Geologists Angry About New 'Pluton' Definition

An anonymous reader writes "According to a story over at Nature, some geologists are ticked off at the International Astronomical Union for using the word 'pluton' to describe a round object orbiting the sun with a period more than 200 years. A pluton, it seems, is a common type of rock formation that exists in most Geology 101 curricula. IAU head Owen Gingerich is quoted as saying that he was only peripherally aware of the definition, and because it didn't show up on MS Word's spell check, he didn't think it was that important."

Comments

Not a moot point

[mattr]

Skipping for the moment implications of inadequacy on the part of both MS and this scientist, clearly there is a problem when people base their work on expectations of intellectual integrity on the part of corporate IT products like this, especially those not easily accessible by reviewers. There is a Japanese character dictionary built into Windows too but I have no idea how a reviewer could grade it against commonly used print versions.

Besides, geology seems to be one of the most highly leveraged sciences in planetary studies, if you consider most of what the Mars robots were doing was geology. For a planetary scientists to miss this is bizarre.