted enough to be able to read a text on a paper. WTF??
In my opinion, people should be incentive and taught to write and spell properly, but if rule-of-law is necessary to achieve it, something is really wrong deep down.
Oh, we were talking about Pluto here? Almost forgot. I'm still amazed there is still no NGO named "Friends of Pluto" [brasiliaemdia.com.br] (portuguese text warning. babelfish is your friend) using vast incentives from government and big companies (which in turn get nice tax-reductions) to defend this unjust arbitrarity.
Re:One simple reason for this (Score:5, Interesting)
And in fact, when Tombaugh announced his discovery he didn't claim that it was a planet, only a Trans Neptunian Object.
Re:Thank you New Mexico (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well, if the Tomato isn't a fruit then ??? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not a justification, it's a description of how the words fruit and vegetable are used in everyday speech. The judge decided, correctly, that the lawmakers were using the words fruit and vegetable as they are commonly used rather than as they are used by botanists.
Re:So we have 15+ planets now? (Score:3, Interesting)
What about it? Half a dozen isn't any surprise to me. This sub-thread was started by a claim of 1000+, which is what got me interested, because it seems... optimistic. No one has backed the claim up yet, but the thread's life isn't over yet. Regardless, I'm all for discovering new planets. Even thousands of them, which would be absolutely fascinating. Let's do it!
Re:Fine (Score:3, Interesting)
Your "views" just make no sense from a scientific stand-point. As far as the "atom" stuff goes, you do know what you are really made from, correct? You do know what the Sun and Moon and Earth are mad from, correct?
All of your other posts were trying to separate celestial bodies by such stupid criterion, that I thought we might as well just lump everything together on the atomic scale. After all, matter is made up of atoms. So there is a much closer link to categorize objects based on atoms vs. the 3rd grade "science view" that you came up with. Though I am very glad that we do not categorize things based only on their atomic make-up.
Please, stop trying to defend your original post. At least own up to the fact that you know crap about physics or astronomy at a graduate or post-graduate level.
Heck, maybe the scientific community should just let any amateur or enthusiast just start calling the shots. Hell, education is over-rated, and let us all just start to build our world view on the "views" of people like you.
No thanks!
Re:Fine (Score:3, Interesting)
You originally used the term "artificial debris"; qualifying it like that seems fine to me. So I'm not clear why any redefinition is needed here.