KellanStec

Since when was it the government’s responsibility to legislate astronomy? Yesterday, Wired posted an article about a Republican representative form New Mexico named Joni Marie Gutierrez who proposed a bill to make Pluto a planet “as [it] passes overhead through New Mexico’s excellent night skies”. The absurd notion that New Mexico has its own sky through which an object 3.5 billion miles can pass coupled with the fact that it can’t be seen by 99% of the New Mexico population makes Gutierrez look all the more ridiculous until you consider that she is passing this bill through legislation. The bill also declares March 13 to be “Pluto Planet Day”.

She appeals to emotion, saying that “We always took a lot of pride in the fact that [Clyde Tombaugh, a New Mexico native] discovered Pluto…When they declared it a dwarf planet, we took it as a personal affront.” Well, aside from the fact that passing a bill solely to make people feel proud is never a good idea, it is not the government’s job to decide what a planet is and what is not. Leave astronomy to the astronomers. I didn’t really know how to respond to this, so I am going to give seven reasons why Pluto should not be considered a planet.

1. Pluto does not have a central nervous system. It is a ball of frozen water and methane billions of miles away. It cannot feel pain, love, or any emotion whatsoever. Its feelings will not be hurt if we make it a dwarf planet. This sounds silly, but it seems to me that all the groups created on Facebook somehow think that removing planetary status deals a devastating blow to Pluto’s self-esteem. Emotional appeal is never a good reason to make something a scientific truth.
2. Pluto does not orbit in the ecliptic plane. Every other planet orbits in this plane. Pluto is inclined by as much as 17°. This means at perihelion, Pluto is about 8 Astronomical Units above the plane. This is absurdly divergent from the other planets.
3. Pluto has a highly elliptical orbit. Well, all planets have an elliptical orbit, but Pluto’s is abnormally high. This puts Pluto closer to the sun than Neptune for part of its year. 8th or 9th planet? Make up your mind, Pluto!
4. Pluto is tiny. At 2/3 the size of the moon, why should we even consider this a planet? There are numerous other Jovian moons that are quite a bit larger than Pluto as well.
5. Incretio ad absurdum. This is a Latin derivation that I made up, which means increasing to absurdity. The definition of planet that allowed Pluto to become a planet in the first place could potentially be applied to dozens of bodies in the solar system not currently considered planets. In fact, we already have discovered a few, and one of them is larger than Pluto–Eris.
6. Why aren’t Ceres and Eris planets? I think if this question is asked in an astronomy class, there should be a better answer than “The public is afraid of change.”
7. It’s a ball of ice. Pluto would be the first planet to melt into liquid if it were brought closer to the sun. If it were orbiting closer to the sun, we would probably call it a comet. It would have a tail just like all other comets.

Pluto’s planetary status has been questioned by science for years, so this is nothing new. Finally, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union decided to include the three following criteria in a formal definition of a planet:

• The body must orbit the sun and have a diameter of 2000 km.
• The body must keep its shape stable due to its own gravity.
• The body must be dominant in its immediate neighborhood.

These make sense to me. Of course, there were other things defined, such as what exactly constitutes “dominance”, but that’s not the point. These guidelines were designed to create more order in the naming of solar system objects. It’s great that the Pluto debate is sparking an interest in the public for science, but nostalgia does not make a science. If we start identifying remote snowballs smaller than our Moon with unconventional orbits as planets, then before you know it, lozenge-shaped lumps of iron will want to be planets, too. What’s next? A Voyager heat shield? Wow, that reductio ad absurdum is actually pretty funny.

If people want to form a close emotional relationship to a ball of ice billions of miles away, that’s fine with me. But some people expect the scientific community to gratify their fixation by distorting the definition of a planet into something that includes Pluto, purely for emotional and nostalgic reasons. Sorry, it does not work that way.

Today, I have decided to diverge from my normal topics and write about my life. This week is my spring break, and I am home alone all week. It can’t go much better than it has been. I have been working on two different websites; one for a class and one for a paying client. It’s been a long time since I have done any website development. I think the last major thing that I did was my sister’s website. My normal approach was to take a design in Photoshop, chop it up, and put it into neat tables. I took a different approach this time, and decided to go for a table less design–something I had never tried before. At first it was tough, but I am really starting to get the hang of it. It’s much easier to position things exactly where I want them, and it takes much less space than a typical table design. Now I’ll tell you a little bit about them.

Little Red Hen Theater
This is the website that I am developing for a class. Instead of registering for Website Development this semester, I talked to the instructor and worked out a deal to test out, since I have been doing this for a number of years and really wouldn’t gain much from the class. It is also saving me about $300 for credits, plus the time I have to waste going to class. This was not my first attempt at doing a XHTML/CSS site with no tables, but it was my first successful attempt. It took me a while–much longer than a table design would have. But once I knew how to do it, it was simple. So far it’s a very simple design, and I just need time to design a suitable logo and fill it with content. Also, I’m not sure about that grey bar on the bottom, it seems like it makes the site look a bit too bland. If anyone has any ideas, let me know. I’d like to toy around with some different colors, but I don’t know where to go with it.

Volf Records
I am working on this website for my buddy Nick, who owns his own record company. This is where I really started to like CSS. If you click on the image to the right, a new page will open of the live design. As you can see, the logo hangs off the edge of the design a little bit. I really like the way that looks, and it would have been nearly impossible to do efficiently with tables. It would have either required me to chop up the logo and put the pieces in different cells, or to create one cell that spanned two below it. This would have created an empty cell to the left of where the links will go (column 1), and threw the whole design off-center. So, in order to remedy that, I would have had to put another cell to the right of everything. Talk about inefficient. Now I’ll show you the (very simple) way I did it. First comes the container for the cell behind the image. I made it the same height as the image, and used a z-index (the third dimension, or depth, of a website) to make that cell go behind everything. Then I positioned the image with three percent less padding than the main container for the entire site. It kind of makes me mad that this is the furthest that I will be going with the site for now, because I left the original design image on my computer in my dorm. But, I worked with what I already had on my web server.

Here is the code for the Volf Records logo:

<style type=”text/css”>
<!–
#contents {
margin-top:0px;
margin-left:10%;
margin-right:10%;
background-color:#333333;
height:100%;
}
#logo_back{
background-color:#333333;
padding-left:10%;
clear:left;
height:100px;
z-index:-1;
}
#logo{
float: left;
position:absolute;
left:7%;
z-index:1;
border:0px;
}
–>
</style>
<div id=”contents”>
<img src=”images/logo.png” alt=”logo” title=”Volf Records” id=”logo” />
<div id=”logo_back”></div>
</div>

Simple, huh? It is much simpler than a table design, that’s for darn sure. I know most of my readers probably don’t understand this code, but I am really excited to be learning something new. I had to share. If any of you have any suggestions or comments, please feel free to leave a comment in the form below. I’d love to hear feedback. Keep in mind that I am still working on these, and there are still some obvious problems with them. If you want to report a problem with the way the site is rendering, please tell me which browser and version you use. I have only tested them in Internet Explorer 7. I have nothing else to test with, since this is my family’s PC which is on dialup. I am not downloading Firefox on 24k.

Also, for my readers who are competent with CSS, you can sure suggest ways to optimize my code. I’m new to this!

Yes, I know it’s Monday. Yesterday was the debut of a Dutch gym’s invitation to exercise in the nude. About a dozen middle-aged to elderly men showed up for the event of the hundred who signed up. The Netherlands are known for their comfortable standards on nether regions (get it?), but this may be a bit too much. I really hope they have rules about cleaning the exercise equipment that contact the more sickening body parts, such as exercise bikes.

Nude exercisers were required to put towels down on weight machines, use disposable seat covers while riding bikes and disinfect the equipment.

Thank FSM. I am glad to see a towel underneath the biker on the right.

Aside from the palpable hygiene concerns, we can see how hilarious this truly is. All we have to do is read a few of the nudist’s quotes, and ensue in laughter. “There are things that you like to do, and for a nudist, it just feels better to do them with your clothes off,” said Ron, who drove for more than an hour to bike naked. “You feel more free.” I wonder if he drove to the gym while naked.

While we are talking about naked people–or at least people exposing parts of their body which society deems indecent–I should mention the mother and daughter who were apparently* banned from Disneyland for life. You might not want to click if your boss/souse/parent doesn’t like you looking at bare breasts, less the nipple of course. Yes, I know I posted a picture of two naked men above, but you took that risk visiting my site. I’m unpredictable. Anyway, what they did was have a shirt with holes from which their breasts “peek”. Then they used the exposed breast as the flesh part of Mickey and Minnie’s face, adding eyes, nose, and mouth.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I think using a pair of human breasts to create the likeness of Mickey and Minnie mouse is creative. And also pretty damn sexy. But much too sexy for the fragile little minds that wander Disneyland! These kids are walking around all day looking for a Disney character to grab or get their picture taken with. And these women are trying to scar them for life. If the shitty music being played all day doesn’t give the kid brain damage, a partial human breast surely will. I wonder how many kids actually realized that these weren’t mice, but actual breasts. My guess is not too many, but I guess it’s just another example of adults reading too much into what children are thinking.

*As I was doing some browsing for more information, I noticed a larger image. That isn’t Disneyland, that’s Bourbon Street–Mardi Gras. Well, that takes out all the fun. Don’t read the last three sentences if you’d like to still think the picture was taken at Disneyland.

This is going to be good. And I mean that in the most sarcastic way possible. For those of you who do not know what I am talking about, there was a discovery made about 27 years ago of a tomb containing ten bone boxes–some of which contain names of Biblical significance. There’s a documentary set to air this Sunday, March 4 on the Discovery Channel brought to you by the same man who brought us the vomit-inducing three hours that is The Titanic: James Cameron. The names found in the tomb include:

• Yeshua` bar Yehosef – “Jesus son of Joseph”
• Maryah – “Mary”
• Yoseh – “Joseph”
• Mariamene e Mara – “Mary also known as Mara”
• Mattiah – “Matthew”
• Yehudah bar Yeshua` – “Judas son of Jesus”

Before we jump to any conclusions, let us look at the facts. Tombs like these are discovered all the time. Hundreds of tombs and thousands of bone boxes have been discovered in the Jerusalem area since the 1970s. Not only are the tombs common, but the names inscribed on the bone boxes are commonly from a pool of fifteen or so names. From our current discoveries, there are 45 bone boxes labeled “Joseph”, 22 labeled “Jesus”, and 42 labeled “Mary”.

But we are talking about something explicit. Right there it is: a bone box containing Jesus, son of someone named Joseph. How likely is it that these two names are found in the same tomb, one claiming to be the father of another, which seems to match the biblical story? Well, David Mavorah, a custodian of the Israel museum in Jerusalem, points out just how common these names were. “We know that Joseph, Jesus and Mariamene were all among the most common names of the period” he says, “To start with all these names being together in a single tomb and leap from there to say this is the tomb of Jesus is a little far-fetched, to put it politely.” Is it wrong to assume the connection, though?

There are several problems with the assumption that it must be the same family the bible describes. First, it presupposes that it was extremely unlikely that a man named Joseph ever sired a man named Jesus. This is one of the reason that the filmmakers turned to statisticians to verify the unlikelihood of coincidence. The odds that these names would be found together run anywhere from 1:600 to 1:1 million, depending on the statistician you turn to. These aren’t particularly good odds on which to base an assertion–especially since we know how common these names really were. Just to give you an example, Jesus was the sixth most popular name of Jewish men. Mary was more popular still, ranked at number one among women. But let’s look at the second problem: translation.

Things written two thousand years ago, even when carved into stone, don’t conserve as well as we would like them to. Aside from the difficulty in reading, translating the names has generated a fair amount of controversy. Stephen Pfann, a biblical scholar at the University of the Holy Land in Jerusalem is even uncertain that the name Jesus on the caskets was read properly. He thinks it’s more probably the name “Hanun.” Ancient Semitic script is infamously tricky to translate. Just check out the picture to the left.

A third consideration, and possibly the most damaging facet to the claim (aside from the utter lack of historical evidence that Jesus ever existed, although I suspect he probably did), is the extreme unlikelihood that the Jesus of the Bible and his family were ever buried in such a tomb. Archaeologist Amos Kloner is unconvinced of the connection, and even states that Jesus’ family probably never had a tomb, much less a tomb in Jerusalem. “It makes a great story for TV, but it’s nonsense,” he told the Jerusalem Post in February. “There is no likelihood that Jesus and his relatives had a family tomb. They were a Galilee family with no Jerusalem ties. The Talpiot tomb belonged to a middle-class family from the 1st century CE.”

Alright, so it’s not very likely that these bone boxes contain the same family written about in the Bible. However, James Cameron remains determined to somehow connect this discovery to the Da Vinci Code. Laughably, he plans to do this using DNA evidence to show that the Jesus and one of the Marys in the tomb are not genetically related, giving credence to the theory that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were romantically involved. You read right. James Cameron is perverting science and archaeology to support something that Dan Brown just made up.

This sick publicity stunt is designed from the inside out to profit James Cameron and his pseudoscience and pseudo history. The worst part is, the profit will be coming from innocent people who are unable to differentiate a fabrication from reality. This could lend a damaging blow to people’s faith that Jesus resurrected on the third day–something many hold dear. The idea that Jesus rose from the dead and is now in heaven is essential to the Christian faith. This depends on an empty tomb.

In conclusion, there is little credible evidence that suggests we should think this tomb contains the family described in the Bible. There are several major problems associated with the assumption that they are connected, and the documentary has little basis in fact. I’m kind of curious to know exactly where Cameron will go with this.

What do you think?