Creek Running North

And the number of moons of Jupiter has changed since you were a four year old smart-alec; but i am sure the number listed today, will change again in another year or so.

“This is the stupidest argument I’ve heard of in a long time.” I hope this isn’t just self-referential to your own “hissy dog” one.  Are we really to make some strange assumptive leap that human beings for dozens of millenia didn’t know the freaking difference???  Sorry, just being snarky because you said i couldn’t comment about deniability.

Actually your point three gets even better with the new category of “plutons” for which Pluto is now the official prototype.  Thus we add Charon and Xena and some as yet not “given the coolest name ever” identified orbiting body.  Then there is the ongoing debates: (my friend Amara is attending the conference) about whether Charon (which appears to be either a moon of Pluto, or some type of binary symbiote) will require our own moon to be reclassified; naming Xena and the aforementioned 2003 UB313; and of course whether the geological term pluton can be coopted by astronomy??

Speaking of really big science news there is much speculation and anticipation about NASA/JPL planned announcement for monday.  If you are interested in such things as Dark Matter

For clarity sake, here is a brief description of the naming debate from Caltech:
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/planetlila/

The planet, with the current temporary (and unfortunate) name 2003UB313, was discovered in an ongoing survey at Palomar Observatory’s Samuel Oschin telescope by astronomers Mike Brown (Caltech), Chad Trujillo (Gemini Observatory), and David Rabinowitz (Yale University).

About the name: The real name of the new planet is currently in limbo while committees decide its fate. For those speculating that the name will be “Lila” based on the web site name I must warn you that that is really just a sentimental dad’s early-morning-after-no-sleep naming of a web site for his (at the time) three week old daughter and one should not take it too seriously! In fact, the sentimental dad was so tired he even spelled his own daughter’s name wrong (it is “Lilah"). The name “Xena” is frequently heard associated with this planet; this name comes from an internal code name that we used before we publically announced the existence of the planet. Other code names have been “Santa” (2003 EL61), “Rudolph” (the moon of 2003 EL61), “Easterbunny” (2005 FY9) and “Flying Dutchman” (Sedna), and “Gabrielle” (the moon of 2003 UB313). We use these names internally simply because they are easier to say and remember than things like 2003 EL61 or S/2005 (2003 UB313) 1 . There is no chance whatsoever that these will become the permanent names of these objects! As soon as the committees make their decisions these objects will get real names. When we first announced the existence of these objects we thought that the real names would be decided in days to weeks, not months to years so it never occured to us that these code names would last more than a few days. We hope the committees decide soon so people can start getting used to the real more dignified names soon!

This argument about planets reminds me of a story. On a hike out to Cape Alava on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, my friends and I fell into a debate over the difference between a stump and a “dead log.” Various taxonomical schemes were proposed, based on such things as the presence or absence of limbs, and whether the tree/stump in question was taller than it was wide. We had several examples to choose from, but could never entirely agree. Scott, the most conflict-averse of our lot, finally tired of the discussion and suggested we agree to disagree.

Fast forward to a couple of years later, and the same group of friends are on a road trip to the Utah desert near Moab. As residents of the rain-forested Northwest, we were mystified by the difference between a mesa and a butte. The terms kept showing up perplexingly in our guide books and in displays at ranger stations and local shops. We tried to puzzle it out with one theory after another, to no avail. Finally, while browsing in the visitor’s center at Dead Horse Point State Park, which has a beautiful view over a bend in the Colorado River, we found our answer. According to the experts, a butte was taller than it was wide, and a mesa was wider than it was tall.

Always one to jump head first into philosophical dilemmas, I quickly asked “What if it’s exactly as high as it is wide?”

Said Scott, “It’s a stump.”

I seem to attract or provoke these kind of arguments. My wife and I once had an hours-long debate about the difference between a swamp, a marsh, a bog, and a fen. It finally ended when we ended up in another conversation about whether the previous conversation had been an argument or a discussion. Then years later, in an orthodontist’s office, I picked up an old copy of Field and Stream or something like that, and there was a detailed discussion of exactly what the differences were between various wetlands. (Last I checked, Wikipedia can resolve this issue too, for anyone who’s curious.) I’m still looking for the article resolving the discussion/argument or dead tree/stump dilemmas.

I’ve been watching this for months and waiting for the announcement.

The only thing that would have pissed me off is if they had decided that Pluto would be a planet “so we don’t upset the schoolchildren” etc., like some people had complained.

Plus, I’ve always kinda felt that Ceres got ripped off, so I’m glad to see it’s probably back in again.

Some people are complaining that the Pluto/Charon thing is “messy,” but hey - whos ta say we can’t have a dual planet?

The one thing I don’t quite get… Charon is a planet because its round and it orbits a spot that is not inside the surface of another object. OK, I’m cool with that…

But then Pluto’s other moons are NOT planets because they aren’t round (ok, I’m following you) so instead they are just saying they are gonna just keep calling them moons… BUT, they also orbit a spot NOT inside Pluto’s surface.

So doesn’t that make them… thingies? Something else? Satellites-of-not-a-planet? Co-orbital companions? Fashionable Accessories?

“Moons of Nothing.” I vote for that.
Sounds maudlin. Makes you feel sorry for the poor little guys. Sounds like a Seals and Crofts song.

Hmm—have to disagree, actually.  It really is just a label.  Sure, there are definitely interesting issues about the origin of planets, the differences between gas giants and terrestrial bodies and planetesimals, and the nature of the Kuiper and asteroid belts; but this isn’t any of those issues.  It’s just “what Solar-System objects should we call `planets’?” About which I am firmly in the “who cares?” camp.  Glad to see people talking about astronomy, but sorry to see that they act as if Nature has an intrinsic category of “planet-ness” and we’re just trying to see what objects fit into it, which isn’t what’s happening at all.

But isn’t that what we do? Is an animal a different species or just a subspecies, or even that? Sure, some things can’t have fertile offspring that aren’t squished into rough spheres by their own gravity or some such… but it’s all just “stuff” until we decide how to categorize it.

Sure, some things can’t have fertile offspring that aren’t squished into rough spheres by their own gravity or some such

Consider a spherical cow…

Have I already bored you with my recent Day out with my nephew and our ensuing Correspondence for the Ages? Yes? Oops, sorry.

Ok, I’ll bore you with a teaching story instead. I was teaching a once-a-week version (one 3-hour class/week) of my human origins class, and a student was getting confused about relationships between African and Asian hominids.

She wanted to know whey we don’t have a nice connect-the-dots fossil trail showing the path that hominids took as they migrated out of Africa and into Asia. I’d already covered how fossilization occurs, why it’s incredibly unlikely under most circumstances, why some circumstances are more conducive to it than others and so on. I also added that we’ve really only been doing research on this for a comparatively short time, and that we don’t have equal access to all of the places of interest, so it’s a matter of opportunity and being aware that we make new discoveries all the time. She looked a bit unconvinced. I remarked on this and she admitted that it all seemed like “one big coincidence.”

I tried to draw an analogy to my field work, in which she’s shown an interest in the past. I explained that, where I work, preservation of materials is incredible. As a result, we’re lucky to have great recovery, but even under those circumstances, and over an incredibly minor fraction of the time we’re talking about in terms of evolution, we still lose some material to natural processes. She nodded and seemed a bit more satisfied. She thanked me and gathered up her things. At the door to the classroom, she turned back and asked, “So, at night, you never lie there and think ‘None of this is true’?”

I told her in less emphatic terms than I’m writing here: No. No I don’t. Which is not the same as not questioning and not feeling that individual elements haven’t quite been shaken out in a way that’s satisfactory. It’s not to say I don’t want to understand how it happened and why it happened in a much more detailed way. It’s not to say I don’t have to step away from it some times and view things from a new angle. But I can’t imagine what it would be like to base the way I view the world on something that I COULD lie awake and think “NONE of this---not one concept, not one mechanism---none of this is true.”

It bothered and frustrated me at the time. As it happened, she had to miss the following week of class, as well, so I was left stewing for 2 weeks feeling like I wasn’t getting through to even one of the very good students.

The week she was back she said, “I was thinking about you during my whole vacation, and what I said to you at the end of class. I didn’t mean it like that!”

I said, “Ok, what did you mean, then?”

She furrowed her brow and said, “It’s just . . . I don’t mean it like ‘Oh, no evolution ever happened.’ But I’m surprised at how much it all shifts.”

I replied that it does, indeed, shift a lot as we find new data.

She nodded, obviously still trying to find the right words, “But that’s good, right? I mean, like those plants (referring to the article in Nature regarding plants that seem able to revert to grandparental genes when they inherit maladaptive copies from their parents). It doesn’t mean Mendel was all wrong, but you’ll teach about that next time. As something new that we know now that he didn’t know.”

I said that, yes, I will incorporate that as another extra-Mendelian mechanism that makes inheritance more complex than he’d anticipated.

“And I won’t be there! I won’t know!” She looked genuinely glum at this prospect, and I pointed out to her that she’d seen the article on the plants in the news, so she did have some access to new information.

“Oh, I don’t read science news articles the same way anymore! The twist everything for headlines!”

So the excitement and interest in this stuff, it happens. Intermittently, true, but also in unlikely and cool places.

What do you expect, considering this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/15/science/sciencespecial2/15evo.html?_r=1

Did Humans Evolve? Not Us, Say Americans
New York Times
August 15, 2006

In surveys conducted in 2005, people in the United States and 32 European countries were asked whether to respond “true,� “false� or “not sure� to this statement: “Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.� The same question was posed to Japanese adults in 2001. The United States had the second-highest percentage of adults who said the statement was false and the second-lowest percentage who said the statement was true, researchers reported in the current issue of Science. Only adults in Turkey expressed more doubts on evolution.

Moons, schmoons—planets, schmanets.

Scale gets me more interested in either stardust or the bigger aggregations.

Note that a viewer must zoom the image for the most information.

Not being a scientist, I have no opinion on all this at all.  Really, none.  I don’t think this debate is intelligent or stupid.  It’s simply not my debate.  However, I really, really like the word “pluton.” Love it.  And I’m excited there’s new stuff out there—new to us, anyway—however we might end up classifying it.

I also love the dismay of CMD’s student.  “And I won’t be there! I won’t know!â€?  Newspapers or no, I think this might be the pulse of the problem some people are having with the idea of reclassifying Pluto.  We are so fond of ridiculing the limitations of our forebears, especially the relative scientific ignorance we perceive in previous eras of humanity (see, e.g., reference to leeches above).  No one likes to think someone will be doing the same thing about him/herself and his/her own generation someday—especially while s/he’s still around!  So I think people being distressed over the idea of reclassifying Pluto might mostly be just a vanity-plus-awareness-of-mortality thing. 

Everything about us is doomed, even our “immutable “truths.  People just hate being reminded of that.

Consider a spherical cow…

Defeats tipping.

anyway, what I mean is if we decided that there was only one species, called “alive,” we’d be right, and nothing about nature would be different than it is now.

CMD, what a wonderful story!

Speaking of great new science stories, and bringing a connect between CMD, Sean, and Chris: this new one from today’s Scientific American online is quite interesting.  It seems we humans indeed leaped a bit in the evolutionary time scale in our development.  I wonder what sort of questions CMD will be getting this next week?  I also have to giggle about the naming “label” thing as it applies to genome research:  “HAR1F”, is that a pirate joke???

Cascadian, a dead log is lying on the ground. A stump is generally wider than tall. A standing dead tree, or the greater part of a dead tree still standing, is a snag.

Then there’s the underused word “stob,” which implies something broken off. The stob is the thing that’s still standing: e.g. a short irregular piece of tree sticking out of the water, or even the remainder of an old fencepost.

This gets useful when you’re trying to tell your partner just where you’re seeing the black-backed woodpecker, which is a piece of information that you’d best get across and fast.

I think a lot of the argument about this is consciously recreational. Some noticeable fraction of my actively posting readers at Making Light are veterans of rec.arts.sf.fandom, a news group whose motto is, “Where people contradict you just to be polite.”

I’ve been standing off from the argument about reclassifying Pluto (and Ceres) because (1.) the change enables us to more accurately describe the universe around us; (2.) it makes sense to me personally; and (3.) if I were going to make a fuss about changes in scientific classifications and nomenclature, I’d have done it when Dimorphotheca (the first true botanical name I ever learned!) became Osteospermum, the Crucifers became Brassicas, and Chrysanthemum got split up into a bunch of smaller categories.

Why make a fuss about a mere planet? If they can rename Brontosaurus, they can do anything.

Teresa! Welcome.

A pedant would point out that they did not rename Brontosaurus so much as eventually more or less agree that Apatosaurus had been improperly renamed Brontosaurus. But I am not that pedant. Brontosaurus is fine with me.

Now the attempt to rename Boa constrictor… that went too far. 

Some people are obviously not convinced of the importance of The Naming Of Things. Odd, since it underpins everything about our conception of the universe.

If geologists object to astronomers using plutonian, why not use chthulic instead?

Rename Boa constrictor? Say what?

Well, I’ve always figured that our model of reality will inevitably bear a weak relation to the great complexities of existence (’cause if we tried to comprehend it all, our li’l’ primate minds would pop).  So I have no problems with tweaking it so that it fits better.  It’s a pain to re-learn things you’d been taking for granted, true, but I’m more interested in having a better understanding of the world itself than a firm mastery of a pale approximation.

One of my favorite names recently had a much closer brush with official extinction. The generic names of many animals are the same as their common designation: the gorilla is Gorilla; the rat, Rattus.But I know of only one case of a vernacular name identical with both generic and specific parts of the technical Latin. The boa constrictor is (but almost wasn’t) Boa constrictor, and it would be a damned shame if we lost this lovely consonance. Nevertheless, in 1976, Boa constrictor barely survived one of the closest contests ever brought before the [International C]ommission [on Zoological Nomenclature], as thirteen members voted to suppress this grand name in favor of Boa canina, while fifteen noble nays stood firm and saved the day.

— Stephen Jay Gould, Bully for Brontosaurus