I actually don't know where "dwarf planet" fits into the minor/major planet dichotomy. To be frank, I'm not even sure that the IAU really worried about that issue themselves. My prediction is that the term "dwarf planet" won't survive very long, so we may never find the answer to that question.:)
Actually, planet technically already means both things you suggest. The term "planet" in the less-common, broader sense means any natural, non-stellar body orbiting a star. (Er, there may be some size threshold there, but it's pretty small. Meteroids and debris probably doesn't count, basically.) Asteroids and comets are merely "minor planets", rather than "major planets".
Of course it's politics. Even in science, nearly everything is political in the short-term. Sad, but true.
As for too few observations, that is the goal in a way. But you have to understand, you *want* to be able to classify something quickly and not wait 50 years to figure out where it really belongs. And classification system that requires a lot of observations we can't generally manage right now is almost useless to us.
The problem with your size-only definition is that it's useless to many astronomers. There are many diverse research areas out there that use the term "planet". A *good* definition will try to account for as many of those fields as possible. If you don't, you've accomplished nothing of value because too many people will refuse to use it (and with good reason). Your definition may be useful to geologists, but not to dynamicists. Worse, it flies in the face of what the term "planet" has meant as long as astronomy has been a science and that will fly. It's one thing to tweak the definition, it's another to radically alter it.
Yes, actually it is a democracy. The universe we study isn't, though. Whether Pluto is a planet isn't determined by data, it's determined by how we, as people, will choose to classify it.
Well said. It's only an issue because a few astronomers feel that their funding and their reputations are at stake if Pluto's status is altered. It's basically about ego and money, not science.
(The preceeding are opinions, not facts. Please treat them as such.)
Be careful that you know what that words mean before you use them. They wouldn't have voted if they didn't have enough people for a legit vote by their rules. They had a quorum when they voted. That doesn't mean that a majority of IAU members were present or voted, but it is a quorum.
Just because the vote didn't go the way you or someone else wanted it to go, that doesn't mean that it makes sense to attack the voting.
"-this is distinct from a gas giant, which should be considered closer to stars than to planets (round, mostly gas: really just stars without enough critical mass to ignite fusion)"
Gas giants are at least a factor of roughly 100 too small to start fusion. That's a pretty huge leap. Moreover, the presence of a core strongly suggests a very different formation mechanism from stars and one that is basically identical to terrestrial planets. (The only additional factor is that they were able to use ices to build their cores so that they became masses enough to capture light gases from the protoplanetary disk.) To me, that says that they belong in the same class as the other planets. Especially when you consider that there are only two gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) and that the other two giants are mostly ice, not gas. This provides a nice intermediate step between rocky planets and gaseous ones.
Eh, I know that the major astronomy textbooks are on two-year cycles of new editions right now anyway. They make it almost impossible to use an older edition when the new one comes out. So how will this help their sales beyond that?
It should also be noted that this is not without precident. The first few (and largest few) asteroids were all deemed planets for around 50 years before they were demoted when it became overwelmingly apparent that they were part of a swarm of bodies between Mars and Jupiter. At that point, it made more sense to reclassify them and astronomers did so.
So what's the big deal demoting Pluto? This has all happened before and will all (probably) happen again.
Why? What do you think that New Horizons will tell us that's relevent to its planetary status? We know its orbit, its mass, its surface composition, and its shape. What else do we need to know? Geological activity, atmospheric and magnetosphere behaviors are pretty much never considered to have bearing on whether something is a planet or not. Odds are they there is nothing that we'll learn that will shift the debate either way. We have the data we need, now we just need to figure out how to *organize* it.
I'm pretty sure that they meant "cleared its orbit of other planets". Although I think what they're really after is "is the domininant gravitational body in its region". Pluto isn't that, Neptune dictates everyone else's orbit in that part of the solar system, including Pluto's.
In the end, the current defintion needs fine tuning. I think that overall it does a good job of accounting for the usage of "planet" from both the geologists and the dynamicists, both of whom have legitimate concerns with the term. (No matter how dismissive Alan Stern and his cohort are of the dynamicists, we're astronomers, too.)
I believe that the people who are angry with the defintion aren't really upset about poor wording in that requirement, they're upset that Pluto has lost its status. And I think that many of them are worried that they'll lose funding or prestige. What they SHOULD be doing is using this chance to leverage Pluto's new status into good press for why it's so interesting and worthy of study. ("Because it's a planet," strikes me as less compelling than, "Because it's part of the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt which is a major resevoir of comets and holds important clues to the formation of the solar system.") But instead they're harming their own credibility and that of the entire field by behaving very badly and publicly demeaning their collegues.
Frankly, the petitioners are behaving like whiney children. There are, in fact, problems with the new definition. I'm pretty sure that the IAU meant that a planet should be the dominant gravitiational body in its region (Pluto isn't), not that it has cleared its region completely. So, OK, we need to revisit that later. But these guys have bad-mouthing their collegues in the press, their petition (and the email that solicited signatures) is down-right dismissive, rude, and accuses a group of collegues of what amounts to voting fraud, and I question the petition itself. (Having looked over the signatures, I don't see a lot of names I recognize. I'm a professional planetary scientist and a member of the AAS (it's not "Union", it's "Society") and DPS. While I am confident that the signers are real people and are possibly even involved in astronomy in some way, this suggests to me that not all that many professional astronomers signed it.)
Accusing the IAU of voting fraud is a cheap ploy. Stern and others left the meeting early. They knew when the meeting ended, but they chose to leave early. Sure, some people probably had really pressing matters to get back to. But I doubt that many couldn't have stayed for the vote. (And even if not, the people leaving should have been random on both sides of the issue.) If Stern thought the vote was that important, he should have stuck around. You don't forgive your Congressman for missing a key vote because he chose to head out to a fund-raiser in your home district instead, do you? And you can't argue that they didn't know that the vote was being taken a week ago Thursday; *I* knew sitting here in Colorado because the BBC and other media outlets reported it. If the media knew, than the IAU members must surely have had the information available.
Worse still is the would-be gripe that not all professional astronomers got to vote in general. Considering that they weren't pushing for us all to get to vote *before* they lost, that's pretty hollow. As I said, I'm hold a PhD in planetary science and am a professional in the field and *I* don't get to vote in the IAU as I'm haven't been invited to join. The pro-planet people weren't stumping to get my vote counted before, so I don't swollow their complaints now. They're bitter about having lost an election and seem to want to kick, scream, and hold their breaths until they get their ways. I have no respect for that and I wish that everyone else would just ignore them they way you ignore a bratty child.
(None of this is to say that I have no respect for people who argue that Pluto should be a planet, provide that they present their cases maturely. You're welcome to disagree with my own view and I can respect that. Just don't accuse me of being stupid or of "hijacking the vote".)
Actually, if you do a bit of research on bin Laden and his band of brothers, you'll discover that they don't want to convert us particularly, either. They just want us to leave their chunk of the world alone. They want us to get the hell out of Iraq and Pakistan (now), to leave Saudi Arabia, to not mess with internal affairs of the various countries, etc. Our conversion is not really a concern to them. Nor are our deaths.
Now I'm not saying that I like their methods, because like any decent person I surely don't. Nor am I saying that their goals are wholly reasonable. But they goals aren't insane, either. We would do well to try to understand them because that's the only way we'll stop terrorism in the long run. (Not by giving them what they want, necessarily. But by preventing people from getting to this point in the first place.)
But note that your link tells exactly the same story. In particular, there were no claims of extensive damage being cased to the tree or any evidence that the kids were really trying to strip every branch from the tree in question. I'd say that the link supports my claim of police hyperbole.
Ug, the kids were taking branches out of the tree to build a fort. They admitted to that openly, there's no "probably" about that part. They deserve a talking-to to be sure, although what kind of talking-to is another question. (I, for one, would opt to a polite discussion with them about public property. I am quite willing to give the kids the benefit of the doubt and believe that they didn't realize taking a few branches out of a tree in a park was considered wrong. I see no need to get yell at them when a simple explanation of the law and the reasons for the law would probably be more effective anyway.)
Additionally, just as important: so you're arrested and they take a DNA sample (pretend that that's OK for a second or that there's a good reason to need DNA). They they don't charge you and the DNA is clearly not needed for the investigation. They keep the DNA on record? Seems to me that if you're found innocent or set free (and, again, there's no reason to keep it for further investigation, as in a rape case say), the police should be required to remove your entry in the database.
I have heard of a lot of teens and college kids, not to mention full adults, breaking down upon being arrested and thrown in jail. Especially when they don't understand what's going on. Being totally powerless will do that to you.
If you are worried about hyperbole in the article, I'm interested in the police claim that they kids were trying to strip ever branch from the cherry tree. Now, I haven't seen this important civic landmark (not entirely sarcastic: trees can be significant, although it didn't really sound like this one was, except from the police description), but your typical tree has a lot of branches, many of which a 12-year-old would be hard-pressed indeed to remove. Of course, we might speculate that the kids had saws and axes, but then we're stuck trying to explain why that wasn't mentioned by the police defending their actions. So that brings us back to the question: how likely was it to the police that the kids were trying to strip the tree and kill it? Did they really believe that? If so, should we trust their testimony and their judgement on this and other case?
While I don't dispute your experience, I have to say that word processors (or IM clients) that flag suspect words has actually improved my spelling. I see the mispelled words so often that I start making a mental note of the ones I screw up the most, one at a time. I'm a lousy speller, but I actually find that that is helping.
As I've said, I agree that this money really should be sent out through the Dept. of Education in a perfect world. But for whatever reason, it isn't being sent through there. (In fairness, there are times when funding NASA to do the education does makes a fair amount of sense. There are a number of projects out there to hook up scientists with classrooms, for example. Getting Dept. of Ed. to run the program just adds to the beauracratic overhead in those cases.)
Also, I don't think anything is making NASA look overfunded. This does give pundits a way to labeling the spending "pork", whether it is or not.
First of all, NASA's mission statement isn't just for space exploration. It's for aerospace research *and* space research. That's significant because it highlights NASA's interests in math and science education in this country. While I would agree that the Dept. of Education should really be funding such initiatives, they clearly don't. (At least, they don't fund enough.) That leaves other agencies with vested interests to fill in the gaps.
In any case, what does it matter which agency provides the money? NASA's budget is written with this stuff in mind. If they didn't fund education initiatives, they wouldn't get those few millions to begin with. If you want to see places where NASA has reallocated its own budget from one area to another, look at ISS. It's sucked up all kinds of money from construction, especially from the science on ISS. Congress has had to specifically get involved and block that in the past, in fact.
"If you've checked the prices on tutition and contact hours recently you'd know that if a school wants something useful, they'd just cut a check and buy it,"
You really don't understand the way higher education is funded. Tuition typically covers something like a third of the price of a college education at the more expensive schools. It's even less at public universities. The biggest source of funding for the latter typically comes from contract and grant overhead, which is often around 50% or higher. A few thousand dollars of tution from each student doesn't go very far to educate the kids.
In fact, universities across the country are struggling to provide all of the facilities and services that their students need and, in some cases, demand-but-don't-need. Here in Colorado, the only way they were able to get a new Law building (required for reaccreditation for the Law School) built was by the students passing their own student fee to pay for it. Other building projects have been delayed for years for lack of money. (Except the stadium expansion, which was paid for by athletics. But that's a rant for a different time.)
And if you think that K-12 schools can just write checks for whatever they want or need, you either went to a very privledged school (either private or just affluent) or you didn't pay attention while you were there.
Considering that NASA's primary mission is to further US interests in space and aerospace and that education is considered a key part of that, I don't see why helping schools and colleges out with their math and science education goes against their mission at all. And considering how useless and expensive ISS is, I'd pick education of ISS every time.
It could well be argued that even when ISS *is* doing research, it's money being thrown away. Thanks to budget overruns and shortfalls, almost all of the useful science has been cut of out ISS anyway. For example, it isn't going to tell us anything new about our response to radiation in space or to weightlessness. They cut out the big hamster wheel designed to test how many g's a human needs to stay fit enough to walk around after landing on Mars. The list goes on, but what they're left with are mostly science fair projects in space. So while I'm always sad to see research cut, in this case I kind of hope that maybe this might serve as a wake up call to Congress and the American public to realize that ISS serves no purpose other than to be built. If that's what taxpayers want, fine. But they should understand that that is all they are getting for their billions.
The aquarium I'm not sure about. But as a rule, NASA not only funds space missions, it funds space *research*. This requires labs and computers. It also has (to varying degrees over time) funded science education initiatives under the logic that this ensures that the next generation of engineers and scientists will be there when we need them in 20 years. Realistically, it isn't enough to persue agressively the science and engineer research: we have to be able to sustain it for it to keep us on top. "Sure," you say, "but shouldn't the NSF of the Dept. of Eduction be funding that stuff?" Probably. But they don't, so NASA has to step in.
I can imagine reasons why the aquarium would get NASA funding (think Europa), but without knowing the details it's hard to evaluate the merits.
Not necessarily. The two types of statistics (internet and overall) that I gave don't compare directly. The ones for the internet said something to the effect of "percent of teens who are approached for sex." This does not mean that they responded in any way. In fact, the first study says that most of them block the person. Which is pretty much what they should do. That's a near-success story. (Success would be if strangers didn't every approach people for sex... unless the approachee had made the invitation in her or his profile.)
It looks to me as if more stats are needed on this topic, but I'm a numbers-nerd.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually don't know where "dwarf planet" fits into the minor/major planet dichotomy. To be frank, I'm not even sure that the IAU really worried about that issue themselves. My prediction is that the term "dwarf planet" won't survive very long, so we may never find the answer to that question. :)
Actually, planet technically already means both things you suggest. The term "planet" in the less-common, broader sense means any natural, non-stellar body orbiting a star. (Er, there may be some size threshold there, but it's pretty small. Meteroids and debris probably doesn't count, basically.) Asteroids and comets are merely "minor planets", rather than "major planets".
Of course it's politics. Even in science, nearly everything is political in the short-term. Sad, but true.
As for too few observations, that is the goal in a way. But you have to understand, you *want* to be able to classify something quickly and not wait 50 years to figure out where it really belongs. And classification system that requires a lot of observations we can't generally manage right now is almost useless to us.
The problem with your size-only definition is that it's useless to many astronomers. There are many diverse research areas out there that use the term "planet". A *good* definition will try to account for as many of those fields as possible. If you don't, you've accomplished nothing of value because too many people will refuse to use it (and with good reason). Your definition may be useful to geologists, but not to dynamicists. Worse, it flies in the face of what the term "planet" has meant as long as astronomy has been a science and that will fly. It's one thing to tweak the definition, it's another to radically alter it.
Yes, actually it is a democracy. The universe we study isn't, though. Whether Pluto is a planet isn't determined by data, it's determined by how we, as people, will choose to classify it.
Well said. It's only an issue because a few astronomers feel that their funding and their reputations are at stake if Pluto's status is altered. It's basically about ego and money, not science.
(The preceeding are opinions, not facts. Please treat them as such.)
Be careful that you know what that words mean before you use them. They wouldn't have voted if they didn't have enough people for a legit vote by their rules. They had a quorum when they voted. That doesn't mean that a majority of IAU members were present or voted, but it is a quorum.
Just because the vote didn't go the way you or someone else wanted it to go, that doesn't mean that it makes sense to attack the voting.
"-this is distinct from a gas giant, which should be considered closer to stars than to planets (round, mostly gas: really just stars without enough critical mass to ignite fusion)"
Gas giants are at least a factor of roughly 100 too small to start fusion. That's a pretty huge leap. Moreover, the presence of a core strongly suggests a very different formation mechanism from stars and one that is basically identical to terrestrial planets. (The only additional factor is that they were able to use ices to build their cores so that they became masses enough to capture light gases from the protoplanetary disk.) To me, that says that they belong in the same class as the other planets. Especially when you consider that there are only two gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) and that the other two giants are mostly ice, not gas. This provides a nice intermediate step between rocky planets and gaseous ones.
Eh, I know that the major astronomy textbooks are on two-year cycles of new editions right now anyway. They make it almost impossible to use an older edition when the new one comes out. So how will this help their sales beyond that?
It should also be noted that this is not without precident. The first few (and largest few) asteroids were all deemed planets for around 50 years before they were demoted when it became overwelmingly apparent that they were part of a swarm of bodies between Mars and Jupiter. At that point, it made more sense to reclassify them and astronomers did so.
So what's the big deal demoting Pluto? This has all happened before and will all (probably) happen again.
Why? What do you think that New Horizons will tell us that's relevent to its planetary status? We know its orbit, its mass, its surface composition, and its shape. What else do we need to know? Geological activity, atmospheric and magnetosphere behaviors are pretty much never considered to have bearing on whether something is a planet or not. Odds are they there is nothing that we'll learn that will shift the debate either way. We have the data we need, now we just need to figure out how to *organize* it.
I'm pretty sure that they meant "cleared its orbit of other planets". Although I think what they're really after is "is the domininant gravitational body in its region". Pluto isn't that, Neptune dictates everyone else's orbit in that part of the solar system, including Pluto's.
In the end, the current defintion needs fine tuning. I think that overall it does a good job of accounting for the usage of "planet" from both the geologists and the dynamicists, both of whom have legitimate concerns with the term. (No matter how dismissive Alan Stern and his cohort are of the dynamicists, we're astronomers, too.)
I believe that the people who are angry with the defintion aren't really upset about poor wording in that requirement, they're upset that Pluto has lost its status. And I think that many of them are worried that they'll lose funding or prestige. What they SHOULD be doing is using this chance to leverage Pluto's new status into good press for why it's so interesting and worthy of study. ("Because it's a planet," strikes me as less compelling than, "Because it's part of the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt which is a major resevoir of comets and holds important clues to the formation of the solar system.") But instead they're harming their own credibility and that of the entire field by behaving very badly and publicly demeaning their collegues.
Frankly, the petitioners are behaving like whiney children. There are, in fact, problems with the new definition. I'm pretty sure that the IAU meant that a planet should be the dominant gravitiational body in its region (Pluto isn't), not that it has cleared its region completely. So, OK, we need to revisit that later. But these guys have bad-mouthing their collegues in the press, their petition (and the email that solicited signatures) is down-right dismissive, rude, and accuses a group of collegues of what amounts to voting fraud, and I question the petition itself. (Having looked over the signatures, I don't see a lot of names I recognize. I'm a professional planetary scientist and a member of the AAS (it's not "Union", it's "Society") and DPS. While I am confident that the signers are real people and are possibly even involved in astronomy in some way, this suggests to me that not all that many professional astronomers signed it.)
Accusing the IAU of voting fraud is a cheap ploy. Stern and others left the meeting early. They knew when the meeting ended, but they chose to leave early. Sure, some people probably had really pressing matters to get back to. But I doubt that many couldn't have stayed for the vote. (And even if not, the people leaving should have been random on both sides of the issue.) If Stern thought the vote was that important, he should have stuck around. You don't forgive your Congressman for missing a key vote because he chose to head out to a fund-raiser in your home district instead, do you? And you can't argue that they didn't know that the vote was being taken a week ago Thursday; *I* knew sitting here in Colorado because the BBC and other media outlets reported it. If the media knew, than the IAU members must surely have had the information available.
Worse still is the would-be gripe that not all professional astronomers got to vote in general. Considering that they weren't pushing for us all to get to vote *before* they lost, that's pretty hollow. As I said, I'm hold a PhD in planetary science and am a professional in the field and *I* don't get to vote in the IAU as I'm haven't been invited to join. The pro-planet people weren't stumping to get my vote counted before, so I don't swollow their complaints now. They're bitter about having lost an election and seem to want to kick, scream, and hold their breaths until they get their ways. I have no respect for that and I wish that everyone else would just ignore them they way you ignore a bratty child.
(None of this is to say that I have no respect for people who argue that Pluto should be a planet, provide that they present their cases maturely. You're welcome to disagree with my own view and I can respect that. Just don't accuse me of being stupid or of "hijacking the vote".)
Actually, if you do a bit of research on bin Laden and his band of brothers, you'll discover that they don't want to convert us particularly, either. They just want us to leave their chunk of the world alone. They want us to get the hell out of Iraq and Pakistan (now), to leave Saudi Arabia, to not mess with internal affairs of the various countries, etc. Our conversion is not really a concern to them. Nor are our deaths.
Now I'm not saying that I like their methods, because like any decent person I surely don't. Nor am I saying that their goals are wholly reasonable. But they goals aren't insane, either. We would do well to try to understand them because that's the only way we'll stop terrorism in the long run. (Not by giving them what they want, necessarily. But by preventing people from getting to this point in the first place.)
But note that your link tells exactly the same story. In particular, there were no claims of extensive damage being cased to the tree or any evidence that the kids were really trying to strip every branch from the tree in question. I'd say that the link supports my claim of police hyperbole.
Ug, the kids were taking branches out of the tree to build a fort. They admitted to that openly, there's no "probably" about that part. They deserve a talking-to to be sure, although what kind of talking-to is another question. (I, for one, would opt to a polite discussion with them about public property. I am quite willing to give the kids the benefit of the doubt and believe that they didn't realize taking a few branches out of a tree in a park was considered wrong. I see no need to get yell at them when a simple explanation of the law and the reasons for the law would probably be more effective anyway.)
That's another question to also ask, yeah. But in this case, it doesn't sound like they're even required to or planning to. (Not even overtly.)
Additionally, just as important: so you're arrested and they take a DNA sample (pretend that that's OK for a second or that there's a good reason to need DNA). They they don't charge you and the DNA is clearly not needed for the investigation. They keep the DNA on record? Seems to me that if you're found innocent or set free (and, again, there's no reason to keep it for further investigation, as in a rape case say), the police should be required to remove your entry in the database.
I have heard of a lot of teens and college kids, not to mention full adults, breaking down upon being arrested and thrown in jail. Especially when they don't understand what's going on. Being totally powerless will do that to you.
If you are worried about hyperbole in the article, I'm interested in the police claim that they kids were trying to strip ever branch from the cherry tree. Now, I haven't seen this important civic landmark (not entirely sarcastic: trees can be significant, although it didn't really sound like this one was, except from the police description), but your typical tree has a lot of branches, many of which a 12-year-old would be hard-pressed indeed to remove. Of course, we might speculate that the kids had saws and axes, but then we're stuck trying to explain why that wasn't mentioned by the police defending their actions. So that brings us back to the question: how likely was it to the police that the kids were trying to strip the tree and kill it? Did they really believe that? If so, should we trust their testimony and their judgement on this and other case?
While I don't dispute your experience, I have to say that word processors (or IM clients) that flag suspect words has actually improved my spelling. I see the mispelled words so often that I start making a mental note of the ones I screw up the most, one at a time. I'm a lousy speller, but I actually find that that is helping.
What are we guys doing?
As I've said, I agree that this money really should be sent out through the Dept. of Education in a perfect world. But for whatever reason, it isn't being sent through there. (In fairness, there are times when funding NASA to do the education does makes a fair amount of sense. There are a number of projects out there to hook up scientists with classrooms, for example. Getting Dept. of Ed. to run the program just adds to the beauracratic overhead in those cases.)
Also, I don't think anything is making NASA look overfunded. This does give pundits a way to labeling the spending "pork", whether it is or not.
First of all, NASA's mission statement isn't just for space exploration. It's for aerospace research *and* space research. That's significant because it highlights NASA's interests in math and science education in this country. While I would agree that the Dept. of Education should really be funding such initiatives, they clearly don't. (At least, they don't fund enough.) That leaves other agencies with vested interests to fill in the gaps.
In any case, what does it matter which agency provides the money? NASA's budget is written with this stuff in mind. If they didn't fund education initiatives, they wouldn't get those few millions to begin with. If you want to see places where NASA has reallocated its own budget from one area to another, look at ISS. It's sucked up all kinds of money from construction, especially from the science on ISS. Congress has had to specifically get involved and block that in the past, in fact.
"If you've checked the prices on tutition and contact hours recently you'd know that if a school wants something useful, they'd just cut a check and buy it,"
You really don't understand the way higher education is funded. Tuition typically covers something like a third of the price of a college education at the more expensive schools. It's even less at public universities. The biggest source of funding for the latter typically comes from contract and grant overhead, which is often around 50% or higher. A few thousand dollars of tution from each student doesn't go very far to educate the kids.
In fact, universities across the country are struggling to provide all of the facilities and services that their students need and, in some cases, demand-but-don't-need. Here in Colorado, the only way they were able to get a new Law building (required for reaccreditation for the Law School) built was by the students passing their own student fee to pay for it. Other building projects have been delayed for years for lack of money. (Except the stadium expansion, which was paid for by athletics. But that's a rant for a different time.)
And if you think that K-12 schools can just write checks for whatever they want or need, you either went to a very privledged school (either private or just affluent) or you didn't pay attention while you were there.
Considering that NASA's primary mission is to further US interests in space and aerospace and that education is considered a key part of that, I don't see why helping schools and colleges out with their math and science education goes against their mission at all. And considering how useless and expensive ISS is, I'd pick education of ISS every time.
It could well be argued that even when ISS *is* doing research, it's money being thrown away. Thanks to budget overruns and shortfalls, almost all of the useful science has been cut of out ISS anyway. For example, it isn't going to tell us anything new about our response to radiation in space or to weightlessness. They cut out the big hamster wheel designed to test how many g's a human needs to stay fit enough to walk around after landing on Mars. The list goes on, but what they're left with are mostly science fair projects in space. So while I'm always sad to see research cut, in this case I kind of hope that maybe this might serve as a wake up call to Congress and the American public to realize that ISS serves no purpose other than to be built. If that's what taxpayers want, fine. But they should understand that that is all they are getting for their billions.
The aquarium I'm not sure about. But as a rule, NASA not only funds space missions, it funds space *research*. This requires labs and computers. It also has (to varying degrees over time) funded science education initiatives under the logic that this ensures that the next generation of engineers and scientists will be there when we need them in 20 years. Realistically, it isn't enough to persue agressively the science and engineer research: we have to be able to sustain it for it to keep us on top. "Sure," you say, "but shouldn't the NSF of the Dept. of Eduction be funding that stuff?" Probably. But they don't, so NASA has to step in.
I can imagine reasons why the aquarium would get NASA funding (think Europa), but without knowing the details it's hard to evaluate the merits.
Not necessarily. The two types of statistics (internet and overall) that I gave don't compare directly. The ones for the internet said something to the effect of "percent of teens who are approached for sex." This does not mean that they responded in any way. In fact, the first study says that most of them block the person. Which is pretty much what they should do. That's a near-success story. (Success would be if strangers didn't every approach people for sex ... unless the approachee had made the invitation in her or his profile.)
It looks to me as if more stats are needed on this topic, but I'm a numbers-nerd.