Posts

@TheGamerPainter  
What?

Everyone from the student/young 6 (except Gallus and Silverstream) are real.

@Barhandar
 
@UrbanMysticDee  
Hey guys this thread is for useless facts. If you want to continue the debate please start a new thread.
 
Edit I know I responded a few times but the thread needs to return to it’s original topic

@Barhandar  
What are standardized conditions? Most of the planets discovered around other stars have higher eccentricities, so our solar system is highly atypical.

@UrbanMysticDee  

Read again - it would become exo/rogue planet respectively, because “planet” is about how it would be in standardized conditions (like, you know, all scientific definitions that weren’t made by stupid people manipulating votes), it’s the modifiers that depend on actual conditions. Like how hydrogen doesn’t stop being nonmetallic because metallic hydrogen exists in certain conditions.

@Barhandar  
“Diluting” a definition is a values judgment. Whether or not it’s “useful” doesn’t mean it’s not true. All these bodies, at least the ones we’ve visited directly, have complex stratified geology, many have satellites of their own (and rings), and many have atmospheres. It may be inconvenient for lazy people to memorize extra planets, but if these things are not planets based on circumstances that are not intrinsic to the bodies themselves then “planet” becomes a verb instead of a noun. A large, round object in space isn’t a planet, planet is what a large, round object in space is doing at a given time based on where it is located.
 
If Earth were nudged into a weird orbit or thrown into interstellar space by a passing star it would all of a sudden stop being a planet because it’s no longer within the plane of the ecliptic.
 
So then what do we call the body itself? If a planet can magically transform into something else depending on what it’s doing or where it is at any given time, then what is the intrinsic thing itself called?

@UrbanMysticDee  
The problem with that is it dilutes the definition of a “planet”. It’s not useful to count hundreds of satellite-sized chunks of of rock that floated from somewhere the same as eight much larger chunks of rock (and in four cases, gas) that have formed from accretion disk.  
Basically, defining them all as a “planet” hits the same linguistic snag as calling them “dwarf planets”, just from the opposite side - they’re not useful as planets, so calling them either “planet” or “planet but with a qualifier that SOMEHOW makes it not a planet” is wrong.
 
Also, a much more useful qualifier of a planet, instead of “clearing neighbourhood”, is its orbit having low eccentricity and lying within plane of ecliptic (i.e. having formed from accretion disk) and exoplanet consequently something that would be a planet if its orbit was in ecliptic and circular but isn’t, as opposed to being “outside solar system” (heliocentrism, modern edition) - “exo” both because it’s what would happen if a rogue planet (same thing but in galactic orbit instead of stellar) was captured by gravity well of a star, and because they’re outside the ecliptic. Also results in eight actual planets, but turns Pluto and the rest into exoplanets instead of “SMALL PLANET THAT IS TOTALLY NOT PLANET WE R ABSOLUTELY SMURT GUIZE”.

@UrbanMysticDee  
Public reception to the IAU decision was mixed. A resolution introduced in the California State Assembly facetiously called the IAU decision a “scientific heresy”.[64] The New Mexico House of Representatives passed a resolution in honor of Tombaugh, a longtime resident of that state, that declared that Pluto will always be considered a planet while in New Mexican skies and that March 13, 2007, was Pluto Planet Day.[65][66] The Illinois Senate passed a similar resolution in 2009, on the basis that Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, was born in Illinois. The resolution asserted that Pluto was “unfairly downgraded to a ‘dwarf’ planet” by the IAU.”[67]

@Dex Stewart  
My favorite episode was the one about WAP.

@Acres  
Usually about once a year.

Keep recycling it? How often does the subject of what a planet is come up in your daily life?

@Acres  
I had that written years ago and keep recycling it because it hasn’t stopped being true yet. But it probably took about an hour originally.

@UrbanMysticDee  
Several 90’s kids are adamant that Pluto is a planet for one reason.  

@UrbanMysticDee  
How long did it take you to research/write that response?

@Acres  
There’s 100 or more planets in our solar system. The IAU’s definition is unscientific garbage, voted on by only a handful of members when most of them were unavailable on purpose because a very small minority wanted to force Pluto into not being a planet anymore.
 
We can say definitively that the Earth is a planet. Earth is the paradigm example of what a planet is. All other planets must meet the same qualifications of the Earth to count as planets. This is true a priori.
 
This is one of two main ways we know the IAU decision to demote Pluto is invalid as science. First, the IAU made the decision based on a vote. Science isn’t a democracy. You don’t get to vote whether something is true or not. You have to test it and re-test it and other people have to test it. It doesn’t matter if you have a “96% consensus” (actually something like 96% of abstracts that were looked at for the meta-analysis at the time mentioned anthropogenic global warming, they didn’t endorse the idea, they just mentioned it), science isn’t based on consensus. There was a consensus 500 years ago that the Sun orbited the Earth but that didn’t make it true.
 
Fewer than 5% of IAU members actually voted on the decision anyway, so it’s a crappy vote.
 
Second, the definition chosen for what qualifies as a planet is totally arbitrary and can be made to exclude the Earth. Planets must have “cleared the neighborhood around its orbit,” which is a totally vapid and arbitrary criterion. The farther from a star a planet gets the more massive it needs to be to qualify as a planet because the amount of space it needs to “clear” becomes greater. By this definition if the Earth were placed in Pluto’s orbit - 29-39 AU - then the Earth would not be considered a planet either because it wouldn’t have enough mass to vacuum up the inner Kuiper Belt. But the Earth IS a planet where it is in space, meaning the third criterion doesn’t signify anything intrinsic about the body itself. The definition of what is and is not a planet should not rest on some factor independent of the planet itself.
 
The third criterion for what qualifies a planet is not based on any intrinsic quality of the body itself but its relationship between it and its parent star. As such it is totally arbitrary and was designed (by admission) to disqualify Pluto and not based on sound scientific reasoning. The rule seemed carefully crafted so that “dwarf planets” like Pluto, Eres and Ceres (another body that was a planet for 50 years) didn’t make the cut.
 
The definition of “planet” also makes explicit reference to the Sun, so bodies orbiting other stars are by definition not planets, they’re “exo-planets”, which is more unscientific bullshit.
 
This isn’t exactly a rigorous scientific argument—so to give its decision the flavor of science, the IAU came up with a definition of “planet” so convoluted it seemed entirely arbitrary. To qualify as a planet, a body must orbit the Sun and be large enough to be at least roughly spherical—two rules that make sense. But it must also have gravitationally “cleared its neighborhood” of other bodies, meaning it has its orbital traffic lane all to itself, which Pluto doesn’t—at least during the most remote portion of its journey around the sun.

@TheGamerPainter  
Nope

@Acres  
Are you talking about Pluto?  
乁| /\•ﻌ•/\ |ㄏ

There’s actually a 9th planet in our solar system. The problem is, scientists have never been able to find it.
 
It’s 10 times the size of earth and has several moons.

@UrbanMysticDee  
How they’re really made  
What’s really inside bowling balls

@Dex Stewart  
I miss when $100 would fill two shopping carts to the top with food. Then one. Then half. Now it’s almost empty.

@Officer Hotpants  
I miss when I could get a huge box of those for like a dollar.

@UrbanMysticDee  
Looks like a painful whopper to me.
 

@UrbanMysticDee  
I like that.

Bowling balls are apparently made out of billiard balls and Bondo  

 
And dice are made of smaller dice  

 
I’m spoilering these things in case you’re pissed off to find out what your stuff is made of.

@Officer Hotpants  
Some states have coastlines, and apparently the more you measure them the bigger they get until they get infinitely big. Then you’d have to fit something infinitely big into a finite space and the universe will implode, or something.