The Weak In Rock

As of this morning Pluto is no longer a planet. The International Astronomical Union has voted to demote Pluto from planet to dwarf planet, a new classification that was developed by the IAU earlier this month. Pluto lost its designation as a full-fledged planet because its orbit is extremely elliptical and takes it across the path of Neptune’s orbit.

Now if I were an evangelical, fundamentalist Christian I’d probably be using this as a reason to cast into doubt the existence of planets altogether. Much in the same way those folks argue that because evolutionary scientists disagree and changes their minds about the exact mechanisms of evolution that they don’t really know what they’re talking about and therefore evolution must not really exist.

Sad as I am to see Pluto demoted - what with having lived my entire life so far in a solar system with 9 instead of 8 planets - reading up on the debates and discussions at this year’s IAU meeting in Prague has been a wonderful window into the way that science works. It’s great to see the collaborative nature of scientific inquiry out in the open like this.

Unfortunately I’m quite sure some nitwit school district in Kansas or Georgia will rebel and insist on retaining Pluto as a planet in their textbooks out of some misplaced, moronic notion of tradition. I can just hear it now:

Cletus: Didja hear about how Pluto ain’t a planet no more?

Billy-Jack: What in tarnation?

Cletus: That’s right. Some Yooropein’ science guys say Pluto ain’t a planet no more.

Billy-Jack: Was there French scientists there?

Cletus: I es’pec there were.

Billy-Jack: Damn those cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Well we ain’t gonna stand fer no Yooro queers messin’ up our solar system.

And so on. Mark my words, Dubya will speak out against this “travesty” soon. America - each scientific step forward is an opportunity to show how stupid we really are.

Technorati Tags: Pluto, International Astronomical Union

Take a look at this super-mega-cool animation done by Daniel Maas at NASA’s JPL depicting the Mars Pathfinder mission.

I know. I’m a nerd.

Thanks to Fark for the pointer.

Technorati Tags: animation, Daniel Maas, NASA, JPL, Mars Pathfinder, nerd, Fark

Last week as I was on my way home from work I tuned into NPR’s All Things Considered, like I do most of the time on my drive home. It’s a pretty good news show, but last week they aired an audio documentary called “My Lobotomy” put together by a man named Howard Dully for Sound Portraits. This program was one of the most jarring things I’ve ever heard on the radio.

I’ve always thought radio was a much more powerful medium than TV. Sure, TV can show you things, but because of all that showing and the focus on the visual it’s easy to miss important things said by the folks on camera or to not notice the nuances of emotion in someone’s voice. Not so on the radio. In this case the effect was staggering.

Mr. Dully is now 56 years old. When he was 12 his step-mother coerced his father into agreeing to let Dr. Walter Freeman perform a transorbital lobotomy on him. Her hope was to turn him into a vegetable so that he would have to be institutionalized and she would be rid of this step-child she not only did not love but did not want around her home at all. The operation didn’t turn Howard into a vegetable, and to listen to him speak it’s hard to notice anything wrong with him at all, but he makes it clear that since the operation he has never felt normal and that it has caused him great pain and trouble throughout his life.

Dully made My Lobotomy in an effort to understand why this was done to him and to try to learn about how society could even allow such a thing to be done to anyone, let alone a 12 year old boy. I admonish you to listen to this documentary. It will give you a peek into the world of psychotheraputics that I think most people are lacking. It will also most likely make you weep. It did me.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the links.

People in the United States (and perhaps most of the world, I’m not sure) expend a lot of energy on fear. Generally speaking they’re usually afraid of the wrong things. They fear things which are either trivial or unlikely to happen and simultaneously ignore many things that not only may harm them, but will harm them precisely because they pay too little attention to them.

Let’s take terrorism as an example. Most Americans (and now, thanks to bombings in Spain and Britain, probably most Europeans as well) are terrified of terrorism. The subject occupies a primary place in the news on a daily basis. And if you talk to anyone about the subject long enough they’re bound to tell you that they’ve never felt this unsettled and fearful of what the future might bring in their lives.

That’s not a sentiment I agree with at all. I don’t like the prospect of religious fanatics flying planes into buildings or setting off bombs on subway trains. That’s scary stuff. The thing is though, even with the relatively massive scale of the 9/11/01 attacks on New York and Washington these were still relatively petty operations carried out by folks who were generally more lucky (in terms of their success) than good at what they were doing. The reason I’m not wrapped up in fear that myself or someone I love might one day be a victim of one of these events is that I think I understand the scale and the odds and I’ve already been desensitized by spending my entire childhood and adolescence in abject terror of massive nuclear devastation as the result of conflict between the US and the Soviet Union.

Here’s a section from an article by Charles Platt that ran yesterday on Boing Boing that sums up my feelings pretty darned well:

We have given up sitting around wondering what we will do if there’s a four-minute warning of armageddon. Instead, we have been induced to worry about primitive explosives in the hands of semi-literate fanatics who might kill perhaps a few thousand of us in tall buildings or a few dozen of us in public transit systems. Such numbers are utterly trivial compared with the mass annihilation that seemed plausible and imminent during the 1950s and 1960s. They are small even by comparison with highway traffic fatalities, yet the anxiety induced by the possibility of domestic terrorism has become comparable with bygone fears of communism. This makes no sense at all, but fears are seldom rational, especially when they are manipulated by elected representatives who somehow continue to command some trust and respect.

If you are so inclined I highly recommend you read the entire article. If you really want to frighten yourself you can note the section wherein he catalogs the real rationale for the continued popularity of war - it’s a function of old men sending the young men off to die so the old men can have all the young women to themselves.

Common sense. We hear that phrase all the time. Actually, I hear it all the time. And I shudder every time I do.

Why does it make me shudder when a friend or co-worker says to me, “well, that’s just common sense.”? I get the heebee jeebees when people say that because it means that as I, or someone else, was trying to impart important knowledge to them they weren’t listening. What they heard made sense to them, and so they immediately discounted it as stuff they already knew. Worse yet, they discounted it as something that everyone knows.

Not good.

I recently sat for a day-long exam in order to get certified in my profession. Prior to taking the exam I attended a two-day test-prep course. In the prep course I was surrounded by my professional peers. This particular certification exam is restricted to those who already have serveral years of experience in the field. So, I was amongst people who were about to take a test to prove to the world they know what they’re doing because they’ve learned it in the field. The number of times that my fellow prep class participants responded to a bit of wisdom imparted to us by the instructor with, “well, that’s just common sense,” was astounding. The instructor repeatedly admonished these people not to think what we were talking about was as simple as all that. Most failed to pay attention to him. How do I know? Because we’ve kept in touch and the folks who thought they were going to be faced with a test of their “common sense” knowledge did not pass the exam.

In today’s Wired News is an article that talks about why some people survived the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11/01 and others didn’t. 911 operators told people in the building who called to stay in place and await either further instructions or a rescue. Those who followed those instructions died. Those who looked around, paid attention to exactly how fucked up things seemed to be and sought out more information from outside via their cell phones, blackberries and whatnot found out that they needed to get the hell out and did so.

Now, one would think that exiting a building that a jumbo jet has plowed into resulting in a massive fire would be obvious. You know, common sense. Apparently not. One of the lessons there is that we human beings really aren’t all that clever. When we’re under stress we’re especially dim. I see this in my work all the time. The more stress you put someone under the less likely they are to see what’s right in front of their faces. That’s why we need to listen to the advice of others. And hopefully we choose to seek advice from people who know what they’re talking about.

In the case of the 9/11/01 attack the folks in the WTC who sought advice from emergency dispatchers got a pat answer to their queries from dispatch personnel who didn’t have enough information to be giving advice in the first place. One call to a loved one near a TV or radio was enough to tell people to get moving.