Thoughts on the universe

SCANDAL in the VAST world of PROFESSIONAL ASTONOMERS!

Pluto, sadly, is no longer a planet, just a "dwarf planet," and people are pissed.

You know when you are really angry about something for like a week, and everyone around you is really angry, and you start coming up with elaborate explanations and schemes for why you should be angry and how you're going to fix it, and you talk about nothing else for days? Like in old FroSoCo a sample of this would be the chatlist/politics list/spam list conflicts. Or like my senior year of high school when we were all furious about they way my school calculated eligibility for valedictorianship. Or sophomore year when Clinton bombed Iraq (for a total of, I just realized with the help of Wikipedia, 4 days) and Diane and I (mostly Diane) diagrammed the way the world would end for what seemed like hours in Ms. Kieta's class. You know how, when you are angry or scared about something, it becomes your entire world in a way that excludes everything else. It always lasts for like a week and then by the time it's resolved you aren't paying any attention anymore. (Another example is when the Stanford class of 2006 got super pissed about having to graduate at Frost Amphitheater and I didn't really realize how much they cared, but then like 2 weeks later the Daily revealed that graduation was actually going to be on the football practice field and the story was on like the third page.)

That's kind of how it must feel to be an astronomer right now. You are raging.