mind this - by Lars Plougmann

Is Pluto a Mickey Mouse planet?

Pluto's status as a planet was "revoked" today by the International Astronomical Union. Our solar system contains millions of objects in a continuum of sizes and shapes but in our quest for simplicity we have chosen a model of the solar system based on one star and a few planets. As with any definition there are borderline cases and Pluto has been determined to fall short of what constitutes a "real" planet.

Lots of books and other information sources shall now have to be revised to reflect the new world-view. As you would expect, the process is already in progress on Wikipedia where a veritable edit war has broken out. In the first hour after the IAU's vote, some 50 changes were made to update the article on Pluto. It is impressive to see how quickly references to "planet" were replaced with dwarf planet and trans-Netptunian object and an explanation of the controversy was added. Soon after, somebody who must have felt strongly about keeping Pluto's planetary status tried to restore the article back to the state it had earlier in the day when Pluto was still the ninth planet. Several attempts at vandalising the page or inserting irrelevant information were corrected within minutes if not seconds.

Wikipedia has several times before shown its ability to react quickly to developments. You can watch revisions to articles as an animation using Wikipedia-animate.

Tags: Pluto Pluto IAU wikipedia collaboration planet solar system dwarf planet

A quarter of a million soccer balls

On a trip to a village in Malawi in November 2005, I shot this photograph of three guys with a home made football.
    Somebody involved with the charity World Vision found my photo on flickr by searching for tags to do with kids and soccer. World Vision is running a gift-in-kind campaign to send soccer balls and pumps to needy children world wide.
    In Malawi and many other places, children start helping their parents with work at an early age, taking away time to play games and the activities normally associated with childhood. World Vision will use my photo in a display at an event at Central Washington University. We are also going to see to it that the guys in the photo and their friends get a new football to play with.
    (This kind of charity only works in tandem with efforts focused on relieving poverty, providing food and treating AIDS and other diseases. For a fresh view on how to support charities [and how not to] read what The Charity Blogger has to say.)

Fishing in The Matrix

In the film hit The Matrix, Agent Smith argues that humans are a plague of the planet:

You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus.

While we as a species are trying to make amends with respect to air pollution and greenhouse gases, what is happening in the oceans is ill monitored and ill understood. Deep trawling may upset ecosystems that we know little or nothing about as 60 year old fish ends up on the dinner table. (The same Canadian study is referred to by the Discovery Channel and The Economist.)
I have been recommended a book by Charles Clover (but not read it yet) which analyses the many facets of the problem and points to New Zealand and Iceland as some of the few places attempting to take corrective action.
The problem is that it takes global agreement backed up by a solution for policing it before the situation can improve. We probably need a scheme similar to the central London traffic congestion charging adapted to the high seas: Something that defines a matrix superimposed on the ocean surface of the planet with a pricing structure for each cell.

The extinction game

15,589 species face extinction according to the Red List published last week. Another organisation trumpets the discovery of 13,000 new marine species this year so far.
So maybe we are only 2,589 species short? The situation is a bit more gloomy. The 13,000 are not new species even if they are new to science. But some of them may be truly new; this kind of thing happens all the time, it is just difficult to track because we have yet to discover potentially millions of hitherto unknown creatures that we share the planet with.
What of the species on the Red List? Some of them may be en route to succumb of their own accord, just like some companies prosper and others yield in the face of competition. The influence we have to be wary of is unfair competition from humans.
Forest fires started by man give rise to heroic attempts to limit the affected area while the forest fires started by lightning are generally left to burn, allowing the cycle of nature to work the way things have been for millions of years.
How do we differentiate between extinction by natural selection and forced extinction caused by humans monopolising ever more resources on land and in the oceans?