Thursday, August 24, 2006

 

Neptune and Aquatic Biology Escape Censure


Item 26.1303 — evolutionary biology, no longer appears on the list of majors eligible for the SMART federal education grant for low-income college students. There is now an empty space between line 26.1302 (marine biology) and line 26.1304 (aquatic biology). Katherine McLane, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, which administers the grants, says the omission was just a clerical error.

Scientists interviewed by the NYT were concerned, but suggested that students in the field might be able to slip by listing just “biology” as their major, or one of the other biology fields that remain legal. One professor allowed that “removing that one major is not going to make the nation stupid”. An on line search of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum showed no recent additions.

People majoring in planetary astronomy are watching the list, in view of the action by leading astronomers Thursday reducing the number of God’s planets from 9 to 8. Various proposals before International Astronomical Union meeting in Prague would have added planets, bringing the number to 12, or even 40, but were voted down. In the end, Pluto was eliminated even though it was round because it had failed to “clear the neighborhood around its orbit. The item it had not cleared was Neptune, with which its orbit overlaps. It would appear that Neptune has also failed to clear its orbit (of Pluto), but no action was taken, possibly to test the waters for reaction from either God or the Bush administration, or from Poseidon for that mater.

The motion erasing Pluto from the list passed by a majority of the 300 astronomers voting, with 2200 abstentions. Two other heavenly bodies that had earlier appeared to be shoe-ins for the list, the asteroid Ceres, which was a planet in the 1800s before it got demoted, and the recently discovered 2003 UB313, an icy object slightly larger than Pluto, lost out as well.

NASA said that this would not affect its New Horizons mission, which earlier this year began what had been thought to be a planetary exploration mission. It will affect My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.

As yet there has been no (known) reaction to either deletion from the Bush administration.

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