this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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Science Memes
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I'm Jewish and I'm upset whenever someone calls Jew Harp (an instrument) or Jew Ears (an edible mushroom) with another name.
come on, why can't we be associated with yummy mushrooms or cool cowboy instruments?
if you call it Jaw harp i want to break your jaw,
at least the Latin name for jew ear still says jew ear
what are the changes and why?
can't post this and expect us to carry on
Yeah! I'm barely able to get mad about this with no information!
This sort of thing happens all the time, and it's usually subject to some level of debate. Just look at the ponderosa pine (pinus ponderosa. Some say there is one species with multiple subspecies, some say they are just different varieties, some say that they are different species, or some are and some arent, etc.
"Pussy willow will now be called cotton stick."
I'm Cotton Stick... Cotton Stick Galore.
Had it not been for Cotton Stick Joe...
From henceforth "trees" shall now be called "tall wavy bois" and "flowers" shall be known as "colorful stemmy bennies."
I will not be taking questions.
But what will the tree community be about then?
Weed. Like it’s always been.
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Pluto is a planet!
The only reason Pluto is no longer a planet is because we discovered there were loads more planets and couldn't be bothered to acknowledge their existence!
i've spent 25 years on this blue marble fascinated by space, and only recently discovered there multiple long orbit dwarf planets going around the sun??? that is so cool why is this not widely known!
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Unpopular opinion: dwarf planets are cool.
It's been like that for decades to be honest. Ceres used to be called a planet, but you don't see anyone complaining about it's demotion
but so what?
we used to have a handful of elements, but when we kept discovering more, we didn't change the rules to have elements, and "strange elements" so schools only have to teach about 16 elements.
Well elements are elements. All of them are just protons and neutrons and electrons at the end of the day. They have different properties but all of them behave by the same rules.
But there's some big differences between the various kinds of bodies orbiting the Sun and how they're orbiting the Sun. Big asteroids were considered planets, until we discovered there's a shitload of them and they're all in roughly the same area. When it turned out Pluto is basically in the same situation and there's a lot more of the transneptunian objects, it was pretty clear that Pluto isn't special. If you compare it to planets it's pretty weird. But I think it's good that they created the dwarf planet classification because that also elevated Ceres back, hell yeah.
I'd rather we have dozens of planets, with news articles talking about "new planets discovered"
we can still teach the handful of "classical planets", so we can have posters, or have like periodic tables, and everyone be aware that they might go out of date as more is discoverd.
the solar system will be more exciting and more varied.
also, the "clearing orbit from similar objects" is time and orbit dependent,
larger orbits take longer to clear, which mean in a few billion years ceres might eject pluto and become a planet?
or we could have gas giants beyond pluto (like this hypothetical 9th planet ) which it would be unlikely it has cleared its orbit, so we could have a planet larger than Jupiter which we would call a planet, but if we discover another planet in its orbit (too large to clear), then we will have to say that it is a dwarf planet.
The main issue here is that everything from a speck of dust to the massive black hole at the centre of the galaxis is pretty much the same thing on a large spectrum.
You can clearly say that some grains of dust are something entirely different than a supermassive black hole, but it's really hard to find solid cut-off points to categorize anything in between.
So we started with a handful of arbitrary examples for each category, which was easy when we only had these examples, but with more and more discoveries the gaps between these examples are filled and it becomes a spectrum, and then it becomes iffy what exactly fits into which category.
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It's all just made up categorization. It's like that because astronomers have agreed to categorize them like that. That's all.
Yes, a dwarf planet!
And Jupiter is a Gas Giant, but we still count it as one of the planets of our solar system
Because if dwarf planets counted, we'd have to include a hell of a lot more than 9 planets.
NASA says there are only 5 dwarf planets in the system. But, it's all pretty arbitrary. The line between planet, dwarf planet and asteroid are all pretty fuzzy.
An alien civilization looking at the Sol system might say that it's only got one planet, Jupiter. Everything else is so much smaller that they're not really significant.
Another logical cut-off would be that planets had to be bigger than any moons in the system. If we went by that standard, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Earth, Venus and Mars could all still count as planets, but Mercury would get ditched because it's smaller than Ganymede and Titan.
What's funny is that we're still using the name "planet" which comes from "asteres planētai", meaning "wandering star". For the Greeks what mattered wasn't the size or the mass, it was how bright they were. That meant that a tiny object near the sun like Mercury (Hermes) got the name planet, because despite being tiny, the fact it's close to the sun means it reflects a lot of light. And Jupiter (Zeus) and Saturn (Cronus) got named not because they're so big, but because they're big and far away from the sun, which means they reflect sunlight in a similar way to the much smaller inner planets. Earth's moon might have been given the name "planet" if it had been a lot smaller and/or further away.
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Pluto's not a planet, but he doesn't care because he knows he's hot shit.
The most performative "hurr durr science" bullshit ever. Who fucking cares if Pluto was considered a planet when you were a kid?
Not you specifically. There are people who really seem to care about this shit.
NPC wojak: "I love science."
"Science says sex and gender are two different things."
NPC wojak gets angry: "Science was corrupted by the Jewish cabal! See: John Money*!"
* John Money is not Jewish, but is pushed by transphobes with the hope you'll accuse him being one.
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Cue in the guys about to get hanged meme. Paleontologist asking the Botanist, "First time?"
meanwhile,
we still refuse to call Sonic th hedgehog protein anything else.
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Wasn't this more about taking away the names from a bunch of people who in hindsight were terrible people? I remember something awhile back about people getting upset because some groups had decided that if you had a shred of negativity in your past, you weren't allowed to discover and name things. I believe they were trying to change a bunch of names "to not honor the original person".
That didn't feel like science so much as politics and I get why some would be against that.
Have you ever been to a niche scientific community conference? It's always been 90% politics.
The Magellanic Cloud community collectively decided that they didn't want to study objects named after someone who had subjugated the ancestors of the communities studying it, so they agreed to call them the Milky Clouds. A pop science article went out about it and people complained that it wasn't science, it was politics. But unless you're a part of that community, you don't get to decide on the names of the objects that these people understand better than literally anyone else alive or dead. They're doing more science regarding these objects than anyone else has ever tried, they get to decide what's best, even if it appears political.
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Science is a highly political process.
The real actual science, just ask petroleum, cigarettes, sugar, mosanto glyphosate, lysenkoism, grant allocation, DDT, lead gasoline and paint, amiante, IQ, operation paperclip, nuclear testing, SSRIs, opioid crisis, covid 19, gain-of-functionr research, psychology replication crisis, trans fats, usda food pyramid, even cold fusion and the latest entry in this list PFOA/PFAS.
Scientific truths and regulatory actions often "become allowed" only when they are no longer economically threatening to the incumbents.
Some of the examples are not shown to work. They are however still good examples since going down a dead end can be a good example. Deciding where to explore is deeply political.
Edit: you could delineate them clearer to make sure nobody thinks of you as a conspiracy nutjob, but you do you.
For e.g. cold fusion there was to the best of my knowledge not a single clear cut case where it could be replicated without doubt or at all. Errors just add up.
Here is an excellent retelling of the cold fusion saga
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn92eWhGG14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbfJFPVApu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWlBZT7L1qM
Basically, as soon as the scientist had one anomalous reading, the political and academic machine got into overdrive, huge money started getting thrown around and the scientists got under huge amount of pressure and paranoia.
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which plants though? are you making shit up?
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