Saturday, August 26, 2006

International Astronomical Union to Pluto: "You cold busted."

Alas, poor Pluto.

After about 75 years of being the ninth planet, everyone's favorite celestial snowball got busted down to dwarf planet status. Now we're left with Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune as official planets.

I've seen some complaints about how the old mnemonic we learned in school -- along the lines of "My Very Educated Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas" is now obsolete.

I always found it easier to, I dunno, remember the actual names of the planets. I think I was a weird kid, though.

I'm not against mnemonics; they're pretty handy. I've always been partial to "Eskimos Go Bananas Drinking Fresca" over "Every Good Boy Does Fine." You can guess how long ago my music class was based on the inclusion of "Go Bananas" and "Fresca."

In old issues of "The Flash," one of the enemies -- The Rainbow Raider -- was named Roy G. Bivolo. I read about that long before I learned about Roy G. Biv representing the colors of the natural spectrum.

My friends and I came up with quite a few mnemonics in my high school science classes, most of which I'm, uh, not at liberty to share, if you know what I mean.

Am I bummed out about Pluto getting sent down to the minors? No, not really. I always thought it had a goofy name (So to speak; the cartoon dog was named after the planet, according to Wikipedia). Besides, it's going to be decades before Pluto is removed from the collective knowledge pool of the general public.

If nothing else, it will be the best-known dwarf planet, which admittedly is sort of like being the coolest nerd (so I hear), but it's something.

1 comment:

  1. Instead of "My Very Educated Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas"

    you can use:
    "My Very Educated Mother Just Sent Us Nachos"

    ReplyDelete