Thursday, August 24, 2006

Weighing In On Pluto

Jerry takes stock of the Pluto situation:
Now that Pluto has been demoted to the status of "dwarf planet", I think that its name should be changed. How about "Dopey"?
I think this is all very silly. Why not keep Pluto around as a planet, in honor of its status as the biggest of the Plutons, whatever its size might be? It's all just a size distribution anyway, and any planetary definition has to have a more-or-less arbitrary cutoff.

But the debate IS getting Astronomy some unexpected, and welcome, press. Help crowd out that Jon Benet stuff!

Let's call Pluto 'Some upstart snowball whirling in the darkness that thinks it's a planet planet.'

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