Tenser, said the Tensor

They've Given You a Number...

Former planet Pluto is now minor planet number 134340.  (That's the numbering system used for asteroids, as opposed to periodic comets.)

Lame.

Defining Planet

If you've been keeping an eye on any of the wire services (or Language Log), you may have noticed that the members of the International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague have been wrangling, Vatican-style, over the definition of the word planet.  Judging by the periodic puffs of contradictorily-colored smoke the meeting is emitting, it sounds like they may be getting bogged down in the details.  (That's where the Devil is, you know.)  Well, defining words involves language, and language is what linguists study, so that means this is a linguistic problem.  Let's roll up our sleeves and see what all the trouble is.

What Would Heinlein Do?

Today on Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow wrote about John Varley's new novel Red Lightning, calling it "The novel Heinlein would have written about GW Bush's America".  He goes on to explain:

Heinlein was an ideological libertarian. You could call his politics right wing, and they were, on many of the left-right axes. But Heinlein never would have sat still for the Patriot Act and the daily and deep incursions on liberties that have come to characterise life in America and increasingly Britain and other parts of the world. He never would have accepted that you had to take away freedom to save liberty.

Doctorow is employing a common rhetorical device, here—asserting that some famous historical personage would surely have agreed with him on some current controversy—but what I know about Heinlein, based on his own writings, doesn't suggest to me that his positions would be as easily predictable as Doctorow thinks they are.

Experts Suggest What?

Sometimes being a long-time science fiction fan has unexpected side-effects.  For example, I was just now scanning the current headlines and I came across the following:

Experts Suggest Spacing Pregnancies

If you haven't been soaking in SF for a few decades, you probably understand immediately what the headline-writer means: experts are suggesting that women should wait some amount of time between pregnancies—perfectly reasonable advice.  But due to lexical interference from SF vocabulary, I misunderstood it to mean: experts are suggesting that women shove newborn babies out of an airlock.  Don't worry, though, after a brief whiskey-tango-foxtrot moment, I deduced they weren't recommending infacticide by explosive decompression.  Whew!