And it’s not anti-religious. Useful to know.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
And it’s not anti-religious. Useful to know.
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Before Common Error and Common Error. I like that. So, now what does AD stand for?
@ ^ René : Alternating Curent vs Direct Curent?
As in ACDC?
Huh. Axtually no chemical element as A. Actinium but not A. Odd that
A D = Sirian style dwarf star? TA type but dwarf eg Sirius A, Porcyon A & Van Maanen’s Star?
Anonymous D .. something?.
A type stars exist that is not TA .. T being brown dwarfs and A stars like Sirius, Vega, Fomalhaut, Altair..
https://www.britannica.com/science/A-type-star
Also obvs Procyon the Liittle Dog Star (Alpha Canis Minoris) but typo because the computer seems to switch letters around on me.. & hide that until after I’ve clicked post comment too..
Also Sirius B a.k.a. the Pup, Procyon B i.e. The Little Pup, Van Maanen’s Star.. Coz ..yeah. Mea culpa. I knew what I meant ..
What does Tyson mean by “accurate”?
Dunno but he doesn’t count Pluto so not that accurate in my view. Coz Pluto ain’t no asteroid nor comet, has more moons than the entire inner solar system combined, has dynamic active geology, atmosphere, cryovulcanism and definitely is a planet in my view. Admittedly I am biased but.. Hey, put Earth where Pluti is & we wouldn’t be a planet either & the IAU def’n is flawed as Fuck..
@chigau —
Yeah, “accurate” bothered me as well. Not the right word here, but I admit it’s hard to find a substitute. “Most practical”? “Obviously the right way to do it”?
Also, it’s puzzling why Tyson gets so worked up about this — he could have just explained the reason for his preference (wrong as it is). I guess when you’re on Rogan, it’s de rigueur that you make a big deal out of your contrarian opinion.
I sometimes wonder whether Tyson checks the accuracy of anything before he blurts it out with such confidence and aggression.
On the other hand, he was right about Pluto. Stopped clocks, and all that…
@StevoR: “Alternating Curent vs Direct Curent?” At some point in my professional past, working for Larry E., I had the prerogative of reporting bugs in the database. My reporting of the buggy misspelling of “ocuring” was the record number of bugs at the time in one bug report.
Tyson is right a lot more often than a stopped clock. But yeah, I don’t always agree with his take, and my disagreement seems to happen a bit more often than for some other science educators I could name.
As for Pluto, that’s a complete non-issue but people sure do have strong opinions on that, don’t they. My 6-year-old neighbor calls it his favorite planet, and I haven’t felt much need to correct him. Frankly, I think the biggest issue about Pluto is what to tell the children! Astronomers all know what Pluto is — what name you want to classify it as is just a convention.
Hmm, I suppose it might be bad form to imply, in a biology blog, that taxonomy is unimportant. But that wasn’t my point at all — rather the contrary: distinctions are indeed important, it’s just that the particular words we use for them aren’t.
@StevoR: And if you put Earth in orbit around Jupiter, it would change from a planet to a moon. But the whole point is the way the solar system is structured, you don’t expect objects that massive to form in such places…just smaller ones like Pluto and Eris and Haumea and Makemake and Quaoar, all of which should still be expected to be fascinating. Criticizing a classification for not working on non-existent objects is kind of like faulting vertebrate taxonomy for having no place for griffons.
NDT’s screeching about accuracy is pretty funny because 1 AD is wrong by at least four years. Jesus is claimed to have been born during the reign of Herod the Great, but he died in 4 BC.
PZ is right, it’s not anti-religious. McClellan does a great job of calmly, factually and objectively countering Neil DeGrassyass’s rant.
And, if Neil DeGrassyass is right and the gregorian calendar is so great, why do we have to patch it with leapyear compensations? (I don’t remember the details, but wasn’t there a Mayan stone calendar that was a lot better? Probably wasn’t a pocket version, though.)
@5 StevoR said: but he doesn’t count Pluto . . . has more moons than the entire inner solar system combined
I reply: Pluto? more moons? are you Sirius? Even though Neil made a real ass of himself, I don’t ever want to see even one of Neil’s full moons!
The Moon takes 27.3 days to orbit Earth, but the lunar phase cycle (from new Moon to new Moon) is 29.5 days. The Moon spends the extra 2.2 days “catching up” because Earth travels about 45 million miles around the Sun during the time the Moon completes one orbit around Earth.
And neither of those calendars includes a year zero.
The leap year patches are part of the Gregorian calendar. And they compensate for the fact that a solar year is not an integral number of days. It is 365.2422 days (according to teh Interwebs). So adding and extra day every 4th year is equivalent to 0.25 days per year, and makes it come out almost even, with some of the remaining error taken up by the 100 year rule and the 400 year rule.
So, your objection is not well founded.
@14
How The Mayans Measured Time
@5: “Coz Pluto ain’t no asteroid nor comet, has more moons than the entire inner solar system”
What a nonsensical argument!
Those 3 moons combined have vastly more mass than Pluto’s 5 combined. In fact our own moon by itself does. But moons don’t count anyway, so far as the actual definition of “planet” goes.
Many asteroids have moons, but they aren’t planets or dwarf planets. Mercury has none, but it is fer sure a planet.
Before you argue with the definition maybe you should know what the definition actually is, ya know? And number of moons isn’t part of the definition.
Yeah, it ain’t an asteroid nor is it a comet. So what ? It’s also not a planet. Just as, for example, Ceres. Ceres and Pluto are dwarf planets because they satisfy the definition of one.
The definitions were developed by Astronomers. If we don’t let Astronomers define what to call the objects they observe, then who? The ancient Greeks? But then it follows that all the planets are Gods.
@16-18 Reginald Selkirk said: The leap year patches are part of the Gregorian calendar.
I reply: Dear Mr. Selkirk. Thank You for all the pertinent info. I was always taught in grade school that the leap year days weren’t part of the calendar. But we were taught a lot of inaccurate things back then.
One other question: what about sidereal time? Does that have any correlation to a calendar-like system? would it be more accurate? (but, probably would be very cumbersome to put on a wall calendar)
@17: “And neither of those calendars includes a year zero.”
Mainly because when these calendars were established, zero was not known in the lands where they were established in.
@21 Ed Seedhouse said: zero was not known in the lands where they were established in.
I reply: do I remember correctly that it was Islamic mathemeticians that were among the first to consider the concept of zero?
@14: “Neil DeGrassyass is right and the gregorian calendar is so great, why do we have to patch it with leapyear compensations?”
Because the time it takes Earth to go around the sun is not evenly divisible by any number of days. Silly old earth!
Hindu. Which means that the West got it third hand.
Same for decimal positioning notation.
@rblackadar #10 & 11
For what it’s worth, as a biologist, I don’t consider one to imply the other. Rather, a proper understanding of biology implies that any system of classification can only ever be conventional and that mere descent doesn’t necessarily tell you much about the reality you’re dealing with.
@LykeX
Thanks, yes, taxonomy as a metaphor here is pretty weak — I was just thinking, as a birder, about how I react when there’s a change of classification, e.g. what I used to call a Winter Wren here in CA is now Pacific Wren because the species was split. Sure it’s inconvenient — I have to make a notation in my book (or get a new one) — but it would be silly to get upset about it. Best to stay current, despite old habits.
I wonder if the Pluto hardliners are aware that back in the 1800’s, for about half a century. Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta were called planets too, until they weren’t.
I want to slightly revise what I said previously. Although conventions don’t affect reality, some conventions clearly make more sense than others. As for choice of words to describe them, most informative/least confusing is best, other things being equal.
I’d be happy to toss the Gregorian calendar on the trash heap of history, especially the year numbering, but getting people to agree to a new calendar is harder than getting them to agree that Pluto’s not a planet.
@shermanj #20: The “patches” are the difference between the Gregorian calendar, and the Julian. In other words, most of this was already worked out by Caesar’s time (although of course Augustus needed to claim a month for himself). The year numbering came later. Much later (in 1582), Pope Gregory’s people noticed the remaining error, so they added the “skip leap day every hundred years, except every four hundred years” rule; and to realign it with Caesar’s days, they skipped ten days upon adopting it. That caused much consternation among some people, and it took hundreds of years for the “new calendar” to be universally accepted (to the extent it has been). If you’re not familiar with this history, you should read up on it — it’s really quite hilarious.
Next question: In the year 2023, why is a (non-Shorts) YouTube video in fucking vertical video mode? Gah!!
There are actually better alternatives to the Gregorian calendar.
• The Revised Julian skips the leap year 7 times every 900 years (year=365.242222… days) instead of 3 times every 400 years.
• Skipping the leap year every 128 years gives a year length of 365.2421875 days, which is even closer.
Not that I’m holding my breath waiting for the world to switch to either of these. Also the earth’s rotation is sufficiently irregular that by the time these make any difference, the solar day is going to be out of whack anyway.
@13
Matthew’s nativity has Jesus born in the last years of Herod (~6BC)
Luke’s nativity has Jesus born during the post-Roman-annexation census (~6AD)
I am virtually certain (*) that Dionysius knew about the discrepancy, knew that it was as much as his life was worth to make noise about it (the 500s AD being Not A Good Era to be Branded as a Heretic), and so he quietly split the difference.
() The usual narrative that he somehow overlooked n years in the reign of Augustus is ludicrous; if that were true, we’d have n years of uncertainty in all of the BC dates. Also, I figure if there was *anything the Romans were good at, it was keeping track of what year it was: They kept a list of consuls (their preferred method of naming the years) going all the way back to the start of the Republic (500BC) long after all other records from that era had been lost.
A bit like a temperature scale with negative values; thus the value of the Kelvin.
But that’s how this whole thing works — pick a reference date, then indicate the distance from that date in either direction.
(Of course, this is a different consideration to metricating time)
So, Jewish writers used BCE/CE not to dereligiousize BC/AD, but to dechristianize it? That sounds like the same thing to me. Unless BCE/CE has some religious significance to Judaism that they forgot to tell me about in Hebrew School, it’s a complete secularization. If Jewish writers of the time wanted to refer to the year 1581 in a religious, but not Christianized way they’d call it 5341 (or 2 if it’s after the Jewish New Year) because that’s the year their religion says it is.
@shermanj #20,
Sidereal time, which is measured against the fixed stars, is useful for some physics like the Coriolois force and also interplanetary travel and the like. With respect to the fixed stars, the Earth’s sidereal day is about 4 minutes short of 24 hours. However, down here on Earth, we use solar time whose day is 24 hours, as it is much more convenient because the Sun rising and setting has much more effect on our ‘daily’ lives than when say Deneb rises and sets.
There is a difference between being anti-religious and being purposely secular. I use CE and BCE because it is secular and universal, and that’s a positive thing not a negative thing.
There’s a difference between “Gregorian calendar, named after a person who promoted it, and “BC/AD”, named after our supposed lord and savior. Naming the calendar after Greg pays respects to the man; naming years after JC pays respects to a faith.
So it really was a Jewish conspiracy?
@31–
Jewish writers were objecting to a system that covertly implied Christian fealty and were not objecting to religiosity itself. Most of those Jewish writers were themselves very religious, so it wouldn’t make sense for them to push an anti-religious agenda. And as you note, they were happy to use year numbers that refer (rather inaccurately) to the birth of Jesus. So the decision to use CE/BCE wasn’t even anti-Christian (as the video points out, the CE/BCE system was invented by Christians), more anti-being-forced-to-concede-Christian-faith-every-time-I-write-the-date.
And I think I see why this confusion has arisen. You seem to share the common belief that ‘secular’ means ‘anti-religious.’ It does not. A secular society allows religious belief and worship, but does not allow it special political privileges. In mediaevel Europe, there were even people known as ‘secular priests’, that is, clergy who were not attached to any specific monastic tradition, and they were often held in higher regard by the community because they spent more time on their social duties and less time squirreled away performing archaic rituals. A society that actively suppresses all religious practice, such as Stalinist USSR, is not secular. Of course, the people who want theocratic rule or want their church not to be exposed to normal responsibilities under the law often use secularism to mean anti-religious, but that’s because they want to retain or regain their special political privileges.
The famous ‘Mammoth Cheese’ was sent as a gift to Thomas Jefferson in 1802 for his efforts in secularising the nation. This gift was given by the Baptist community in New England. Yes, a religious sect gave a gift to celebrate secularisation! Why? Well, the Baptists in New England were a minority that had been subject to discrimination and persecution by the Calvinist majority. They knew the difference between ‘secular’ and ‘anti-religious’.
@ 21 Ed Seedhouse
I don’t understand why anyone thinks there should be a year zero. If you’re going to pick a point in time and measure time forwards and backwards from that point; then the first 365 days is the first year, or year 1 CE, the next 365 days is the second year, etc. And likewise going backwards.
The counter to this is to say we could count it like birthdays. If someone says their kid is 9, we understand they mean more than 9 years have passed since birth, but less than 10. If we did the same with calendar years – that is, it’s not year one until 365 days have passed – there would be, not “a” year zero, but two. Zero CE, and Zero BCE.
But to be consistent we would have to do the same with centuries. Instead of the first century CE, the zeroeth century CE.
It makes more sense to me the way it is – to call the first year (the first 365 day period) following “point zero” to be year 1.
Nine years ago thonyc at the Renaissance Mathematicus did a takedown of NdGT on this very topic.
I note that “Vulgar era” was also used instead of “Common Era” (Vulgar being Latin for common).
Someone back in antiquity wrote a calendar mode for emacs which allowed one to get the current date in multiple calendars including Julian, Hebrew, Islamic, French Revolutionary, Mayan (all three of their calendars), Coptic, Persian, …
The French Revolutionary calendar is one of the more interesting experiments out there. It tried, to a degree, to decimalize things so the original calendar had the day divided into 10 ‘hours’ with the hours divided into 100 ‘minutes’ and each minute into 100 ‘seconds’ (this did not catch on at all). There were still 12 months to the year but they were given new names with the suffix indicating which season. Each month was 30 days long. Each month was also divided into 3 décades of 10 days each. The 5 or 6 extra days were outside the months/décades and were set between Fructidor (August/September) and Vendémiaire (late September/October) and were a long holiday celebrating the revolution. So today is 13 Prairial an 231 de la Révolution
chrislawson @36, never heard of the Mammoth Cheese. Although, it did immediately set me to wondering, howinhell did they manage to turn such a behemoth of a cheese while curing it?
I’m sure that, for the workers, it was a pure labor of loathe.
Well, back to diverting myself from the discomforts of my own folly. I entirely failed to consult a map before journeying afoot to the Y today, which turned out to be 5 miles each way, in 95° F heat, terminating in a hill of such a slope that I’m certain the crew aboard the ISS heard my muttered profanity while scaling it. So, I’m sunburned, with legs and back that feel like that cheese wheel freewheeled over them. To insure the folly was complete, somehow I had managed to have mobile data not working on my phone, denying me the use of the onboard mapping software.
Perhaps this weekend I’ll outdo such a journey and go streaking through the solar corona.
@37:”I don’t understand why anyone thinks there should be a year zero”
I didn’t say there should be, only that zero was not a thing when the current system was put in place.
A year zero would, however, mean that people would be right to celebrate the turn of decades, centuries and millennia on the start of years ending in zeroes, as they universally do, instead of the theoretically correct years ending in ones.
Well, I certainly celebrated Y2K with great enthusiasm. Largely, because I’d not have to listen to any more doomsday hype, both on the IT side and mythical catastrophe side.
@19. Ed Seedhouse : “Those 3 moons combined have vastly more mass than Pluto’s 5 combined. In fact our own moon by itself does. But moons don’t count anyway, so far as the actual definition of “planet” goes.”
3? You’re behind the times! Pluto has 5 moons – Charon, Nix, Hydra, Styx and Kerberos – not 3. :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moons_of_Pluto
I know multiple definitions for planet – & why the IAU one fails. For starters it says a planet can only orbit our sun which is ridiculuous sicne we know exoplanets exist around ther stars and also flating around not orbiting any stars at all. (Rogue planets.) Then it also has the absurd orbital clearence condition which is terminally flawed because it means planets close to their stars have an huge advantage over more distant ones. For instance, put Mercury where Pluto is and it ceases to be a planet. Ditto Mars and Earth etc .. It also begs the question of defining “clear” and what that menas – note all planets have asteroid and comets in their path so are any of them then actual planets? It raises more questions and problems than it answers. It also means planets can’t collide becuuse if say Mercury was shifted into a collision course with Earth it wouldn’t have a clear orbit – so at that point technically both Mercury and Earth wuld stop being planets and become ..what? Its just a mess and wrong.
My definition of planet FWIW – an object that isn’t self-luminous from core nuclear fusion so not a star, gravitationally rounded so not an asteroid or comet and not directly orbiting another planet so not a moon. By this defintion Pluto is indeed a planet.
Yeah and our Sun is a dwarf star. Does that then mean it isn’t a star? Almost all stars are dwarf stars with red dwarfs being the vest majority – the smallest and faintest ones. Same here. Pluto is a dwarf planet but dwarf planets are types of planet and thus stillplanets just like the very different to ours ice giants (eg Neptune) and gas giants are still planets. Dwarf planet is a sub-class of planet and like with stars, most planets are dwarfs – indeed counting all the planets inluding ice dwarf varieties as well as rocky earth-mass, ice giant and gas giant ones Pluto is actually larger than average and one of the largest and most massive because when you look at Eris, Sedna, Haumea, Ceres, Orcus, Varuna, Makemake, Quaoar, Ixion, etc .. Pluto is larger than all of those at least in diameter and virtually equal to Eris in mass. See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trans-Neptunian_objects
Yes astronomers define things in astronomy but you do know that astronomers don’t all agree and that there are alternative defintions that are better than the controversial and as I’ve noted logically and scientifically flawed IAU one which will hopefully be replaced with one of the better alternatives soon.
@12. monad
Yet Pluto exists as do other ice dwarf type planets so they aren’t “non-existant” and we’re discovering lots of planets that we didn’t expect (eg Hot Jupiters) and that break the previous rules and test the boundaries yet are still planets. At least to reasonable people’s defintions so not in the IAU sense which is unduly and inappropriately restrictive and exclusive which also as noted rules out planets existing around other stars by absurd defintion.
Also key point here shown by Hot Jupiters but also other exoplanets generally is that just because something forms in one place doesn’t mean it stays there, since planetary orbits can change with them migrating both inwards and outwards. Some migrating planets will eject other planets from the solar system – something thought to have happened in our own systems early days.* If Earth was shifted to our outer solar system into an orbit too large to clear would it then cease being a planet? Do planets that don’t orbit stars stop being planets? Did the ejected 5th ice giant* suggested for our early solar system stop being a planet when it was ejected? I don’t think so & think that claiming it did is plain silly! Which is why the IAU definition fails.
@15. shermanj :
LOL. I see what you did there! Yes – Pluto’s quintet of moons (seelink above here) is more than the entire inner solars systems 3 of our Moon, plus Martian Phobos & Diemos.
@5 StevoR said: but he doesn’t count Pluto . . . has more moons than the entire inner solar system combined
I reply: Pluto? more moons? are you Sirius? Even though Neil made a real ass of himself, I don’t ever want to see even one of Neil’s full moons!
.* See : https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111110142102.htm
^ Dóh! Seems I misread Ed Seedhouse’s #19 there – my apologies. Thought he was saying it was 3 moons for Pluto not the inner solar system. Yeah, it is true that moons don’t count for the definition but I still think its interesting and notable that Pluto has more moons than Earth, Venus & Mars combined. Mass-wise,well, our Moon is exceptionally large as is Pluto’s Charon which is definitely much larger and more massive than Phobos and Deimos which are comparable with Nix, Styx and Kerberos. Off topic anyhow.
SteveoR, I consider a planet like biology considers a virus.
Example, Earth orbits Jupiter. Moon the mass greater than most of the planets?
Planets, like life are defined by current understanding of the state of the art of science.
An ever improving, ever evolving thing.
Not fixated upon what is around what, like a cock ring.
After all, Sag A*’s closest planet would always be a planet and everything any other star system could present a moon, bigger cock ring, poor definition of cock.
As a point of order, and because I’m an inveterate pedant, I would like to point out that BC was never used in Medieval Latin. Because it isn’t Latin, it’s a translation from the Latin. The original equivalent that was used is AC (ante Christum) or more usually ACN (ante Christum natum), though Bede, who was mentioned in the video as the first on record to give a “BC” date actually used “ante incarnationis dominicae tempus” (before the time of the incarnation of the lord), and didn’t abbreviate the phrase to initials.
StevoR @43: Ethan Siegel on Pluto.
We understand planets better than ever, and that’s why Pluto still isn’t one
The most disappointing bit of DeGrasse’s video is that he agreed to appear on Joe Fucking Rogan’s show. spits!
To whom is a system of dating based on the (however erroneously calculated) birth of Jesus Christ “common”? The powers of what one could then call Christendom spread across and took over large chunks of the non-Christian world, imposing their calendar on people whose own calendars were calculated from other real or imagined events, often religious.
That said, a common calendar is a useful thing, however arrived at, and cosmetically de-Christianizing the calendar of the dominant powers is the least one can do. Literally.
@44:
Thanks for admitting your reading error. But, judging from your further comments, you seem to have a habit of misreading things about science. Maybe you could work on that before you pontificate about such things.
I am not surprised at NDGT’s vehemence. That’s just a guy insisting he’s right. Definitely not mistaken. And there are reasons. He can make them up on the spot.
It’s when he’s writing (as opposed to being interviewed) that he’s usually more nuanced. But yea he’s used to being right and he’ll get quite loud and insistent when he’s challenged – because people usually back down when someone loud and insistent refuses to admit they are wrong. People are wired that way, and NDGT is wired to have learned it, as well.
But NDGT isn’t a crusader for Christians, not by a long shot. He just like to say stuff.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/neil-degrasse-tyson-stands-his-ground-after-offending-christ
Helge @51: Funny story. That same Christmas, Tyson sent a tweet;
Apparently, neither Santa nor Tyson know physics, because “red light penetrates fog best” is bullshit. And he repeated it in an NPR interview. I dug a little bit, and couldn’t find anyone correcting him to his face.
It does appear to be a common misconception, but from a science communicator presumably trained in physics, its inexcusable.
@26. rblackadar : “I wonder if the Pluto hardliners are aware that back in the 1800’s, for about half a century. Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta were called planets too, until they weren’t.”
Yes I knew that. Ceres at least is now known to be a dwarf planet – which as noted should mean planet of the dwarf variety, dwarf describing its size and planet that it’s well, a planet. Same fro Pluto, Makemake, Eris, Haumea, Sedna and many others.
BTW. Whilst onastronomy trivia, Uranus was first described as a star and then as a comet before people realised it wa sactually a planet – and as the only one with a Greek rather than Roman name should really be spelt Ouranos.
@50. Ed Seedhouse : “Thanks for admitting your reading error. But, judging from your further comments, you seem to have a habit of misreading things about science. Maybe you could work on that before you pontificate about such things.”
No worries and again mea culpa but seriously what else do you think I am misreading here and why please?
@47. Rob Grigjanis : I like Ethan Siegel and am a fan but on this we disagree. I also like Ken Croswell and think he is correct here in this article :
http://kencroswell.com/NinthRockFromTheSun.html
With his two intrestng Pluto questions here : http://kencroswell.com/PlutoQuestion2.html
Providing food for thought as well. There’s also his noting of the analogous exoplanet orbits with HD 45364. here :
http://kencroswell.com/HD45364.html
Showing that even large planets can have unclear and crossing orbits thus again, the “orbital clearence” criterion fails..
Try answering Ken Croswell’s other Pluto question here :
http://kencroswell.com/PlutoQuestion.html
Pluto expert who of course led the NewHorizons mission explains : why Pluto is a planet here in a 40 min youtube clip.
Plus as this 2021 news article notes we have an ongoing scientific debate here :
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/pluto-planet-debate-rages-rcna8848
with, well, me and many experts on the Pluto and other ice dwarfs are planets side.
Also :
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2021/02/15/yes-pluto-is-a-planet-says-nasa-scientist-at-the-site-of-its-discovery-91-years-ago-this-week/?sh=75ac9c7568df
&
https://www.gainesville.com/story/news/2010/03/14/laurel-kornfeld-pluto-still-a-planet/31747665007/
In addtion to : https://phys.org/news/2022-08-pluto-planet-longer.html
Stevo, it’s not a fucking planet.
Get over it. It’s a largish Kuiper belt object. You’re literally raging about an entirely reasonable definition the IAC came up with in 2006!
They literally only invented the term “dwarf planet” as a sop for crybabies who want it to be a planet. It’s not a planet. Deal with it.
StevoR, I shan’t belabour the point, but on this topic, you quite like Gerrard on nuclear power.
Well, other than at least Gerrard does it about an important issue, whereas you do it about mere nomenclature.
(The disdain for scientific bodies, the cherry-picking of the odd dissenters, the hodge-podge of popular pieces — recognise those?)
#56 IAU, whatever.
@ 56. Silentbob : The llnks and articles I’ve already shared and points made in #43 show why it the IAU definition is NOT in fact “reasonable.” Your weirdly abusive evidence and logic free, unsupported assertion heavy rant here puzzles me as does your hostility here.
@37. John Morales : odd dissenters? Did you hera whta Alan Stern noted in the linked youtube in #54.
Nope. Not one bit.
You’re the one hung up on it.
You don’t like how the IAU classifies it, but that doesn’t make the IAU wrong, or its critics right, since it’s purely a matter of definition.
Does not matter one whit, since Pluto is whatever it is regardless of how someone classifies it.
(Such a triviality!)