First snow of the season was today. My roommates are already grumbling about the weather.
Winter has arrived.
I voted this morning, before 7am.
A crucial issue for me was the amendment against gay marriage issue. I don't believe we should be legislating morality, and I don't think Prohibition Mark II is an especially particularly good idea.
I don't expect my state to go this way.
I'm seriously beginning to eye other countries, or at least other states.
I didn't stop feeling patriotic or proud of my country. My country stopped having things to feel patriotic or proud about.
:(
(* Note: Freedoms may vary by sexual orientation or other characteristics. Some freedoms restricted by location, for your own good, or simply because we don't like you having them.)
I'm not a religious person. At least, not if organized religion is what you define religion as.
I still think the “War on Christmas” is stupid. On BOTH sides of the issues.
It does not offend me that the word contains “christ”. Using the word “Christmas” too many times in a school bulletin doesn't bother me. (I find people who get too readily offended over pointless, stupid issues far more offensive than the name of a holiday could ever hope to be.) I see no need to refer to it as the “Holiday Season”.
I see no need to change the lyrics to Silent Night
And this is a bit much
Call it Christmas. Call it Winter Festival. Call it Saturnalia. I don't care; “a rose by any other name” and all that. To you, it may be a Christian holiday. To someone else it may be a pagan holiday co-opted by the Christians. To me, it's a secular holiday. GET OVER IT, PEOPLE.
But by the same token, stay the hell away from my Halloween.
This reminds me of something … something historical … wonder what that might be.
Also reminds me of a few episodes from Babylon 5.
I don't necessarily agree with the site's author on some things. In particular, I think skepticism risks becoming about unquestionable dogma as much as anything else does, because skeptics (like anyone else) don't tend to question things that support their worldview with quite the same thoroughness and zeal that they question things that oppose it.
To put it another way, skepticism is only one tool in my toolbox. I have others. But when the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat every problem like a nail.
But that's another topic entirely, and on the linked entry, at least, I'm in full agreement. The PR guy in question should be removed, posthaste.
Attention, IAU. You can officially bite me.
I'm still considering Pluto a “true” planet … whatever the hell that means. Why do we need a definition of a “true” planet, anyway? It's not like the Great Maker is going to be sitting there on judgement day informing us how close we came to the “correct” definition, and what fabulous prizes we have won as a result.
<picard>There are nine planets!</picard>
Or more. You can increase the number. Let's have dozens of planets! Sedna! Ceres! Xena! Even Quahogg, or whatever the hell it is called.
But it's too late to have less than nine. You can't decrease the count without a very good reason, and I don't think this qualifies. Something like “Pluto? That's no planet; it's a SPACE STATION!” might work…
The IAU definition relies on an arbitrary distinction, so I have no issues with making my own (just as arbitrary) distinction. A body can be considered a planet if, in order of importance:
Some additional factors, which are neither definitive nor required, but do increase the qualifications, are if:
A body can be both a moon and a planet.
If it was ever widely considered a planet for a period of not less than twenty (20) years after the start of the twentieth century, it is grandfathered in until such time as the Millenium Falcon reports back that it turned out to be a giant space station after all.
I also note that the line between planets and other celestial bodies is (and probably always will be) fuzzy. The universe is a strange place, and when it comes down to it, all we are doing here is saying that we'll call one lump of matter X, but that a different lump of matter isn't really X.
Incidentally, “dwarf” is an adjective, just like “jovian” and “terrestrial”. If we are going to say that dwarf planets aren't really planets, then shall we say that the gas giants are truer planets than Earth?
I think it makes a lot more sense to say “Yeah, there's lots of planets out there. We'll teach the terrestrial and jovian planets, but as for the dwarf planets … they're obviously planets — just look at the name — but there's just too bloody many to cover them all. Except the ninth planet, Pluto. We stopped counting after that.” It'd piss a lot less people off, I think.
There is a growing controversy over the IAU's decision (not surprised in the slightest). Including the fact that only a single-digit percentage of the IAU actually participated in the vote. And, of course, this…
From BBC news:
Dr Alan Stern, who leads the US space agency's New Horizons mission to Pluto and did not vote in Prague, told BBC News: “It's an awful definition; it's sloppy science and it would never pass peer review - for two reasons.
“Firstly, it is impossible and contrived to put a dividing line between dwarf planets and planets. It's as if we declared people not people for some arbitrary reason, like 'they tend to live in groups'.
“Secondly, the actual definition is even worse, because it's inconsistent.”
One of the three criteria for planethood states that a planet must have “cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit”. The largest objects in the Solar System will either aggregate material in their path or fling it out of the way with a gravitational swipe.
Pluto was disqualified because its highly elliptical orbit overlaps with that of Neptune.
But Dr Stern pointed out that Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have also not fully cleared their orbital zones. Earth orbits with 10,000 near-Earth asteroids. Jupiter, meanwhile, is accompanied by 100,000 Trojan asteroids on its orbital path.
Read the rest here
Neil Gaiman had an excellent observation on the Virginia Tech shooting.
I keep trying to wrap my head around this, and I really can't. It keeps running through my head: It could be my school, and it could be my classroom. Just randomly, one day, some idiot walks in and starts gunning down people he doesn't even know as some kind of mentally-deficient statement.
What would that feel like? Would I be one of the first killed, or would I be one of the ones who gets a little warning and saves his classmates. Or would I be someone walking past on the sidewalk who notices the guy and takes him down before he has a chance to go through with it?
To anyone that even slightly buys into the “defender of the weak” crap Cho was reportedly spewing forth in his rantings, I'd like to point out that he didn't do a very good job defending random innocent people (most of whom didn't know him) from himself. People who kill random people because of an inability to cope with their own problems are nothing more than cowards.