Whacking myself in the head with a ball-peen hammer* would be less painful than thinking about American politics at the present moment, so we turn to Science! for all our humor and entertainment needs…
1, Pluto Behaves More Like a Planet Than Thought. See, a planet is big chunk of rock wending its way through space, while thought, insofar as it can be said to do anything, just sort of sits there, wherever ‘there’ might be. So, Pluto, being a big chunk of rock, albeit perhaps not a planet-sized level of big but certainly really really big, by flying through space, is, insofar as it can be said to behave, behaving more like a planet than like thought, because exactly how thought can be said to behave is, at best, undefined…
Yea, that’s the ticket.The article goes on about solar wind or something, which stands even less chance of being funny than the above exercise in excruciating pedantry and headline mocking. Speaking of headlines of the Damned…
2. NASA News: Scientists Discovered Habitable Planets. And These Earth-like planets could harbor alien life. We have another couple of Inigo Montoya moments here: these words, ‘habitable’ and ‘earth-like’ – I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
Perhaps I shouldn’t pick on Science World Report, from which that first headline came, because a moment’s inspection reveals that the authors, in addition to having a most tenuous grip on science, are not native English speakers. For example:
They were shocked when they compared the sizes and temperature of these worlds to Earth and Venus; it was matchless, and highly known as the outstanding objective so far in researching outside the solar system. Then the results were directly issued today in the journal Nature.
I should work “Highly known as the outstanding objective” into my next bit of business writing to be directly issued. It would be matchless.
Likewise, Metro, from which the second headline was ripped in bloody tatters, seems to be an attempt to get hits from young city dwellers with disposable income, and can therefore hardly be expected to aim very high, science-wise or even English-wise. Both these articles are riffing off a paper published in Nature: Temperate Earth-sized planets transiting a nearby ultracool dwarf star. Here, you the reader are expected to know what ‘transiting’ is, and to have some idea what an ‘ultracool dwarf star’ is. For example, not this:
Core-accretion theory predicts that, given the small masses of these ultracool dwarfs, and the small sizes of their protoplanetary disks3,4, there should be a large but hitherto undetected population of terrestrial planets orbiting them5—ranging from metal-rich Mercury-sized planets6 to more hospitable volatile-rich Earth-sized planets7. Here we report observations of three short-period Earth-sized planets transiting an ultracool dwarf star only 12 parsecs away.** The inner two planets receive four times and two times the irradiation of Earth, respectively, placing them close to the inner edge of the habitable zone of the star8. Our data suggest that 11 orbits remain possible for the third planet, the most likely resulting in irradiation significantly less than that received by Earth.