Status Updates From How I Killed Pluto and Why ...

I rather like this book actually.

Oh goodie! Planetary scientists and astronomers collecting signatures and conscientiously objecting for the resurrection of Pluto as a planet! ☀️⭐️

'Once you write down a definition with lawyerly precision, you get the lawyers involved in deciding whether or not your objects are planets.' Seems like a terrible idea to this lawyer.

Q: 'In the entire field of astronomy, there is no word other than planet that has a precise, lawyerly definition.... Why does planet have such a definition but star, galaxy, and giant molecular cloud do not?' A: Because of your discoveries and demotion of Pluto, sir!

'Keeping Pluto dead has taken a lot of work. In the days, months, and years since the decision was made, I've been accosted on the street, cornered on airplanes, harangued by e-mail, with everyone wanting to know: Why did Pluto have to get the boot? What did Pluto ever do to you?'

On being advised to stay humble: 'Humble? I thought, and chuckled to myself. My one-year-old daughter had recently learned to mock me in a sign language she had made up herself.'

The reddish star in the upper right of the spectacular constellation Orion is known not just by its common name Betelgeuse, which in Arabic means "armpit of the giant"...

I like how he says "The universe speaks to me in strange ways," when certain events keep reappearing in his life. "What is the universe telling me?" I believe that there are certain signs and reoccurrences that do give warnings or themes in life, too.

'[Wife] was in her energetic superwoman second trimester. If I was working late trying to figure out something about [space], she would stay awake even later looking at baby magazines. If I woke up early to try to look at a few pictures of the sky just as they were coming off the telescope, she would already be awake looking at pregnancy books. As long as she was fed, she was unstoppable.'

He has such a dry sense of humor, I love it: 'The rules on when an object qualifies for a name are obscure, uninteresting, and designed to keep names from being given to insignificant asteroids that are seen a few times, then never again. Nonetheless, they are the rules, and to the zealous enthusiasts, they must be followed at all cost to prevent astronomical chaos from breaking out.'

'It did seem as if they hated me, or at least felt that antagonistic indignation that can be pulled off particularly well on the Internet.' Is Donald Trump trolling astronomers now?

New concept: 'Albedo is a measure of how reflective something is. Freshly fallen snow has a high albedo, while coal or dirt has an albedo that is quite low.'

'Finding out that something you have just discovered is considered all but impossible is one of the joys of science.'

I like this: 'Most of us have a blind spot, something we can't see even though it is right in front of us. [X] were directly in my blind spot. I knew about them but preferred not to think about them. Why? ... Since this information did not fit well into my view of the solar system, I chose not to think about it.'

Also, I love this chapter title: "The Moon is My Nemesis."

I'm enjoying his extended metaphor of the solar system as the ocean: asteroids as schools of minnows, planets as the pod of whales, and Pluton and the Kuiper belt objects as a "previously overlooked collection of sardines swimming in a faraway sea."

"The usually sparsely attended final session was likely to be full of surly astronomers itching for a fight." First, aren't they always? Two, it's disheartening that even this scientist finds the governing body's usual resolutions "unintelligible."