Slashdot Mirror
IAU To Uwingu: You Can't Name That Martian Crater Either
RocketAcademy writes "The International Astronomical Union has thrown a tantrum over a plan to crowdsource names for craters on Mars. The IAU gives official scientific names to craters, but it has only bothered with craters that have 'scientific significance.' The science-funding platform Uwingu has launched a campaign to come up with popular names for the remaining craters. For as little as $5, a member of the public can name one of the craters on Uwingu's map, with the proceeds going to fund space science and education. This caused the IAU to issue a statement condemning such crowdsourcing efforts. The IAU pointed out that it did allow the public to vote on names for two of Pluto's moons, in the past. In that case, however, the IAU rejected the winning name (Vulcan)."
Last year, the IAU got into a spat with Uwingu over naming exoplanets. Sounds like the old name a star scam, on Mars.
and someone to take their money willingly.
That's way better than a crater.
You want the privilege of naming? No problem. But you have to get there first. Put up or shut up, bitch.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Names are such fickle things that will change with time. It's sad that people will fork out money for nothing but also that the IAU thinks that whatever names they are applying now are going to stick for eternity.
Conclusion: people like to argue
The rancorous debate over what to name celestial bodies strikes me of angelology. Who's going to know what they were named a thousand years from now, and how many times will those names be changed by people yet to be born? I mean, who cares? Let them each keep a different and divergent list of named craters, call them "List A" and "List B", and we'll revisit in 2,000 years and see which names stuck, and whom smelt of elderberries.
Gently reply
if we survive 'weather' forecast remains at hang on to our hemispheres status http://www.globalresearch.ca/weather-warfare-beware-the-us-military-s-experiments-with-climatic-warfare/7561 ,,aka swing low sweet chariots of fire & ice.... kids marching http://img.rt.com/files/news/23/08/00/00/1380713_keystone_web_480p.mp4?event=download
Call it whatever you want. If it sticks, it's official. Why should they get the only right to name something?
The reason why the IAU is the body that gets to name celestial objects is international recognition. If every country used its own naming scheme, pretty soon the scientific communication would become a complete muddle.
-Bob-
If you don't want to select your crater yourself, just pick your price level and we'll have a Mars scientist choose a crater for you!
Money for nothing and craters for free
I imagine that using buzzwords like "crowdsourced" means we're not supposed to spot that this is just a way of fleecing people of money for a totally worthless certificate.
Maybe the cause is good. But this method of fundraising is just sleazy.
Why do they get to decide, other than by authority by assertion?
buy the IAU some Wheaties which haven't been pissed in.
Seriously, the IAU is just a private organization with self-appointed powers. Their "official naming rights" are no more official than your's or mine, although their names are more likely to get used.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Where does the IAU get off with this insistence that it has the power to name everything in space, from craters to the smallest boulders. Pompous aholes.
friendly familiar foreign & nearly just a stone's throw away cosmosically speaking. in fact it is just a thrown stone,, lifeless useless etc.... meanwhile there'll never be a better time to consider ourselves in relation to one another & our current accommodations... thanks again moms
It's amazing that the IAU seems to think that they have the rights to name anything at all. Frankly they have no authority other than it's another drummed up French based "authority" created when Europeans thought they could create such things. Yes, they ponder such things as the definition of a "planet" but still it's not CERN and is only recognized by scientists and astronomers as a de-facto authority, that's all. So really they have no claim to naming things no more than anybody else.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Of course Uwingu can name craters. So can you or I (though the challenge there lies in getting anyone else to use those names). The IAU has no more legal authority to say "you can't call the planet Pluto's newly discovered moon Vulcan", for example, than your local Kiwanis club does. They can only offer guidance that their "industry" tends to take seriously, and the rest of us can completely disregard if we so choose.
So whether or not a bunch of pissy astronomers decide to use Uwingu's names rather than something more poetic like "MC2013B17" has no relevance to the situation.
You can name whatever you like whatever you want. No muss, no fuss, no red tape, no nothing.
Achieving a name recognized by somebody other than you is a somewhat more complex problem, usually requiring a certain amount of give-and-take in terms of "I'll accept your stupid idea if you endure mine" type arrangements.
For all the histrionics about it, Nobody was somehow magically anointed the Super Name Czar by some magically authoritative process. Some organizations have their shit together, and any names in a given domain not endorsed by them are pretty much just private nicknames, some don't; but that's it.
Anyone found anything indicating what percent they will be donating to a tax exempt space organization?
They say they want to get $10 million to that fund.
The cost of a hole in Mars goes for $5 to $5000. They also have another naming purchase plan for exoplanets where it is $4.99 for each person attempting to name it and then $0.99 for each vote for that name, and 1000 votes needed.
Even by the dry standards of academic discourse this is pretty meek:
Recently initiatives that capitalise on the public’s interest in space and astronomy have proliferated, some putting a price tag on naming space objects and their features, such as Mars craters. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) would like to emphasise that such initiatives go against the spirit of free and equal access to space, as well as against internationally recognised standards. Hence no purchased names can ever be used on official maps and globes. The IAU encourages the public to become involved in the naming process of space objects and their features by following the officially recognised (and free) methods.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Otherwise it is just a waste of money. Learned that the hard way ........
Confirmed comets are always named after their first two discoverers; the fact that they also have a catalogue designation for the books doesn't change that.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Here
So I don't care what they say, they are a meaningless group of useless twats.
Fuck the IAU, that is what I say.
They are worse than ICANN with respect to Internet dealings.
I think it is time we route around the problem of the IAU and start popularising and crowdfunding alternatives to their bullshittery and nonsense.
Nobody of any worth gives a damn about their old-fart opinions anyway.
What are they going to do like, SUE? They don't own the universe. You can't patent or trademark space. (you damn well better not be able to, looking at you America!)
Not only that, this is actually doing something of worth as well, it is FUNDING things.
The IAU say they like to promote and work with amateurs in the field, then they do this shit? NO, screw that.
I don't give a damn if there are 10k+ members, they are all worthless if they want to keep space their little secret club-group for them to all wank over. THEY are the reason people joke about the field and don't take it seriously.
Sure, there are some nice systems they came up with, but who cares when half the time it is tied up in such stupidly tight regulations?
I'm sure everyone would find it lovely if we were to refer to every single thing as their scientific names all the time. (especially grammar nazis. Holy crap, the thought of them all being grammar nazis. Also, enjoy these sentences.)
Why ISN'T there an official way to name things? Why are these pretentious douches not wanting to give memorable names to planets, stars and other such things? If there was an official way, it would PREVENT all of these varying names given, which is why the damn standards were created in the first place. Not only that, as I mentioned above, it would help fund science efforts, it would get more people interested directly with helping fund science and give great REAL gifts to people, not those phony promises and certificates that claim your acre of the moon or whatever else.
So, any of you that are likely reading this now, why not? Why are you all so anal about it?
Pretty much all other naming societies aren't as anal as you lot are. Do you see gene researchers whining over sonic hedgehog? Well, besides that small group STRETCHING to high-hell in being against it, missing the fact that Sonic Hedgehog is a HEDGEHOG related gene, not human. I don't think anyone would ever consider giving funny whimsical names to something that would cause serious illness.
Also who the hell would even come up to a patient and tell them that? They just want to know if their kid is good or bad, and if it is bad, they just want to know if there is a cure or treatment. If THEY ask for specifics, then you tell them.
Absolute lunacy.
As you may or may not be aware, "Uwingu" is loosely affiliated with the SETI Institute (not to be confused with SETI@home), who will be the first beneficiary of their income from this scheme. I've had the dubious pleasure of participating in the SETI Institutes "crowdsourcing" activities in the past, and although they seem like good engineers and scientists, they unfortunately have either very low ethics or some sort of major deficiency in sense of self and others. If you look at setilive.org, for instance, they launched this site to huge media fanfare, with tens of thousands of people signing up for what was publicized as "citizen science". Unfortunately, as people slowly realized after having clicked through millions of images of radio noise, the project has essentially no scientific value, and was more likely just some sad attempt at attracting paying members to the institute's financial support group "TeamSETI". Today the "crowdsourcing project" has barely one active user on at any given time.
This Uwingu thing oozes of that same kind of disregard and carelessness with other people's resources: let's "u-wing-it" and see if we can get the dumb people on the interwebs to throw some money at us, and if all they get out of it is some phony certificate with no validity, who cares, at least we got some money out of it, right?
This whole website seems much less about officially naming planetary bodies/object & more about trying to get the public interested in donating to scientific research. As long as the funds are going towards that end and no guarantee of being an "officially recognized" name is being presented I don't see an issue. And if you actually check out some of the names used (Peoples names, DeeDah, Winnie Wonka's Cholote Factory, Stella's scientific saucer dent) you'd have to be an idiot to think these names were ever going to be officially recognized by a government body. The IAU's designations don't hold a lot of clout with me either, they are a politically driven organization that are just a little full of themselves.
The french have a tradition of making themselves the official arbiters of things they don't actually do anything. See also FAI - Federation Aeronautique Internationale, the guys who required the Neil Armstrong to get an FAI Sporting License in order for them to recognize that the Moon Landings took place "officially"
You have to admit, Pluto itself has been thumbing its nose at the IAC.....even before the "demotion", two more moons were discovered (Nix and Hydra), giving Pluto a total of three known moons. (Charon was the first moon discovered). http://www.windows2universe.org/our_solar_system/moons_table.html
This puts Pluto fourth in the solar system in moons -
Jupiter (63!)
Saturn (62)
Uranus (27)
Neptune (13)
Pluto (3)
Mars (2)
Earth (ONE)
"was an elaborate excuse to make Pluto an un-planet?"
I think they pretty much said so themselves. Something about how some delegates were upset that Pluto had ever been called a planet and the discovery of some of the other sizeable bodies orbiting the sun gave them cause to determine it wasn't a planet. The reasoning behind was also completely un-scientific, something about how uneducated people would become confused if there were too many planets listed in science books.
People still keep paying to "register a star" for loved ones, even in full knowledge that the act has no official status, even for the plebeian billions of stars on astro patrol photographs. So why not set up an official, central registry that would auction off naming rights on stars, minor asteroids, minor KBOs, exoplanets, and extraterrestrial mountains and craters. The proceeds would become grants for astronomy and space science. It would be your state's vanity plate registry writ cosmically large.
Let the human ego pay for the telescopes and probes that taxpayers won't.
Well, I guess Arnold Schwarzenegger is one.
But all seriousness aside, let ordinary people name places on Mars? Never! And while we're at it, we need to fix the names that ordinary people have given places on Earth. Think of all the places across North America that got named over the last several hundred years (some of them with names that were Anglicized versions of names dating back even more hundreds of years). No, we need to take back all those terrible names, and let some Official Committee re-name them. Double-plus good!
IPooOnIAU