Dear Pluto fetishists,

[gordonzola]

WTF? No one knocked it out of the sky. It's still there. It can still be your favorite interstellar object even if it's not a planet.

As I said in a comment elsewhere, it's like being upset that evolution is (mostly) being taught in school or that Drake's Plate is now taught to be a fraud (which was a big issue when I was in grade school). I am fully willing to let scientists in that field decide on the definition of planets and do not feel like it should be up to popular vote.

It's not like science doesn't have an agenda at times. But it's hard to find one here beyond having a reasonable definition to work with.

Comments

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

haha. I also just realized that most of the people who would get mad at this post are at Burning Man.

[smallstages.livejournal.com]

I was bummed when I clicked the "unpopular posts" tag and this was the only one. Make more unpopular posts, G! They're my favorite, especially since I can't fully grasp the magnitude of the cheese-centric posts, though they are always very pretty and well-linked and seem very thorough.

Love this post.

[twostepsfwd.livejournal.com]

And, if all else fails, Pluto is STILL A DOG!

Re: Love this post.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

Those eggheads can't take that away from us!

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

that was upsetting it's true. But mostly because of the fact that such an unlikely looking animal didn't exist! Brontosaurusses were cool looking!

[chreebomb.livejournal.com]

*gasp of horror*

it all makes sense now. i kept asking myself, "where's the brontosaurus of my childhood!" when reading my son's dinosaur books.

[masscooper.livejournal.com]

Or when the Piltdown Man turned out to be a hoax! Boy, was my face red.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

OMG, I couldn't show my face in town for a month!

!!!

[sparkle-shortz.livejournal.com]

[nihilistech.livejournal.com]

Wait. People are actually really upset about this?

It's not like we've declared war on Pluto because it was a planet even though U.N. inspectors said it wasn't and then decided it really wasn't but kept sending troops there anyway.
It's just an amusing astronomical adjustment.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

I think the problem was that Pluto failed to report planet-enrichment activities to the UN Astronomical Agency inspectors, and it got punished in return.

What about my

[barthanderson.livejournal.com]

These friggin bastards are wreaking havoc with my natal chart.

[tinymammoth.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, my friend with the astronomy degree says they should have kept it a planet, and my friend with the zoology degree says they should have stuck with "brontosaurus". Both cite the feelings of the public in their arguments.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

wow. I didn't picture you as an anti-science enabler. ;)

Re: What about my

[lemon-says.livejournal.com]

It's obviously an anti-Scorpio bias. Who will be our ruler?? We're positively adrift, I tell you.

I think they should have left it an honorary planet or something. You can't just snatch planethood like that!

[aparecida.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I wish people would STFU about this already.

Oops, I said that out loud (so to speak).

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

it's just way, way too much anthropomorphization for my tastes. someone on my flist posted about wanting to go out in space and give pluto a hug. OK, then, see you never, dude. someone else posted this cartoon about pluto being sooo sad that he was being "dumped." little sniffling planet comic, with a cell phone on its ear.

yeesh

[chreebomb.livejournal.com]

hahahaa

someone posted a poem in queerpoets... about pluto!

[spoonfeeding.livejournal.com]

ACTIVIST ASTRONOMERS!

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

The Christian founders of this nation guaranteed us 9 planets.

[albatrossity.livejournal.com]

does the warrior princess get to be a planet yet?

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

Actually, I got more irked about this after hearing about the way the process happened: by popular vote. Total votes: 424 out of 2700 attendees at the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague.

So, if I understand this correctly, Pluto got downgraded by the same mechanism that a rule change is voted on at a science-fiction convention. That's not so much about science as it is about the feelings of people who come to the business meeting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_redefinition_of_planet makes for entertaining reading on the topic. It doesn't include the post-vote comment by astronomer David Brown (in a USA Today article for which I can't find the link at the moment), who said that the new definition "brings magic back into the solar system."

[strix-an-stones.livejournal.com]

Interesting for sure. I felt a moment of kinship with Pluto, being a small person considering a dwarf plantet. Then it jsut seemed so damned absurd. Next we're going to have medical d00bs wanting to change the classification for dwarfism and culling the smallest of our number as being a Small Humanoid Body and not imply human.

People are weird.

[touchyphiliac.livejournal.com]

According to their definition, Earth is not a planet either. It has not cleared its orbit!!

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

excellent point Professor Touchy!

[jwz.livejournal.com]

I never thought it was a planet anyway.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

oh sure, you say that now that it's safe...

[kest]

strangely enough, this is the first I'd ever heard of Drake's Plate. I'm amused.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

ha, well it was basically in my backyard. Teachers made a big deal about it because it was local and fresh scandal.

[ihavemeaning.livejournal.com]

I thought this before reading your post as well!

Our thoughts are like so sexily correlated on this issue, I get a shiver down my spine. And I think I am in love in that e-detached, I-promise-not-to-stalk-you sort of way.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

awesome. Go ahead and stalk, you live on the other coast, right?

[crabbypattie.livejournal.com]

Don't let the flat-earthers bother you. Now let's hope scientists can resolve some of the big issues in our life-time;dark matter, string theory, Big Foot, etc.