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THANK YOU VERY MUCH INTERNATIONAL ASTRONOMICAL UNION
The premise for this column hasn’t even survived for one week:
The International Astronomical Union, dramatically reversing course just a week after floating the idea of reaffirming Pluto’s planethood and adding three new planets to Earth’s neighborhood, downgraded the ninth rock from the sun in historic new galactic guidelines.
Unions. You just can’t trust ’em.
From the link:
“But the scientists at the conference showed a soft side, waving plush toys of the Walt Disney character Pluto the dog - and insisting that Pluto’s spirit will live on in the exciting discoveries yet to come.”
Well, if Pluto is a dog, what is a Goofy?
Why does Goofy wear clothes, whilst Pluto doesn’t?
Enquiring minds want to know…..
“Ninth rock from the Sun” GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
FFS, the big 4 are gas balls and there is an asteroid belt between mars and jupiter. Then there are those rocks orbiting the planets, we call them moons.
How can we hold a reasoned debate when twits are saying this kind of crap?
Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2006 08 25 at 02:48 AM • permalinkBy my count, counting only Ceres from the inner belt, Pluto is the 31st rock from the sun.
#9 is the second moon of Jupiter, Europa.
Cmon folks, it aint rocket science…
Posted by The_Wizard_of_WOZ on 2006 08 25 at 02:55 AM • permalinkAstronomers: always barking up the wrong tree (though we agree with them!)
Posted by WeekByWeek on 2006 08 25 at 03:20 AM • permalink#7 The Wizard Of Woz,
“All these planets are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there.”Posted by Daniel San on 2006 08 25 at 03:31 AM • permalinkI hope Pluto will be offered a place in a government training scheme to prepare it for alternative employment.
Posted by Bearded Mullah on 2006 08 25 at 03:57 AM • permalinkMore Disney Nostalgia:
It’s a shame that the inventor Gyro Gearloose and his little robotic pal with the lightglobe head did not survive into the electronic media age. There remains much for them to do.
As for the Pluto affair, I’m glad the stargazers finally came to their scentses.The quote in the article is priceless
“this will leave teachers scrambling to change lessons just as the new school year starts”.
lets see
” Pluto is a planet”
“Pluto is a DWARF planet”
Need a day off now.
One thing i don’t get and will wait to be enlightened. One of the reasons for the downgrade was that a planet should “clear its neighbourhood”. Leaving aside jokes about my neighbours, the reason advanced for pluto not doing this is that it crosses its orbit with Neptune. Doesn’t this mean that Neptune also doesn’t clear its neighbourhood? Or have the journo’s just stuffed up and reported incorrectly?
In all the movies when aliens are communicating with Earthlings, they present a schematic showing nine planets rotating around a sun. This shows a common point of understanding. The Earthlings will, in turn, point to the 3rd planet, signifying our home planet. And all heads will nod in agreement.
Now if that’s going out the window, what will the aliens be showing? A schematic with 9 planets still? And will a gray hair member of the astronomical society shake his head in the negative, draw an X through the ninth planet, and write “drawf” beside it? And then maybe add more circles at various places on the scematic? And would this not, in turn, challenge the aliens to draw even more circles showing their even great understanding of the solar system, adding even worm holes and super secret space stations?
Intergalatic wars have started over less.
Posted by wronwright on 2006 08 25 at 05:49 AM • permalinkHold the press…a counterattack is underway…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5283956.stmI think Goofy is the result of some Dr Moreau/Mengele gene splicing experiment, funded by the well-known nazi Walt Disney.
When they found their animorph was dumber than Al Gore, Walt decided to use him in movies, so the project wasn’t a total loss- after all, even Gary Busey can remember some lines and wobble around the set without swallowing his tongue and convulsing (most of the time).
It’s a shame that the inventor Gyro Gearloose and his little robotic pal with the lightglobe head did not survive into the electronic media age.
What?!?! Both appeared on the 80s cartoon show, Ducktales!
Have you no sense of kulcha, sir?
Posted by Quentin George on 2006 08 25 at 07:04 AM • permalink#20 Wronwright - It’s not even just the movies. Doesn’t the Voyager spacecraft have a plaque on it showing a man and a woman, and the sun with nine planets lined up next to it, and an arrow at the third planet? Guess we’re gonna have to go get that thing back and update it. Don’t want any aliens thinking we’re stupid ...
I just googled it. There’s two Voyagers and the furthest one is 10 billion kms (that’s 6.25 billion miles my Seppo friends and you Poms) beyondPlutothat Pluton thing.
D’ohIt’s not going to matter shit when the Vogons turn up anyway; perhaps the arty left may actually do something of benefit to mankind for once when they do appear to start on the proposed bypass- surely Vogon poetry can’t be so bad that some dick on the Australia Council wouldn’t sling a grant to further develop the muse, then they’d give up on building matter transfer pathways and move onto the beachfront at Byron- shit they’d blend right in with the resyt of the pythmically challenged mutants in that neck of the woods.
Don’t Panic!
And now, don’t it all make a sort of sense?
I mean, think it through here. There’s a fair chance there’s intelligent life out there somewhere, right? And, some of them intelligent life dudes might be hostile, right? And them what aint hostile might have some juice on the galactic zoning commission, right?
So, seeing as how we’d probably be out gunned or out maneuvered in civil court, why send out good directions to where we are at?
From the EvilHRLady
Mars: We’ve prepared a nice package for you, in reference to the long time you’ve spent as a planet.
Pluto: I’m being fired? As a planet? What did I do wrong?
Sun: It’s not about what you did, although your orbits have overlapped Neptune’s, and well the Astronomers—
Pluto: The Astronomers feel? Have you ever made an independent decision in your life?
Mars: Why don’t we go have a chat with Mr. Moon. He’s in outplacement.
Posted by tabitharuth on 2006 08 25 at 11:51 AM • permalink#27 Zuzzy: “Guess we’re gonna have to go get that thing back and update it.”
Or send someone back in the Tardis to fix it before launch. Oh wronwright…?
Posted by Old Grouch on 2006 08 25 at 12:23 PM • permalinkJust where are the culture police when you need them?
You can’t say “DWARF”! anymore! That’s a verboten term these days. Have they no sensitivity? Just where is the bleeping EU Commission on Stupid Actions and Counterrevolutinary Wording anyway?
It’s a moot question anyway. Our local radio station just blew the thing up.
They held a contest called “Should Pluto Live?” It lost, so boom.They had
Swell. And just what am I supposed to do with My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas now? Huh?!
Oh, I don’t know, Yojimbo. Anyone who’s been following the Matt and Amy Roloff saga on A&E understands that “dwarf” is perfectly acceptable to dwarfs.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 08 25 at 02:12 PM • permalinkAcceptable to dwarfs but not to the culture class.
Are they the family from Portland? They are adorable. I see them on The Learning Channel here. I click through to some of these shows on cable and I have no idea. We have reality show rejects screaming at each other all of the time for whatever reason I don’t know. We have some bozo in a Viking helmet with a clock around his neck! What is that all about? I usually click through these things for about a minute with little or no sound. Helps.
They have decided they can’t call small-person non-planets like Pluto “plutons” now. A pluton is actually “an intrusive igneous rock body which crystallized from a magma below the surface of the Earth”.
Imagine the red faces in the International Astronomical Union cafeteria now.
Yes, they’re the Portland family. How about that farm! A&E puts on some pretty good slice-of-life reality programming. Dog and his bounty hunting family is another fascinating group. I’ve never seen Viking helmet clock guy. Like to, though.
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 08 25 at 05:49 PM • permalinkI am assuming the “crosses Neptune” reason is misreporting of some sort.
The real problem for Pluto is the thirteen other plutinos, which have the same 2-orbits-to-3-of-Neptune orbital period as Pluto, which are stable on gigayear timeframes, and are not under Pluto’s gravitational influence.
The only body with a stable orbit around the Sun the same length as Earth’s is the Moon, which also orbits the Earth. Similarly, the only bodies with stable orbits orbiting the Sun in the same length of time as Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune are in orbit around those bodies or the gravitationally associated L4 and L5 points. All the minor bodies in those orbits are thus under the gravitational dominance of the planet in those orbits.
On the other hand, there are a whole bunch of bodies that share Ceres’s orbital period without being dominated by Ceres’s gravity, which is why Ceres was demoted from planetary status in the 19th Century after they were discovered. Similarly, since 1992, we’ve discovered there are at least thirteen objects with the same orbital period as Pluto which have positions that are not dominated by Pluto’s gravity.
So, there is a consistent and logical reason to class bodies such as Ceres and Pluto differently than the eight planets that have forced everything sharing their orbits to bend to their gravity. Since the matter is one of gravity, and gravity is a matter of mass, “dwarf planet” seems a reasonable name for this class of planet-like bodies.
So, we have eight standard planets, a starting roster of three dwarf planets (Ceres, Pluto, and 2003 UB313), and a number of other candidates for dwarf planet status (Charon, Orcus, Sedna, Quaoar, Varuna, Ixion, Vesta, Pallas, Hygiea, and many, many more).
Posted by Warmongering Lunatic on 2006 08 25 at 06:48 PM • permalinkKyda
The clock guy is on VH1. I don’t know the name of the show or the showtimes. Whenever I click through again I will take note.
I do like the house! I like the remodel they did to their kitchen with the counter about two feet high. Makes sense. The wife is really adorable. It would appear that they are doing a good job of raising the kids too.
#41 Pluto’s orbit does cross Neptune’s orbit. In other words for some of it’s orbit around the sun Pluto is closer to the sun than Neptune is. This is made possible by Pluto’s much more oval orbit path, ie: it’s path around the sun is more rugby ball shaped than soccer ball shaped. We always learn that Pluto is further away than Neptune because for our entire lifetimes and a good time before it has been further away. It’s yearly orbit takes so long that many lifetimes go by before it even finishes the part of it’s orbit beyond Neptune.
I don’t believe it: 43 comments on an outer-planet-related thread, and not a single ‘Uranus’ joke! Standards have slipped. (Let me guess, they changed the name of that planet back in 2300 to get rid of that stupid joke forever? Really, what’s it called now?)
First, the astronomers came for Pluto, but because I was not a Plutonian…
Unions. You just can’t trust ’em.
Oh I don’t know, after 76 years as a unified planet, I reckon Pluto’s going out with close to full pay and benefits.
Posted by Vanguard of the Commentariat on 2006 08 25 at 09:22 PM • permalink#43—Yes, Pluto does cross Neptune’s orbit.
The crossing doesn’t logically constitute a failure to clear an orbit, though. After all, it’s just as fair to say Neptune crosses Pluto’s orbit, or the Earth crosses the orbit of the Apollo asteroids, or the like.
So I am assuming that the reason Pluto doesn’t qualify as a planet is being misreported by the popular press. That instead of Neptune, the reason is something else.
That something else, to me, is logically the same reason Ceres doesn’t qualify—because there are other objects (thirteen known ones in Pluto’s case) in the same orbit, and Pluto’s gravity has failed to either capture or eject them.
Posted by Warmongering Lunatic on 2006 08 25 at 10:25 PM • permalinkisn’t it also something to do with the orbits of the other planets being roughly in the same plane & pluto’s not?
anyhoo, much more interesting news from czecho is that czechwrecks starts on 1 september
The downgrading of Pluto is just the first step in providing the Palestinians with an appropriate homeland at last…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 08 26 at 03:54 PM • permalink
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Pluto was always a ‘Mickey Mouse’ planet anyway….