Movies

I haven’t had much of a life lately, but one bright spot is that I’ve been watching lots of movies. Stacy is a bit of a movie buff. The house is full of movies on tape and DVD and she brings home movies from the library by the armload. I’ve probably averaged a movie per night for the last couple of months. We saw two movies last night. First, “Gods and Monsters,” declared by Stacy to be our dose of gay culture for the evening. And second, the animated “Shark Tale.”

Mm, don’t you love IMDB? I looked up the biographical Gods and Monsters just now to read that the lead actor was playing someone with whom he shares some similarities in real life. Much more interesting though, is the “trivia” that the second actor, who played kind of a protagonist role, suggested the closing scene to the director. This scene was brilliant. In an emotionally charged scene earlier in the movie, he had declared “I am not your monster!” Then in the closing scene, he acknowldeges friendship and respect with a gesture that softens that stance.

Shark Tale was the real surprise for containing–crossdressing! Ok, really it was only crossdressing for purposes of disguise, but still, the movie has a number of delightful LGBT allegories and ends with the father accepting his son–”no matter what he eats or how he dresses.”

Dunning calls

Of course I get these. The courts have taken all of my money and are taking all of my pay. I have one dollar in my purse. I have no assets. No car or house to repossess. Creditors will have to get in line and wait a bit. I kindly explained this to them — once. I won’t explain it again.

Fortunately, dunning calls are easy to separate from legitimate calls. A dunning call goes like this. I answer the phone and am met with silence or perhaps low static for an awkward second or so, as some automatic dialing machine detects that a human has answered and transfers the call to a phone bank of people working collections. The sound in my receiver changes as one of these poor people picks up the phone and begins to speak. Of course I have just answered the phone with “Hello, this is Sonia” but they ask, in a heavy foreign accent, “Hello? Hello?” Then pause, then, “Is this…” another pause as they read my name from a computer screen in front of them, “… ____ _. ____?” They use my legal male name with my middle initial, they mispronounce it very badly, and they sound somewhat tentative. I imagine this is not from surprise at reaching Sonia, but because few of these sequences lead to real conversations. This one doesn’t. I hang up.

Pluto

Pillow talk on a recent night meandered to the subject of Pluto.

The conversation didn’t really go quite like this, but, lets say, it inspired this:

Q: You’re an astronomer. Give me the straight scoop. Is Pluto a planet?
A: The International Astronomical Union recently ruled that no, it’s not a planet. Not everyone agrees though…

Q: What new thing happened that people used to call it a planet but now say it’s not?
A: Well, this IAU ruling is pretty new. Before that, most people called it a planet.

Q: Fine, but what new scientific thing happened that the IAU decided this?
A: Some scientists that didn’t want Pluto to be called a planet scratched their heads for a while and came up with a new scientific principle that the other 8 planets clearly have, but which Pluto does not.

Q: That sounds bogus. Are Pluto’s feelings hurt?
A: Children worldwide are upset over the IAU decision.

Q: Seriously, wasn’t there some recent discovery of something out in space that started all this?
A: We recently found something out past Pluto, orbiting the Sun like all the other planets, and is almost certainly a little bit bigger than Pluto. So, if anyone was going by size, their set of things they call planets would kind of have to change.

Q: Just this one thing was discovered?
A: This new thing kind of precipitated the naming crisis, but we’d been finding big asteroid-planet-icy-rocky things out by Pluto since 1992, and big rocky-asteroid things in the asteroid belt since 1801. They called that 1801 rock a planet when they first discovered it, so the debate has been on and off since then.

Q: You said not everyone agrees. What do other people say?
A: All sorts of stuff has been proposed. My favorite opinion on the matter was printed in the Letters to Editor in Sky and Telescope magazine several years back. The debate was going on there month by month until one person wrote in saying basically “My name is Clyde Tombaugh. I discovered Pluto and I say it’s a planet.” That was the end of the discussion in the pages of Sky and Telescope for a while. Clyde died several years ago, before this subversive new thing was discovered.

Q: What do *you* say Pluto is?
A: I say there are five planets. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn have been noted since the beginning of civilization as “wandering stars”–that’s even the origin, from ancient Greek, of our word “planet.” Most everyone was fine with that until just a few hundred years ago. Every redefinition of “planet” since then has been based on some new fangled theory. Consider the last few hundred years where we keep trying to redefine planet as people come up with fancier scientific theories, and compare those few hundred years with 10,000 years of civilization before that when no one argued. All those millennia, the conversation would go, “The wandering stars? Oh yeah, everybody knows them. There are five…”

Q: That avoids the debate by discounting all of science. Shouldn’t we come up with a scientific answer? And isn’t that what the IAU did?
A: No, we shouldn’t have a scientific answer, and no, the the IAU answer isn’t even a scientific one. The IAU cited some scientific stuff to declare that eight things in our solar system should be called planets. They specifically stated that their ruling applies to our solar system only, not any other solar system. So it’s nothing more than a label applied to eight things.

Here’s an analogy: Let’s define “finger” using a bunch of medical terminology that will let us call our pinky, ring finger, middle finger, and index finger as “fingers”, we’ll come up with a definition that excludes the thumb, excludes moles and warts, and declare that it only applies to human beings with no birth defects, injuries, or other bizarre circumstances. Now, do we have a scientific definition of “finger”? No, we just have a single label that we have applied to the four things commonly known as the pinky, ring, middle, and index fingers. Four things in the entire universe. This definition has no other use. We made sure of that when we said “human being”! We haven’t made any new discovery, we haven’t used any new discoveries, we haven’t added any new knowledge to the world’s understanding of science. Oh sure, we defined a word, but we specifically said that our definition didn’t apply in any other situations that might be useful in furthering science or medicine. We could have accomplished the same thing without all the medical terminology. The IAU did the same thing.

Q: Bah. It’s still a matter of drawing the line somewhere. What exactly is the IAU definition? Would I even be able to understand it?
A: You probably can understand it, even though it leans on some fairly new scientific theories. The definition has three parts:

1. A planet is in orbit around the sun. This scientific theory is about 500 years old. That’s when Copernicus pointed out that Earth was a planet too, in addition to the five planets I like.
2. A planet is round. Or, to quote the technical wording of the IAU definition, “nearly round”. The idea is that a small rock in space can have a jagged shape, but bigger and bigger rocks are more subject to crushing under their own weight. A big enough rock will crush into that “nearly round” shape that we all intuitively think of planets having.
3. A planet has “cleared it’s neighborhood” in space. This is the pièce de résistance that draws a dividing line where the Pluto naysayers wanted it. To understand this, you have to understand a couple of relatively modern theories. Firstly, that the solar system formed out of some sort of cloud of gas and dust, and that under the influence of gravity it started to condense into clumps of stuff, and that these clumps kind of mixed it up with each other, and that clumps crashing into each other and combining formed the planets we have today. Secondly, that when clumps mix it up, the bigger one wins. If they crash, the bigger one just gets bigger. If they approach but don’t touch, the smaller one flies off in some random direction and the bigger one stays in about the same orbit it was in before. Either way, over time, a big clump can prove itself king of the mountain by clearing it’s neighborhood in space of virtually all smaller objects.

Copernicus’s solar system looked like this:

Saturn
Jupiter
Mars
Earth
Venus
Mercury

(six planets)

Today we have,

(a whole bunch of rocks, including Pluto and another one even bigger)
Neptune
Uranus
Saturn
Jupiter
(a whole bunch of rocks, including the 1801 rock)
Mars
Earth
Venus
Mercury

(eight planets)

The point is that if you consider the ten lines I just listed as ten “neighborhoods,” then in the cases of the eight planets, it’s striking how few rocks are left at this point in time, whereas in the cases of the two rock fields, it’s equally striking that no rock has turned out large enough to be effective at clearing away smaller rocks.
Q: I like it! How come you don’t?
A: It stinks of political squabbling. Oh, but let’s not go there…