The Most Useless Current Discussion in Science
What's in a name? A few days back the astronomers classified the planets in a way so that there were twelve of them. Then they reclassified so that there were eight. They actually had a conference for this. So much effort for so little. Things such as roundness, and curves of orbits were considered in determining the classification. To me it seemed that people had made up their minds whether they wanted Pluto as a planet or not and based their criteria for classification on that instead of it being the other way around. But who cares? If a body is interesting because it has some interesting properties, and I do not mean Sharapova, then it should be investigated if not then no one will care about it. Raising it to the status of planet or degrading it to a planetoid is just silly bookkeeping.
It was reported that, "It was unclear how Pluto's demotion might affect the mission of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which earlier this year began a 9 1/2-year journey to the oddball object to unearth more of its secrets." (See http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/08/24/pluto.ap/index.html ). Now this is a rather silly thing. If Pluto has some interesting qualities that need exploration then it should be explored whether today it is classified as a planet or not. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet and sewage by any other name would still be pretty bad.