GraniteM

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m not concerned with Pluto’s feelings. If it’s too small, has an irregular orbit, hasn’t cleared it’s immediate vicinity, etc., then fine, it doesn’t meet the objective standards by which we’re going to define planets going forward, that’s totally acceptable.

But saying that a dwarf planet isn’t a planet is just bad etymology. It’s got the word planet right in there, but it’s not a planet? That’s super confusing for the casual user.

Planetoid, on the other hand, had been in common use for literally decades, and it makes perfectly good etymological sense. Asteroid = star-like, because if you’re not careful you might mistake it for a star. Planetoid = planet-like, for the same reason.

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I don’t want justice for Pluto, I want justice for linguistic clarity!

[H]owever much all this soothes my vanity, and however much I appreciate being vice-president of Mensa, an organization which bases admission to its membership on IQ, I must, in all honesty, maintain that it means nothing.

What, after all, does such an intelligence test measure but those skills that are associated with intelligence by the individuals designing the test? And those individuals are subject to the cultural pressures and prejudices that force a subjective definition of intelligence.

[…]

The whole thing is a self-perpetuating device. Men in intellectual control of a dominating section of society define themselves as intelligent, then design tests that are a series of clever little doors that can let through only minds like their own, thus giving them more evidence of “intelligence” and more examples of “intelligent people” and therefore more reason to devise additional tests of the same kind. More circular reasoning!

–Isaac Asimov, “Thinking About Thinking,” 1975

“What would Henry VIII say if he were alive today?”

“Help help let me out it’s dark and I can’t breathe in here, help help help!”

It’s not a continuity error as such, but I’m a big fan of all the technologies that by rights should have completely upended galactic civilization but then just get forgotten.

The Genesis device should be an appalling superweapon that would change the face of war.

And then those missiles from Generations that can kill an entire solar system should, too.

And the time on TNG that they stumbled on a weird transporter trick that could make it so no one would ever need to die of old age ever again.

And the Tribble blood that cures death.

And so forth.

Looks like Marian from River City Girls has taken a turn for the worse.

Dante’s Inferno, or, That Time I Went to Hell and My Favorite Classic Poet Was There to Give Me a Tour and I Got to See All My Least Favorite People Being Horribly Tortured.