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New Mexico Might Declare Pluto a Planet
pease1 writes "Wired and others are reporting that for New Mexico, the fight for Pluto is not over. Seven months after the International Astronomical Union downgraded the distant heavenly body to a 'dwarf planet,' a state representative in New Mexico aims to give the snubbed world back some of its respect. State lawmakers will vote Tuesday on a bill that proposes that 'as Pluto passes overhead through New Mexico's excellent night skies, it be declared a planet.' The lawmaker who introduced the measure represents the county in which Clyde Tombaugh, Pluto's discoverer, was born. For many of us old timers, and those who had the honor of meeting Clyde, this just causes a belly laugh and is pure fun. Not to mention a bit of poking a stick in the eye."
Is it really that big of a deal that they want to pass this to honor the person that found Pluto? A link to the Memorial Text. This probably won't cost the state much money so let it be.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
They're voting a friggin' fact!!
No, they're voting a friggin' name. Pluto is a big round ball of matter that orbits the sun at a mind-boggling distance, and no one's questioning that. NM just wants to call it a "planet", which is well within their prerogative. they could also pass a law whereby you would be referred to as "the one who does not understand the law", and that'd be just fine as well.
One of the basic functions of government is naming things. (Don't believe me? Go look at a street sign. And then pick up any package in the grocery store. The words on those things have meaning, essentially, only because the Government says so.)
The saddest thing about all this, to me, is that the legislators probably did this because their constituents demanded it. There are way too many people out there who think that Pluto being declared not a planet is the biggest astronomy story in recent memory. Hints as to the source of gamma ray bursts? Flowing water on Mars? The Hubble's main camera having trouble? Landing a probe on the surface of Titan? More beautiful photography of Saturn than you can shake a stick at? None of those seem to get a grip on the popular consciousness. But Pluto, subject to more anthropomorphizing than any planet should be, somehow gets to be the cute underdog, fighting for its rights against nasty scientists. Blech.
Most state representatives are not professional politicians. They do their service at the statehouse for a few months out of the year, and for the rest of their time, they have a real job. It takes five minutes of this representative's time to write this bill, and another minute of their legislature's time to vote for it (most state legislatures handle their voting instantly rather than having protracted voting times like Congress does) to honor an astronomer from their state, so I don't see a problem.
I, for one, like this resolution. The IAU decision last year consisted of one of the most ridiculous definitions I have ever seen and it is nice to see a legitimate resolution being offered to attack it. There was a resolution last year in the California statehouse, but that read more like a joke, than something more serious like this one. I've emailed my state assemblyman this story so maybe Arizona will do the same thing. After all, this PLANET was discovered using an Arizona telescope. For those who think this is a waste of money, how much money do you think this will cost? This is a symbolic resolution, no appropriations are associated with it. The text looks like it took 10 minutes to write. As commented earlier, this will take about a minute to vote on. So certainly compared to other government wasteful spending, this ranks pretty far down there.
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In my view, debris is the result of the actions of intelligence, so no, planets aren't made of debris. They are generally made of materials condensed out of a stellar (or proto-stellar) accretion disk, or otherwise naturally found in space.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Unfortunately, there are some Representative jackasses in my country (Brazil) trying to push this etymology-purity agenda, forbidding any use of foreign expressions where a translation is available. Before anyone says that would violate freedom of speech, I should inform that this agenda is mainly lead by a Communist Party of Brazil representative. 'Nuff said.
I remember once a crappy CHI teacher I had, who said foreign/loan-words should be written in italics or quoted (this is right) and gave "deletar" as an example. "Deletar" is how "to delete" was adapted into Brazilian Portuguese computer-related lexicon, and its use is widely accepted and understood. I argued with him that this word was already officially accepted, and was even listed in Brazilian Literary Academy latests dictionary updates, to which he replied the Academy is not defending the purity of Portuguese well enough. He then mentioned that there at least seven good translations for "to delete" in Portuguese but, as it turns out, all translations he suggested fail to capture the computer-semantic of deletion. I proceeded to show how successfully loaned words from other languages like French and no one seems to bother: "capô" (vehicle hood/bonnet) is derived from "capeaux", just like most car parts in Brazilian Portuguese (maybe because the first cars were brought here by French people). He just shut up.
Completely OT: This same teacher also was against CSS because it made impossible to the user to enlarge fonts, against PDF for text because it is an image format. He also said that human adaptability to absence of light increases with time (this is right) and that if you remained 60 minutes in a dark room, you'd be adapted enough to be able to read a text on a paper. WTF??
In my opinion, people should be incentive and taught to write and spell properly, but if rule-of-law is necessary to achieve it, something is really wrong deep down.
Oh, we were talking about Pluto here? Almost forgot. I'm still amazed there is still no NGO named "Friends of Pluto" (portuguese text warning. babelfish is your friend) using vast incentives from government and big companies (which in turn get nice tax-reductions) to defend this unjust arbitrarity.
And in fact, when Tombaugh announced his discovery he didn't claim that it was a planet, only a Trans Neptunian Object.
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