Bastards

[prog]

People who voted to declassify Pluto are the same sorts of people as Americans who wanted to ditch their constitution as soon as they realized that it's 200 years old and was written by squares besides. Wevowution, Vivian!!

I really want to not care about this but I'm finding that I can't not.

Comments

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

You know.. this falls into the same category of thing I commented on about a month ago in this entry Specifically:

Topic: Science as Religion

Many people believe that science is another form of religion -- a 'belief' in 'stuff scientists come up with'.

It is not. Science is a process, a methodology, whereby one uses verifyable evidence to obtain a greater understanding of the world (and universe) we live in. Don't believe in a scientific theory? Find verifyable evidence to prove it wrong. A real scientist will thank you if you're successful.

While it's sad to see Pluto's status as 'planet' being revoked I see this more as 'correcting a theory based on new evidence'. Keeping Pluto as a planet, based on new discoveries, would also support the idea of adding several more 'Kuiper belt objects'

This is a lot like the change a few years back in the skunk's status from member of the 'Mustelidae' family to 'Mephitidae' family -- a change based on genetic analysis. Keeping skunks as mustelids would support adding raccoons to mustelids as well since raccoons were found to be closer genetic relatives to the rest of the weasels thank skunks are. It just seemed better to give skunks a family of their own.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Which is why the most reasonable counterargument is: Who sez that "planet" needs to be a scientific term?

But apparently lots of people do, and so. (I don't necessarily think it needs to be, but IANAS so whatevs)