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All posts/comments by me are licensed by CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, unless otherwise noted.

  • As someone who used to listen to a lot of shortwave radio, this just bums me out.

    I know foreign people who listened to VoA, and now it won't be there anymore for them.

    Makes me wonder who they'll listen to, who will fill the void, with the VoA being gone.

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  • From the article ...

    U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg issued an order Saturday blocking the deportations but lawyers told him there were already two planes with immigrants in the air — one headed for El Salvador, the other for Honduras. Boasberg verbally ordered the planes be turned around, but they apparently were not and he did not include the directive in his written order.

    Steve Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, said that Boasberg’s verbal directive to turn around the planes was not technically part of his final order but that the Trump administration clearly violated the “spirit” of it.

    “This just incentivizes future courts to be hyper specific in their orders and not give the government any wiggle room,” Vladeck said.

    Honestly, not surprising.

    They're bending the system as far as they can, and sometimes even breaking it, if they can get away with it.

    If you give them an out, they'll take it.

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  • So if you put earth into the Oort Cloud it would still be a planet, because we know that earth has the potential to clean it’s neighborhood.

    Would it be a non-planet for the millions of years it would take to clear its orbit?

    Does Earth's body/features magically change somehow for the duration of the clearing process, so that it doesn't resemble a planet?

    The point is that using external criteria to identify what an internal thing is is not logical, or scientific.

    The theoretical object in the Oort Cloud would relative fast clear the space around himself if it had the size to have a stable and long living internal heat source.

    You don't know that, especially with the size of the Oort Cloud, and the size of the orbit to clear. And the rules for how much clearance has to be done is very arbitrary.

    Also bodies can be small and have a decaying heat source that'll last many millions of years, or renewing heat source via tidal interactions. It's not necessarily a size thing.

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  • Ceres does appear to be active in some form with cryovolcanoes, based on the 2015 Dawn mission.

    Then It's say that it was a planet, though IANAPG.

    I think focus ought to be more on what the qualifications are for the minor label. What does it mean to be minor?

    There shouldn't be a 'minor' nomenclature, it's a contrivance. It's a planet, or not

    Also, to reiterate, the issue being discussed is one of disqualification, and not what qualifies. Identifying a body as a planet or not should not be done based on the criteria of the crowded or not nature of the space around it.

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  • Your original idea only holds if it’s still valid to claim Mars still has oceans, even though they’re all gone. When things stop existing, it changes their properties.

    My latest point was to counter your latest point that things like bodies of water or atmosphere should not be considered criteria for identifying a planet or not,

    Also, Mars may still have water, under the surface.

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  • Should Ceres be a planet?

    I honestly don't know. I tend to say no, as it seems to just be a lifeless rock with no geological activity. I'd love to have rules to identify that, made by planetary geologists.

    But I wouldn't want to disqualify a body with planetary characteristics like geological activity just because the space around it is busy, or it's orbit is not in the ecliptic plain, etc.

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  • I personally don’t think they can be counted as skies and oceans etc. anymore when they’re being mixed in with multi-thousand-degree hydrogen/helium plasma.

    So Mars never had oceans? Or an atmosphere?

    So Saturn's moon Titan doesn't have lakes? Or an atmosphere?

    What happens if a body is found in the Oort Cloud that has an internal heat source so that it has a internal ocean like Europa? It's it still not a planet because the space around it is busy?

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  • For some reason this subject always hits a nerve

    Always bothers the hell out of me because of the politics that went into defining an arbitrary rule that makes no sense for identifying something that the rest of humanity has to obey, as well as that planetary scientists did not make the decision astronomers did, as well as that just a small subset of the international governing body voted the rule in, and not most/all of them.

    Scientists should know better. They should not 'just call it a day' then make money by arrogantly selling books on the subject.

    It's bad Science.

    They should have used the term “dynamical dominance”, implying whether or not a body is the primary object left in its orbital area after formation. And this has its own issues, as solar systems change over time.

    What does the environment around a body have anything to do with classifying the body itself? How would the body magically change if the area around it became crowded? It's a nonsensical criteria.

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  • Things can get defined separately from themselves. And they can be defined to be several things. I’m a Norwegian and a German because of my parents.

    Your political nationality doesn't stop classifying you as a human being.

    Being a world is different from being a planet.

    You completely avoided the point I was making, that a body doesn't stop being a planet because it's neighborhood/orbit is crowded.

    If the Moon got too close to Earth so that it broke up (Roche limit), so that now Earth has not cleared the space around it, it would stop being a planet for a million years or more until it "cleared out" it's local space/ orbit, based on the rule that disqualifies a Pluto from being a planet.

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  • Removed duplicate comment.

  • If you pick a random Earth-sized lump of the Sun as a potential planet, and swap its place with Earth, Earth would quickly get mixed in with the rest of the Sun and stop being a distinct entity, so be very silly to still call a planet,

    Why? Everything about Earth is still the same, skies, oceans, etc. Only difference is that it's crowded in by other bodies now.

    Trying to scientifically judge if a body is a planet by something external to it, if it's being crowded in our not, it's not logical, and doesn't change the body itself.

    What does a body clearing is orbit or not have anything to do with the body itself?

    Location makes some difference to whether or not something’s a planet.

    Only because a very few human beings astronomers illogically/arbitrarily decided that's so. The reality on the ground for the body is that its still Earth, the planet we live on.

    Planetary Scientists should be deciding the rules, and not solely Astronomers.

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  • Pluto should never have been lumped in with the planets in the first place. Its orbit is so weird and slanted

    You are doing the same thing, judging if a body is a planet by criteria external to the body (it's slanted orbit), and not characteristics of the body itself.

    If Earth's orbit was 'weird and slanted', not on the ecliptic, would Earth stop being a planet? No, of course not.

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  • I realize the comic is good natured, but I feel the need to be serious for a moment, and say something...

    Any rule that would disqualify Earth as a planet, if Earth and the other planet switched places, it's a bad rule, and should not be used.

    Humans don't stop being humans, if they are standing alone one day, and are surrounded/crowded by other people the next day.

    Also, having a single handful of people decide for the species what the definition of a planet is, and then some of them sell books about it, it's not good science.

    Planetary Scientists really need to step up, and decide this.

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  • From the article...

    Surprisingly, premium paid versions of these AI search tools fared even worse in certain respects. Perplexity Pro ($20/month) and Grok 3's premium service ($40/month) confidently delivered incorrect responses more often than their free counterparts.

    Though these premium models correctly answered a higher number of prompts, their reluctance to decline uncertain responses drove higher overall error rates.

  • Then maybe leave them in the past.

    You should never forget your heroes.

    EDIT: And when someone says something like this about them...

    I suspect that this undead army would be happy with Trump’s attack against the LGBTQ

    ..., they need to be defended.

    Not everything is as black and white, 0% or 100%, nothing in between, as those with an agenda would want you to believe it is.

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  • Would it, though?

    Legally, yes.

    If they kept repeating the same thing, they started getting fined a lot, and then to be a little hard for Elon to explain how he's saving money when he's paying Court fines.

    They have not crossed that line yet, not obeying the courts.

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