"Pluto Is Not A Planet... Get over it." --Neil deGrasse Tyson

As Randall Munroe reminds us in his often witty and memorable comic xkcd, there are many different emotions still involved in the discussion of the planethood of Pluto and other objects in our Solar System and it's been over 2 years since the demotion. In the past, I've found myself to take a somewhat middle of the road position. Pluto used to be a planet, but is no longer. Plain and simple. I've even used the moniker PlutoWasAPlanet for XboxLive and other internet services and it always attracts laughter when I mention the name to people.

And that's how I feel we should approach something like this - with laughter. One of the most popular groups on Facebook is the When I was your age, Pluto was a planet group - there are over 1.3 million users in the group. I used to be one of them until I read more and found out just how different Pluto is from the rest of the bodies in our solar system that we call planets.

According to Resolution B5 by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the definition of a planet is as follows:

A planet is a celestial body that

• (a) is in orbit around the Sun

• (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and 

• (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit. 

Further down in the resolution, Pluto is specifically reclassified as a "Dwarf Planet" by the established definitions. Thus Pluto is not currently a planet, but Pluto WAS a planet at one point. As the above comic illustrates though, perhaps Pluto never should have been called a planet. As Neil deGrasse Tyson points out in a transcript from Nova ScienceNow, we have faced this problem before:

NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: Did you know that in 1801 a new planet was discovered orbiting between Mars and Jupiter?

ROBERT KRULWICH: Neil deGrasse Tyson is director of New York's Hayden Planetarium.

NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: They called it Ceres. And they looked some more, and they found another planet, and another and another. The count of planets in the early 1800s was greater than it is today, thirteen planets in the solar system. And they kept looking, and the numbers kept growing. And they were running out of names, and they realized that, rather than counting new planets, they had discovered a new swath of real estate in the solar system called the asteroid belt.

ROBERT KRULWICH: So Ceres became an unplanet, and was re-designated to a new class. And it became the biggest asteroid.

NEIL deGRASSE TYSON: So we've been there before. We know how to demote something.

Of course, back in the 1800s, we presumably hadn't established the mnemonic devices those of us learned in elementary school and hold onto so dearly. Don't lie - you remember the one you were taught. Mine was "My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas." I guess now it should be changed to "My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nothing." The 'P' in Pluto now stands for the period in the sentence. Pluto has become nothing more than punctuation, but without that punctuation we'd have an incomplete thought, so it still plays a vital role in the structure of our Solar Sentence System. I suggest that in the future we all take a scientifc approach to similar events should they happen again. We should be light hearted and not become angry with science when an idea or notion we cherish has been changed. That just means science is doing its job in establishing logical rules that we can follow in the classification of objects instead of catering to people that love a cartoon dog so much that it bled into astronomy.

Of course, I wonder how the world will react when more people realize that When I was your age, the Brontosaurus was a dinosaur.

Networking With Your Professors

This blog is mostly for the random student that happens upon this blog.

I've learned in my 6 years of college that networking with my professors has played a vital role in establishing myself as a noteworthy person on campus. Not only have I utilized my interactions with these leaders to further my academic career, I've also grown close enough to some of them to consider them to be friends... perhaps even one day colleagues.

I strongly urge the student reader to not be afraid or bashful when it comes to speaking with professors. Feel free to email them with not only quandaries of their class, but also discussions and questions of related material. Almost as often as I send a link to a friend of mine on AIM, I hop onto my email and send it to a professor with a spin on my perspective and see how they react. After this initial correspondence, it makes it easier to approach them in person.

The beauty of getting a professor to know you not just by your name but by your face is that they feel obligated at the point to acknowledge you in passing. This encourages them to strike up a temporary conversation, even if it's just a few pleasantries or jokes, that further reinforces your presence in their mind.

Eventually, you can become comfortable enough with a teacher to use them as a research outside of academia. You can ask them to be a reference on a job application or you can ask if they know anyone in the related field that can help you find a job. Often times I find myself unsure of who to contact about an event on campus that I'd like to participate in or create, and this professors often have the ability to speed the process along greatly.

I personally have used my connections to get 3 jobs now as well as access to speakers to participate in multiple computer game conferences that a former student organization of myself used to hold. I invite them to BBQs and events at my house and on occasion I have been offered similar invitations.

I can not stress how important it has been to me to develop a personal connection to most, if not all, of my professors (at least relative to my major). I wouldn't be where I am today i.e. quickly approaching my masters, a year and a half of professional level design on a AAA title under my belt, and confident in my intellectual abilities enough to be proud of myself and to think that one day I will make an impact on this world that might be memorable of foot note in a history book.