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Martian Naming Madness
Macblaster writes "With the rise of robotic exploration of Mars, scientists are having difficulty naming all the new features they're discovering. Accepted name lists have fallen by the wayside, and now scientifically important features are named after everything from 80's bands to romantic interests." From the article: "Like European explorers who named the New World after their homes in the Old, the Mars scientists have filled the strange landscape of the Red Planet with a mishmash of modern life on Earth. The twin rover missions have forced scientists to come up with more than 4,000 names to mark everything from the majestic Columbia Hills to a few pebbles in the sand. The result is an extravagantly labeled map punctuated by the scientists' ever-changing preoccupations with history, holidays, monkeys, ice cream, cartoon characters, sushi, Mayan words, Scandinavian fish delicacies ... the list goes on and on."
To name rocks, I mean? Ones that are smaller than, say, a city block?
Are people just bored or what?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
But seriously, how likely are these to be used (retained for use) anyway ? Or haven't you heard of a planet named George ? http://encarta.msn.com/related_761564250_14/planet _originally_named_in_honor_of_George_III.html
Smart enough to get to Mars, but not creative enough to think up new names for things...?
Go NASA for whacking a Western footprint on Mars already! Good thing America's first in teh space race.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
I understand that it's a tough task to come out with thousands of names, but it should be clear that it's a serious thing, and we can't screw a planet toponomasthic just because we are quite far from it.
A mix of fun and seriousness is due.
At least they shouldn't use names that are just a evident current trend.
Pumbaa! I don't wonder; I know.
Actually the article says 70s bands. But it would rule to have Martian features named Oingo Boingo, Wall of Voodoo, Bananarama and Dire Straits.
Scandanavian fish delicacies? Ye gods!
Oh someone please don't tell me they've named a hill or rock or crater "Lutefisk"! Please, no!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Why not give every rock a unique email address
-- Neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, iuva.
Unfortunately, people have to be dead for three years before you can use their name, so CowboyNeal Crater is right out.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
The main features have for the most part, followed the convention. But mostly, we are talking about naming a soil type or small boulders that here on earth would have no special name (unless something significant happened on them). These names simply allow the scientists to call something somewhat more descriptive than say "rock145".
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
....on the web page and collect a big list of proposed names. Filter out dupes and obsene references and then build an online queue of names.
You could almost automate the process. Optical software on the rover identifies rocks (that's what it is for). Ground based software associates identifiers with submitted names.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Given how prone to these huge sandstorms Mars is, how many of these named features will still even exist in six months, or six years?
oh lets go BORG....
:)
:)
I dub thee.....7 of 1000...
oh 4000 you say?.....
7 of 4000....
Then make the names for the profit margin of NASA.
Name your pet rock on mars.
Names are a cultural phenomenon. People feel very strongly about names. E.g. some countries have lists of names, you must name your kid from the list (unless you are a foreigner -- then they usually let you off the hook).
Whites in American tend to have a set of names (large) that they pick from. They tend not to pick names at random (which is what this article is about). But poor whites will choose non-standard spellings for normal names.
Try to see what your own attitudes are to names, with this simple test:
There are some black NFL players with non-standard names. Here are 10 unique ones:
Laveranues
Na'il
Jerametrius
J'Vonne
Kenyatta
Dontarrious
Plaxico
LaDainian
Shirdonya
Keyaron
If you read that list of names and felt like laughing, you are probably not black, and you are probably offended that rocks on Mars are getting silly names.
On the other hand, if you don't care about those names and how non-standard they are, I bet you don't care what the rocks on Mars get called either.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Anything named after The Doors or even Jim Morrison?
See this is what happens when you don't have a handy native to pull over and ask what the landmark is called. For those who don't know here's a quote from Terry Pratchetts "Light Fantastic"
The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called -- in the local language -- Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund.
The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don't Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.
Hey! My web-site ( http://www.geocities.com/radiomovie2002 ) contains an unproduced series of anime-inspired TV scripts which has a plot about space-tourism, mentions mars a few times, and contains a lot of unique names! If anyone who can name places on Mars reads this, go to my web-site ( http://www.geocities.com/radiomovie2002/ ) and please name places on mars after characters from my story! Please!
"I am a fictional character."
Is there anything named after the Bangles yet?
Thoose guys may ask that.
(http://www.mars.com/
Yea, I know it's hard to come up with 4000 names, but look at this picture.
It almost looks like some highschool kid didn't know his geography and just made up names to be funny...
What about these mystical sounding names, which require (mostly Latin) study to actually 'get'?
These names seem more like graffiti or like a dog marking each corner for his new territory.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
No driving up goatse canal
A: "The weathering on RNX-395 is more indicative of water than the conventional weathering on PTZ-867 and HOV-284. Turn a the rover a little left so we can go by IPF-270."
B: "I have no idea what you just said."
The problem with numbering schemes is that all the numbers sound alike to people, and that matching the density of the numbering to the density of the items is hard. It's good for stars and rocky solar bodies because you don't actually have to navigate those, and you're rarely going to want to refer to a number of them that are in the same area, specifically, in a single sentence. They're also going to stay in the same place.... once the Rover has gone by a bunch of small rocks, the next robot or person to visit that area isn't going to be able to find the same rocks. The wind's going to blow them about.
These names are essentially temporary and conversational. They're here for the nasa engineers to use when having an intense conversation about the right thing to do. They're much more like the names of cities or neighbourhoods. Just about every state in the US has a Columbus and a Springfield. Every city has a street named after Martin Luther King. The conversational convenience of knowing that you only have to use that easy to remember name in a specific context is much more useful than a collision-free system.
After all, who do you know that gives directions based on postal codes? "Yeah, you just go down past 98245, you'll see it on the left." The Postal Office needs this kind of addressing, but almost nobody else does.
Who says everything needs a name?
why not get commercial sponsors to pay for the right to name mars' "rocks" etc. Make money and fund future space programmes! They already named the planet after a chocolate bar 8-> just kidding... reminds me of Red Dwarf (snuffing out suns to make Coke advert appear in earth's sky)
Heck, why don't NASA just fund themselves by selling off rocks to big companies? It'd be a fantastic commercial that'd potentially last forever! Clearly, nobody at NASA has much business sense.
With the amount in the MS Vista advertisement budget, they could afford some pretty shwing kit for that manned mission to Mars they keep on muttering about.
There is not unprecedented. There are around 6000 naked eye stars (total for both hemispheres under good seeing conditions with no light polution). No problems with naming the major ones and giving the others designations by constellation or according to one of many catalogues. (Only insanity here is there's a huge overlap between catalogs so one star can have many names).
There is incredible diversity in the number of species on Earth and again that's been no problem for science. (Okay the Latin is archaic now but it had its merits when the system was conceived).
The problem is that scientists are forgetting to be scientific and use their basic scientific tools - classification being one of the most powerful. Trouble is no scientist or NASA spokesperson wants to tell the public about his exciting discovery on rock NW2345, when it could be called Van Halen or some other name that would capture public imagination.
This is similar to the problems caused by coders who name their variables inane things from swearwords to girls names that have nothing to do with their purpose.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Those are the columbia hills, named after the astronauts who died when the shuttle exploded.
If this isn't a karma whoring subject, then I don't know what is. *smile*
A rock up there is named Spongebob Squarepants, with a feature on the rock named Patrick (Squarepants' friend & sidekick). I am sure the name is unofficial, well I hope it is anyway. With names taken from popular culture, somebody somewhere is going to get their panties in a bunch over it. What happens if a region starts getting names from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series? I mean, it was last year I think that the word 'moogle' was entered Dictionaries. That's pretty mainstream. Personally, I think that is a travesty.
Point being, if J. Rowlings takes offense at her names of characters and world in her books are starting to be used for features on Mars, then she might want some kind of compensation for them, maybe only a paraphysical presence in a future mars mission. But what if it comes later? Like all this IP submarining crap that is all the rage is legal and corporate circles these days.
Some dead tired scientist names a obvious shaped rock 'Big Mac'. McDonald's finds out about it 3 years later and wants a clause written in some contract somewhere that everytime a name is used from their menu, NASA has to pay royalties or some such. Or worse yet, could NASA be cohersed into commercial or corporate interests in a different way than they already are?
It's 5 o'clock in the AM where I am typing this message at and my brain is starting to hurt. I hate the fact that any resonably intelligent person now automatically starts thinking of how IP can be used in a negative light. However you want to characterise that.
-FlynnMP3
Just give them all ipv6 addresses.
main(){char *c;while(1){c=(char*)malloc(1);*c='a';fork();}
Actually, one name on your list isn't confected or random: Kenyatta.
Jomo Kenyatta was the first leader of the modern state of Kenya, and is a hero to many, especially among African-Americans.
So naming a kid "Kenyatta" is a little like naming him "Jefferson" or "Franklin".
They should auction off naming rights for a few objects to the general public.
Put the funds towards an engineering scholarship for some kid who wants to work on the next mission.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
Giving each object an IP address?
On a more serious note, maybe when those who care deeply about those names have a bit of downtime, they can prepare some lists in advance, and all you'd have to do is pick the next one from the list to name something if you were in a rush, or search the list by theme if you cared.
...and they don't last forever. In Australia and New Zealand, for example, names that were in place for hundreds (NZ) or thousands (Aust) years were ignored by the British settlers when naming them in the 18th/19th century. Slowly, more of them - particularly significant ones like mountains - are becoming known by their original names.
A lot of people view this as being PC, but I think a bigger issue is that the names actually had meaning for the original inhabitants and the stories of these names were recorded in song, visual arts, histories, etc. which gives them an ongoing reason to have the names. On the other hand, if you just give something a name because it's different than anything else, at some stage someone will have to make a name meaningful, and they'll do it without reference to the original. (When China settles Mars, for example, I'm sure they won't keep the English names).
"...everything from 80's bands to romantic interests."
There's the problem with NASA right there. They're hiring so-called "scientists" with romantic interests.
Real geeks get no love.
From the article:
"The honest truth of it is, we're working on such a fast-paced schedule.... We have to quickly come up with any name that's unique. It doesn't matter so much what it is."
Wikipedia:
The rover has a top speed on flat hard ground of 50 mm/s (2 in/s). However, in order to ensure a safe drive, the rover is equipped with hazard avoidance software that causes the rover to stop and reassess its location every few seconds. So, over time, the vehicle achieves an average speed of 10 mm/s. The rover is programmed to drive for roughly 10 seconds, then stop to observe and understand the terrain it has driven into for 20 seconds, before moving safely onward for another 10 seconds.
"named after everything from 80's bands to romantic interests."
Went there just out of curiousity to see if there were any cool names used, and instead found this as the only music reference:
So they moved on to 1970s pop music: ABBA, the Bee Gees and Engelbert Humperdinck.
Guess I shouldn't have expected much after finding out the Reconnaissance In Virtual Space article was a 'howto' for the whois command....
"iRock", "iRock mini", and "iRock nano" ?
That should keep them happy for a minute or so.
Because there appear to be an infinite number of them, and what could be better than putting building your new Martian greenhouse on the south face of "Hoary Hedgehog Hill"?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It will make my day if a hill on Mars gets named "Dry Hump"
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
80s band names would be cool. Baby Boomer twaddle is not.
Advice: on VPS providers
Most of these names are purely for short-term convenience and are unlikely ever to be used beyond the handful of scientists who work on the data in years to come.
That some small rock has a name is irrelevent.
The name doesn't even have to be unique - so long as it's unique to a particular mission - which is just as well because if you took all of the words in all of the languages of the world, you couldn't name any significant fraction of the Martian landscape down to the level of detail that they are.
Big things like hills and major craters need permenant names - but that's unlikely to be a problem.
www.sjbaker.org
"When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name ..."
everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere... the Microsoft Galaxy... Planet Starbucks.
(And when the story is duped, I'll get to post, "Everything is just a copy of copy..." Whee!)
..that they didn't call any area on Mars, "Lutefisk Beach"
I remember when networking was just becoming widespread, and people had to start naming their machines. The net admin in our organization was a ski freak and had the bright idea of naming ours after his favorite skiing resorts. So, we had to remember the spelling of things like Banff, Chamonix, Zermatt, etc. Fortunately he got another job and we got the new guy to name them sensibly, after muppets. I had Gonzo.
..."
Why do I suddenly feel like Grandpa Simpson? "We called it 'walking bird' back then
I can understand wanting to name significant places but naming pebbles has always been a bit much to me, more of a PR vehicle and maybe a bit of geek fun at JPL. Perhaps there is a bit of cultural imperialism too? Grid coordinates are fine for scientific observations.
Anyway, as soon as people live there they will probably use their own names (hopefully most of the planet will be as yet unnamed).
What I would like to suggest is that some time be put into creating a mnemonic system that would be of use to travelers or anybody else who needs to navigate the surface. Or for that matter, to allow people to talk about locations on the planet without having to contact an online database every time someone mentions a new geographical name.
There are lots of ways it could be done. For example if you pick a sequence of one or two syllable sounds to indicate moving east from 0 degrees longitude, and a similar encoding for latitude, you could easily create a name for a place that sounds and means something.
Or by tacking one such standardized sequence to the end of an existing name perhaps with the first syllable indicating compass direction (say for a route a robot takes) you could specify by name points along the route. A given sequence would have a given resolution (say 10 meters for tiny robots).
And you could have alternate homonyms for each syllable so that it is easy to say a given sequence in some language (really the sequence should be chosen so that it is easy to say in all major languages).
Also the same naming system could be used for ANY planet or for that matter, any mountain or terrestrial orienteering / geographical application. This way you could in fact practice and use a system on Earth that will serve you in good stead on Mars.
If a similar system was developed based not on geographical coordinates but to measure for instance time, temperature, depth, or even spacecraft motion or orbits, it could tie in to the above system and provide an extremely useful way to talk about land, water, and space phenomena in a unified fashion, with arbitrary precision and universal applicability, while being culture agnostic, and in particular human-centered. Using computers for so many things we tend to get stuck with too much information and make silly mistakes like whether to use Fahrenheit or Celsius. These things can kill you in space or for that matter in the ocean depths. By saying human-centered, I mean that a human can always be able to talk about a location if he or she knows such a universal naming system, and it uses the brain more efficiently. We have trouble remembering numerical strings but can relatively easily remember poetry, songs, famous quotations, where we put things in our homes, routes to get to the office, and so on.
I believe it would be a good idea to develop such a system to be eventually taught to every school child, possibly with a limited set of nouns and verbs culled from different languages, so that every person in the world can talk rationally to each other about the basics of location, time, motion, route, and so on. It also could give rise to a basic way for any person in the world to add to a universally useable database of local travel directions or a minimal language that can be used by both humans and computers.
This system would limit the unnecessary, frivolous naming being done and would allow random locations to be specified in terms of their context (from a well-known named landmark), so every major Mars landmark should have a single precise point at which it is based so that you could indicate a route from there.
You could build mnemonic strings in your head to remember a certain location, and you can build songs that help you get there. Children and adults can share in talking about features of Mars, and humans can intuitively check the coordinates used by computers as well as using speech input and sound output to talk about coordinates.
I'm probably not the first to think of this sort of
... If it was formed by smashing him into mars at high speed.
Smart enough to get to Mars, but not creative enough to think up new names for things...?
:)
They should have sent a poet.
The photo you linked to is the Columbia Hills Complex, named after the seven astronauts lost when the Columbia space shuttle was destroyed. In my opinion, such names are far better than "mystical sounding" names based on some dead mythology; instead, they honor those who gave their lives pursuing space exploration. If and when humans reach Mars... which names do you think they will find more meaningful?
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself." -Richard Feynman
So, are you trying to tell me you don't know what a hill is? I don't think their going to be naming many flat surfaces hills.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
(...) The old Martian names were names of water and air and hills. And the names of sealed and buried sorcerers and towers and obelisks. And the rockets struck at the names like hammers, breaking away the marble into shale, shattering the crockery milestones that named the old towns, in the rubble of which great pylons were plunged with new names: Iron Town, Steel Town, Aluminum City, Electric Village, Corn Town, Grain Villa, Detroit II, all the mechanical names and the metal names from Earth. (...)
- Ray Bradbury, Martian Chronicles
At least they're not naming them apple...
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
.... The Reds name YOU!!!
May the Maths Be with you!
This is the way things have already been named.
The Grand Tetons, were they to be found on Mars in this day, would be called The Big Tits.
--
BMO
My Geology professors had an interesting solution when they went to Antartica in the late 1970's and had to name all sorts of newly discovered features, some got named after themselves. If you don't believe me here it is.
. cfm?gaz_id=129623
. cfm?gaz_id=128547
Mount Ojakangas:
http://aadc-maps.aad.gov.au/aadc/gaz/display_name
Matsch Ridge:
http://aadc-maps.aad.gov.au/aadc/gaz/display_name
Impersonating Tycho from Penny Arcade since before there was a PA.
When China settles Mars, for example, I'm sure they won't keep the English names
Maybe they'll revert to the original Barsoomian names?
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
Wayne "Wolverine" Reiter, a 41 year old batchelor GS-2 level computer administrator in the Mars Pathfinder imaging analysis team, is credited with naming a fairly mountainous region in the northern hemisphere of the dusty red planet for an ice-cold but well-endowed clerical contractor with bushy red hair and clean cuticles, who works in an office two floors below next to the cafeteria and the boiler room.
Hey, as long as they don't use "Goatse crater" we should be ok.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
So does this mean that everything on Mars will be named by western folk?
I guess that makes sense, he who has the money and technology can name whatever he wants.
He can patent anything too.
Generally speaking, if something gets a name like NW2345, it will also at some point acquire an actual name that people can call it. You can't call something hill NW3464 in casual conversation... there just isn't enough redundant transmission to be clear that you don't mean hill NW3646 or NWT464 or NW3474. But if you say that you're sending the rover to lutefish hill, everybody knows where you are going.
Why not have all of the planets in the solar system named sol-1, sol-2, sol-3, etc? Why not number people by social security number? Because there isn't enough redundant distinction in normal conversation to overcome noise and know what the heck you're talking about. That's why you have a slashdot ID number, 465911, but you have an actual name as well, syousef. Or why species have their technical taxidermy names, but are also called things like "dung beetle" "giant squid" and "platapus."
All of the features on Mars already have coordinates. Now they just need to be called something.
The ______ Agenda
.. sci-fi names. Between character names from books by Asimov, Heinlein, and Adams, they'll be set for a while.
This sig is false.
No, you save "goatse" for a rock that's had a big hole drilled into it by the rover.
Table-ized A.I.
in biology, when someone discovers a new species, that person gets the right to name it. while most biologists will name new species after their mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, girlfiends, etc. some have been a bit more - creative.
s .html
some examples:
Eurygenius (pedilid beetle)
Ochisme Kirkaldy, 1904 (hemiptera)
Dolichisme Kirkaldy, 1904 (hemiptera)
Florichisme Kirkaldy, 1904 (hemiptera)
Marichisme Kirkaldy, 1904 (hemiptera)
Nanichisme Kirkaldy, 1904 (hemiptera)
Peggichisme Kirkaldy, 1904 (hemiptera)
Polychisme Kirkaldy, 1904 (hemiptera) Kirkaldy was criticized for frivolity by the London Zoological Society in 1912.
Pieza deresistans Evenhuis, 2002 (mythicomyiid fly)
Lalapa lusa (tiphiid wasp)
Agra vation, Agra phobia (carabid beetles)
apparently, as long as the name can be made to sound vaguely greek or latin, it's acceptable. for more names try
http://home.earthlink.net/~misaak/taxonomy/taxPun
or
http://home.earthlink.net/~johnepler/names.html
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
Yep, that's where I work. No, really. I've had files on liver, kidney, and guts. But no anus.
Same applies to animals. And the Aussie icon the Kangaroo.
When the first white settlers saw a Kangaroo and asked "WTF is THAT?", the local aborigines replied "Kunguru", which meant "I don't know" or in other words I don't understand what your saying.
They must have got a giggle every time people said "There goes a mob of I don't knows".
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
Dire Straits should definitely be the name of the sand dune where they got stuck....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Comment removed based on user account deletion
for being so concerned w/ names you should have checked your spelling. The correct spellings are: Lavernius and Jevon
Thank you Dave Raggett
Remember a game from late 80s called Elite? It's a space adventure where the names of the worlds were generated by an algorithm from predefined syllables(sp?).
How hard is it to get that algorithm and give it to NASA?
my 2c
they name a mount after the most beloved cat of the internet.