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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."
"Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
Well fine, I'm gonna start my own Pluto-recognizing state, with blackjack, and hookers!
In fact, forget the state, and the blackjack.
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction." - Blaise Pascal
That depends on what the meaning of the word "word" is.
Read up on "Freedom Fries" for a good example of redefinition.
They're just arguing on a slippery slope fallacy. First Pluto is stripped of its title, and before we know it, there will only be one Mexico again.
Don't submit to the international fascist conspiracy! Pluto IS a planet!
It be declared a planet.
Given the relative scarcity of larger bodies of water there, I did not realize that New Mexico had any pirates at all, let alone some in the legislature. Good work!
Also, pi = 4. Or maybe 3.2. The government has spoken, let it be written!
I don't like the fact that scientists say the world is round so I'm going to petition my local government to enact legislation to make the world flat. Does that sound right?
Well, at least it keeps her out of the streets, I guess.
I wouldn't be so sure of that; She is a politician after all. It's in her nature to whore herself out.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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.
I mean, really. Who would know more about astronomy? Astronomists? Or Representative Joni Marie Gutierrez, Landscape Architect? Let's just let her and her colleagues sort out stem cell research and evolution and global warming and blah blah.. I don't want to have to think about it. :P
1) Argue with scientists
2) Pass a law declaring victory
3) ???
4) PROFIT!!!
Legally speaking, at one time tomatoes were not considered fruits.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Next they should outlaw disease. Just imagine the healthcare savings.
This bill is a complete waste of time and taxpayer money. It is not the place of government (nor religion) to declare something a fact when it contradicts information obtained using the scientific process.
Illinois to vote on a bill to define pi as 22/7.
Oklahoma's legislature to say that eclipses really are dragons eating the moon.
North Carolina is considering a bill to re-instate earth, water, air, and fire as elements.
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.)
Politics. Pandering to the idiot vote. For Astrology believers, the 'downgrading' of Pluto was a slap in the face, provoking those feelings of religious outrage which politicians love to exploit. Millions and millions of voters in New Mexico have some sort of belief in Astrology, ranging from slight interest to passionate conviction. Many of those votes have just been guaranteed to those legislators responsible for this bill.
Being enlightened slashdotters, most of us have little appreciation for how stupid people really are. I am here to say that yes, they are that stupid.
Can't anyone see? This whole debate was created by Pluto itself as media hype to keep Pluto in the news!
Twinstiq, game news
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.
Heck, by the "as Pluto passes overhead through New Mexico's excellent night skies, it be declared a planet" definition, pretty much everything up there is a planet...the moon, the stars, some comets, satellites...the international space station...just about everything but the sun, I guess...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Yea, funny and even cute, until you figure that as they look at new science books for state public schools, the state will be more concerned with the books promoting the official state version of the planetary population than they will be with overall quality or cost to the taxpayers.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Connecticut has declared Pluto to be a social networking site.
which, by the way has more bearing on reality than the semantics of the word "planet".
this is *still* a non-story.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
This is what I see upon looking at the article:
"I'm right and everyone else is wrong! I'm going to believe it MY way, and that's that."
I mean cripes... I wonder how many of them still believe the world is flat? Just because you say that it's true doesn't mean that it is.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
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.
It would be fun to stand on the border between New Mexico and Texas and hop back and forth over the borderline, thinking "now it's a planet, now it's not. Planet again...."
Table-ized A.I.
Actually it reinforces the first ammendment in a way which the first ammendment does not need, and as such could be seen as weakening the first ammendment, yes.
The first ammendment states that noone can interfere with anyone calling Pluto anything they want, including a cartoon dog. If the state legislature decided that calling Pluto a Dwarf Planet violated the state constitution, that in turn would violate the US Constitution because as a New Mexico and a US Citizen, I would simultaneously be restricted from saying, "Pluto is a Dwarf Planet" (under NM law) and allowed to say it (under US law).
They are setting a precedent of slipperiness here. By defining Pluto in terms of what citizens are allowed to call it, they actually introduce the notion/thought/possible (mis)understanding of their state contitution that says citizens are only allowed to define objects in a way that the state legislature permits. The law is unnecessary in the same way that any anti-discrimination law (should be) unecessary -- non-discrimination is already protected as an interpretation of the consitution. The law, by leaving some groups out (e.g. hemaphroditic pagans), can actually weaken the original intent of the consitution, because the law introduces the idea that the consitution should not be interpretated to include those groups. Laws like this can provide a de facto interpretation of the intent of the constitution.
As a bizarre example, if I were to draft a contract in New Mexico now that had the words "Pluto, a dwarf planet," in it, and actually got someone to sign it, I could probably claim the contract void after the state legislator does their magic. So while a funny addition to the New Mexico lawbooks, the legislators should actually be extremely careful in how they write the law. In all honesty, they made the news and should probably just drop the law at this point, before they do something stupid (or waste hundreds of hours researching similar laws and avoiding the pitfalls that they made).
Or so a lawyer would argue, of which I am not one. Fortunately, hypothetical arguments are still protected in both the US and the sovereign state of California, so I'm okay...
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Clyde Tombaugh.
He found Pluto at a time when detecting planets was done with glass plate negatives and telescopes that were manually driven. He knew he was looking for a planet but where to find it was a matter of subjective debate. But he was the consummate scientist; as his wife noted after the demotion of Pluto, he would have been disappointed but he would have understood.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
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.
The Gish Bar Times - Blog covering Jupiter's moon Io
A large part of science is categorization, putting together like objects and phenomona, aiding researchers in narrowing things down. With the discovery that Pluto is one among many like bodies, we either have to admit into the planetary family dozens if not hundreds of such bodies, or we have to say that, whatever emotional attachments some might have to this particular body, it isn't a planet. Science is supposed to be dispassionate, so it can't consider that some legislator in New Mexico might get pissed off at a perceived slight to his state. In science, the rule is "if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck", even if the locals have been calling it a emperor penguin for years.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Image:Save_pluto.jpg
Table-ized A.I.
I live in New Mexico. Our legislature just spent weeks debating the realtive merits of cockfighting; this Pluto thing is actually an improvement in the level of legislative discourse.
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.
As a former resident of New Mexico (along with Bill Gates :), I'd hope that a state representative would focus aim on the poverty of the south valley barrios in Albuquerque, the fact that NM has the highest rate of police shooting people in the back, or maybe even the violence and drug problems on the SE side of Abq. That should be a priority... but then again, that is just me.
Daylight Savings Time gave me an idea: Between November and March, Pluto is a planet, but a dwarf-planet between April and October.
Table-ized A.I.
Pluto is recognising New Mexico as a country.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
This is what happens when a poorly thought definition change occurs. The dynamics of the Pluto orbit were known for a long time. There's been no sudden increase in scientific insight due to this capricious change. Let's look at the facts. Pluto was considered a planet for more than 75 years. In recent times, many Kuiper Belt objects (which by definition interact gravitationally with Neptune) were found, one which is probably even larger than Pluto and at it's closest approach can be closer to the Sun than Pluto is at it's most distant. There may be many such objects larger than Pluto. So yes, if Pluto were discovered now (ignoring the new definition), it probably would not be considered a planet.
But let's look at the definition. Pluto satisfies the first two conditions, it is in orbit around the Sun and is massive enough to form a sphere. The third condition is that "it must have cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit". That phrase has yet to be defined. So we're saying Pluto is not a planet even though we don't yet know the meaning of a critical term. Let me point out what should be obvious. Namely, if one defines the neighborhood of an orbit as a locus of the trajectory (in four dimensional space-time, eg, the space within distance d of the object at time t), then anything big enough to be round most likely has cleared an impressively large neighborhood of anything of similar mass. I assume reasonably that "cleared" means here that no amount of mass similar in order of magnitude routinely runs through this neighborhood. Also, it ignores the grief that the definition change causes to the outside world. Science textbooks need to be modified to reflect this new definition. Given that the definition is "official" yet is still mostly incomplete, the IAU will need to complete the definition of planet (and you can bet that Pluto == planet is still on the agenda). Finally, the definition explicitly only defines "planet" in the Solar System. The related definition of "dwarf planet" (ie, if it is massive enough to be rounded by gravity, it's a dwarf planet) does apply to exosolar dwarf planets (by a 2003 decision by the IAU).
So all this effort fails to apply to other star systems. This is quite relevant. First, the Solar System is a mature star system, more than 4 billion years old with no signs of recent perturbation. Second, all the orbits of the "planets" are circular. That's unusual. Most of the objects yet discovered have very elliptical (ie, large eccentricity) orbits. The definition would be hard to observe anyway since one would need to be able to account for most of the nonstellar mass in the star system before they could claim that anything has "cleared its orbit".
Finally, the decision was made with little concensus. The IAU is not an open-membership body. My impression is that it admits members directly by election only or at the behest of a "national member", a national level organization (like the US National Academy of Science's Board on International Scientific Organizations) which may have similar membership requirements. IMHO, IAU membership isn't constituted in a way conducive to concensus outside the astronomy community. Second, as noted before, only 5% of the members of the IAU actually voted on the definition in question. Further, only IAU officials had the power to modify the definition when it was being voted on. Finally, no report of the actual vote has ever been made public, as far as I can tell. We know that 424 members voted on it (this is widely reported in the media), but I have never seen reported the actual vote tally.
In summary, a redefinition of a common term, "planet" which manages to remain ill-defined and to have little scientific value by an international body that failed to generate any concensus either inside or out on the decision.
Actually it is a smart political move. Scores points with the constiuents that for the most part agree that demoting pluto was totally dumb to begin with. And creates some good tourist marketing material. "Come visit sunny New Mexico where Pluto is still a planet!".
This bill is a complete waste of time and taxpayer money. It is not the place of government (nor religion) to declare something a fact when it contradicts information obtained using the scientific process.
WTF?! You realize we're talking about whether to call Pluto a planet or not, right? This is a social convention, not a fact of nature. It's a societal decision about how we use words, it has nothing to do with any even remotely scientific process, nor can it possibly contradict information. If you think you should name your baby Dwight and your wife thinks he should be named Fred, you're not arguing about a fact of the world, nor is there a true and right answer, nor can either of you be correct or incorrect in any meaningful sense of the word.
It's highly amusing that there are some people who think there's some fact of the matter about what is or isn't a planet that's independent of what we arbitrarily choose to call a planet. The law in question is silly, granted, but it does not in any way at all whatsoever "contradict information obtained using the scientific process".
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Why is being a planet treated as some sort of exclusive club? Sure, they're planets, every last one of them. So what?
What about it? Half a dozen isn't any surprise to me. This sub-thread was started by a claim of 1000+, which is what got me interested, because it seems... optimistic. No one has backed the claim up yet, but the thread's life isn't over yet. Regardless, I'm all for discovering new planets. Even thousands of them, which would be absolutely fascinating. Let's do it!
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's also pretty hard for schoolchildren to memorize the names of all countries, rivers, lakes, mountains, and so forth. Does this mean we only have ten of each of those?
Making schoolchildren memorize arbitrary nomenclature is often useless and one of the many signs that our school systems are structured and run by the clueless.
As to why you'd have them memorize the names of any planets at all, you'd probably mention to them (not make them memorize) the first few discovered by our relatively limited earthbound observations as an unimportant but mildly interesting historical issue, and any beyond that which might be educational in and of themselves. I suspect you'd want to tell them how large the current planet count has become, again purely as a matter of interest, and as an intellectual fulcrum for you to inform them that said number is expected to change shortly, and often. Along with the asteroid count, the comet count, the satellite count, the star count, the galaxy count, etc.
There is no need for them to "memorize" any of these names and numbers until or unless they decide to focus on space science one way or another. And perhaps not even then. They just need to know that there are other planets out there in our system, and how planetary systems work, so they don't get caught up in superstitious nonsense.
On top of this, they need to know how to look things up so that when they want a fact for some reason, they can go get it with minimal fanfare.
Intellectual honesty, critical thinking skills, and the ability to use reference materials fluidly are all far more educationally valuable than canned, arbitrary information that came from a committee not entirely in internal agreement anyway.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
... welcome our new Pluto-recognizing overladies.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.