Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Illinois Declares Pluto a Planet

Posted by timothy on from the after-ruling-out-pebble-and-mailing-tube dept.

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."

2 of 512 comments (clear)

  1. Yo mama is so fat... by thomasdz · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Yo mama is so fat...Illinois declared her a planet
    New joke meme?

    --
    Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
  2. Re:Too right! by Hurricane78 · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Well, I see the exception of disallowing some operations with 0 or infinity in them as the biggest failure of mathematics. In mathematics, you try to remove exceptions, and simplify complex sets of rules into a simple formula.

    My theory is, that they miss the temporal component, and that in fact 0 and infinity are complex numbers of (0,t) and (inf,t), where t is a sequencing variable. That way you could easily divide by zero and get out infinity, but not lose any of the information, that makes their use so problematic right now.
    Because then (inf,t1) and (inf,t2) are not the same.

    On, and the range between 0 and 1 has the same amount of numbers as that between 0 and infinity.

    [IA(O)NAM (I am (obviously) not a mathematician). But this does not influence my being right or wrong in any way.]

    --
    Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.