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One Find, Two Astronomers

Posted by samzenpus on from the I-saw-it-first dept.

Malacon writes "The New York Times is running a story about Debate Between Astronomers who both claim to have discovered the same object beyond Pluto, and almost the same size. Apparantly the US Astronomers had been tracking it for quite some time, but chose to not report it yet. They also claim the Spanish Astronomers stole data to make the find."

9 of 301 comments (clear)

  1. Typical Spanish by seriesrover · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    First its the fish, now its planets. Watch out Gibraltar!

  2. Re:Finders Keepers by chewedtoothpick · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Then again, when you do something as irresponsible as that, you can possibly cause whole cultures to believe in your theory, no matter how vehemently you renounce it when you realize it is wrong. Look at Darwinism - less than a year after publishing his theory he fought up and down to try and stop it after he realized the innumerable flaws. Somehow though, it is the only theorem for our origins that is taught to an already overly ignorant public.

    --
    Erutangis ym si siht.
  3. Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic
    Please stop referring to people from the US as USians. Thanks.

    Why?

    Is it our fault that the forefathers of the USA chose a quite absurd name for the country they were founding? Come on, it's like naming India "The Republic of Asia", or Germany "The Federal Republic of Europe". Quite frankly, that showed them as way, way shortsighted.

    So for you the center of America is in the center of the middle country of North America instead of the center of Central America... ouch, your logic makes my head hurt.

    Anyway, if you take a look at CIA World Factbook you will notice that the official short name for the United States of America is United States, not America. As such, it is particularly absurd to use the name American for it's nationals (although, granted, that's currently the official name in English). It would be much, much better of these people realized how absurd that is, and chose a different name. Given the choices, USian rocks.

    You can see two interesting articles on this in Wikipedia: the Use of the word American and Alternative words for American.
    1. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic
      Come on, it's like naming India "The Republic of Asia", or Germany "The Federal Republic of Europe".

      Your argument would make sense, except there is no continent named "America". There's just North America and South America.

      Since a term describing an occupant of a set of two continents is not very often useful, and since the United States had dibs in common usage on the term "American" w.r.t. nationality for centuries anyway, it's best just to stick with the status quo rather than invent strange combinations of acronyms and word suffixes.

    2. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Your argument would make sense, except there is no continent named "America". There's just North America and South America.

      Your counter-argument would make sense, except there are no continents named "Europe" or "Asia. There's just Eurasia

    3. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      This is a political discussion, not a geological one.

  4. FUCKING no-warning-reg-req-link BOOOOO by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    it's like being spit at

  5. Re:This could get ugly... by QuantumG · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    What about before? Baby, meet bathwater.

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    How we know is more important than what we know.
  6. Re:This could get ugly... by QuantumG · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    This site already tracks when people press the reply button. That's the trigger that means you're not allowed to change the comment. Preview is an inferior solution.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.