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Illinois Declares Pluto a Planet
The Bad Astronomer writes "The legislators in Illinois, always on the lookout for more places to find voters, have passed a resolution declaring Pluto is a planet. I'm not sure what else can be said here, except that — besides overstepping their jurisdiction just a wee bit — they make a couple of scientific howlers in the resolution itself."
There are now 8 planets in the UNIVERSE because they defined a planet as a body orbiting the sun. The definition sucks so I have no problem if states are defining a planet as something else than a small club of grey men(IAU).
You can say that it's "just a definition", but I don't see where it's the place of a legislature to make scientific definitions to scientists. Legislatures supposedly have better things to do. If they don't, they should recess until that changes.
The IAU definition of a planet is more extensive than that. Also, while I haven't read the IAU text, I doubt their definition means that there are only eight planets in the universe. The only thing I don't like about their definition is that their use of "dwarf" in "dwarf planet" basically means "not a planet", and I think that's inconsistent and improper use of the word.
At least Indiana came to it's senses before legislating the value of pi.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
But don't publishers try to sell "new editions" to the districts every six months, or is that only a college problem?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Neptune will never "suck up" Pluto. They are in a 3:2 mean motion resonance, so although their orbits cross, they will never collide.
http://www.nineplanets.org/plutodyn.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance
Well, Pluto's orbit is about 16Â farther from the plane than Earth's. Illinois' latitude is about 37Â, and Earth's axial tilt is about 23.5Â. So, we can have a minimum of 13.5Â of Illinois' "overhead" to the earth's plane, and a maximum of 60.5Â. So the orbit of Pluto is indeed overhead Illinois many times in the american summer. The odds that Pluto itself is in the spot are astronomically (literally) low.
PS: Fuck slashdot and it's lack of unicode support. And while we're at it, inline TeX would be nice to.
entropy happens
Isn't that how politicians do everything? No Child Left Behind tripled the amount of fresh veggies children were eating in cafeterias, by defining ketchup, relish, and French...sorry, FREEDOM fries as fresh vegetables, since they are all plant matter, and all WERE fresh before being cooked. Awesome work, children are eating healthier and they didn't even have to spend money on giving them different food than before! They also drastically reduced animal testing within the US by defining rodents and birds as non-animal vermin. For a grand finale, they redefined the poverty line, thus reducing the number of low income families! Then for an encore they changed the definition of what it means to be "unemployed" and drastically reduced unemployment! Truly amazing what you can to dramatically improve the country without doing anything other than changing the definitions of words!
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI