[cosmos] pluto no longer a planet - official

Pluto was stripped of its status as a planet in Prague on Thursday, when astronomers from around the world redefined it as a "dwarf planet," leaving just eight classical planets in the solar system. Pluto is no stranger to controversy. In fact, it's been dogged by disputes ever since its discovery in 1930.

Many astronomers contend the ninth rock from the sun never deserved to be a full planet in the first place.

Discovered by Clyde Tombaugh of Arizona's Lowell Observatory, Pluto was classified as a planet because scientists initially believed it was the same size as Earth. It was the only known object in the Kuiper Belt and in 1978, it was found to have a moon - Charon. But in the 1990s, more powerful telescopes revealed numerous bodies similar to Pluto in the neighborhood.

Scientists agree that to be called a planet, a celestial body must be in orbit around a star while not itself being a star. It also must be large enough in mass for its own gravity to pull it into a nearly spherical shape and have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.

Pluto's reaction to its downgrading has not been recorded.

[petron again] chicken feathers and human hair

Everything’s linked and syndicated these days. I got this story from Oil and Gas, who got it from Reuters, under Science News [?].

Well, it’s getting stranger by the day.

The Philippine Coast Guard appealed on Thursday for chicken feathers and human hair to help sponge up the country's worst oil spill. Petron, in which the Philippine government and Saudi state oil firm Saudi Aramco each have a 40 percent stake, said a fresh spill was spotted late on Wednesday.

"We are appealing for the supply of indigenous absorbent materials like chicken feathers, human hair and rice straw," Harold Jarder, head of the Coast Guard in Iloilo, a province north of Guimaras, told Reuters. Jarder said San Miguel Corp., Southeast Asia's largest food and beverage conglomerate, promised to donate one tonne of chicken feathers a day from its plants in Iloilo and nearby Bacolod City.

Les Reyes, owner of one of the country's largest hairdressing chains, said his 200 shops had started collecting hair clippings on Tuesday. "This is in response to the call of Greenpeace," Reyes said, adding he had also asked other salons to donate hair to the Coast Guard.

Jarder said chicken feathers and human hair will be placed in sacks tied to bamboo poles and placed along the coastlines of affected villages. Some communities in Guimaras are already using rice straw in sacks to try to contain the spill, which has affected 27 coastal villages and a marine reserve and is spreading in a northeast direction toward the islands of Negros, Cebu and Masbate.

[blogging] 6 reasons to continue

Can’t resist the temptation to reflect.

Tomorrow marks a special occasion for me – one month since I began this blog - and therefore 23:59 today will give me my month’s stats. The Glenfiddich is at the ready [my beloved single malt can’t be bought over here] and now I’ll attempt neither to be embarrassing nor unethical:

1…First up - why blog? To put it another way, into which categories do bloggers fall? Seems to me there are five sorts:

i…those who need a blog because they are either journos, pollies or a combination of both, who have regular column inches or minutes of airtime and their hits are stratospheric. Good luck to them because they work hard at it.

ii…those selling something, e.g. Apple.ru are about to open a forum/blog and many other firms do the same. Then there are the specialist music blogs with info on what’s on and where.

Full text here.

[nuclear] iran's answer to the 'gang of six' proposals

This is a summary of the key points in Bill Samii’s* article on Iran’s 23 page response to the ‘gang of six’:

· Iranian Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani gave representatives from China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland (representing US interests) a 23-page written response to an international incentives package at a meeting in Tehran.

· Mohammad Saidi, of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said that although suspension of Iran's uranium enrichment was no longer an appropriate precondition, Tehran was willing to hold talks. Iran has also rejected the possibility of suspending uranium enrichment.

· The proposal called on Iran to cooperate fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), "suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities" and "resume implementation of the Additional Protocol" of the NPT.

Full text here.

[life] of images of the lord, flat tyres and burnt toast

Today, everything is going wrong and it’s still morning. I usually pick up my best mate and we go to Ikea for a coffee and a bite to eat and to chew the fat over this and that. A number of things happened.

Firstly, leaving the car park, my front passenger tyre suddenly deflated. No problem. Next, only one part of the jack was there. Next, the bolts were rusted. No problem – find a piece of metal tubing to put over the star spanner.

Spanner broke. OK, no problem. I have another. Finally the bolts give and the wheel is changed. It goes flat. I don’t know why, it just went flat. OK, it’s raining and in this carpark, the dirt has become a quagmire. It’s over the arms, trousers, shirt, everywhere.

So out comes the little pump they supply you with, with the plastic nozzle, which is broken. OK. Hold it on the valve and foot pump at the same time. Eventually we get to Ikea and we always have a discussion paper. Today was Tom Cruise [the last posting].

This article continues here.

[hollywood] how tom cruise lost his career

Hollywood and in particular, Paramount, has had enough. It takes a lot for Hollywood to castigate a wayward star so why, in Cruise’s case?

The thing was that Cruise combined a number of distinct negatives which finally tipped the balance over what were perceived as waning positives.

Shifting away from movies to sport for one moment, the great rugby star David Campese, known as much for his mouth as for his truly breathtaking onfield style, once said:

It’s OK to be a big mouth, as long as you can back it up on the field.

Or in this case - on the movie set. This is what Tom Cruise has failed to appreciate. Fine, espouse Scientology ad nauseam. Fine, speak of eating your wife’s placenta. Fine, hide your baby from the world. Fine, bounce up and down on a couch like a little boy. And even then you can still be taken seriously in Hollywood.

Full text here.