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For Mooslims and Pastafarians it may make no difference, but for those who follow the joke faith post-modern religion Discordianism, the IAU has named the minor planet formerly known as 2003 UB₃₁₃, aka Xena aka “the 10^th planet,” after their goddess Eris.  According to their Principia [page 000015] not much is known about Eris:

Her geneology is from the Greeks and is utterly confused. Either She was the twin of Ares and the daughter of Zeus and Hera; or She was the daughter of Nyx, goddess of night (who was either the daughter or wife of Chaos, or both), and Nyx’s brother, Erebus, and whose brothers and sisters include Death, Doom, Mockery, and Friendship. And that She begat Forgetfullness, Quarrels, Lies, and a bunch of gods and goddesses like that.

One day Mal-2 consulted his Pineal Gland and asked Eris if She really created all of those terrible things. She told him that She had always liked the Old Greeks, but that they cannot be trusted with historic matters. “They were,” She added, “victims of indigestion, you know.”

At least the Greeks didn’t have two (2) “One True Symbol”s like the MOOs, nor did they confuse correlation with causation (in “Pirates are Cool”) like the Pastas (you can also correlate beer sales with teachers’ salaries).

On May 10, 1933, the year the Nazis took power in Germany, students, encouraged by their professors, burned mountains of “un-German” books{top left}. In his play Almansor (1821) the German writer Heinrich Heine wrote:

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

In 1982, about 50 years later, they were burning books in Minnesota{top right}.  That same year, 25 years ago, the American Library Association proclaimed the last week in September as a week to celebrate banned books{posters below}.  Google Booksearch chipped in this year with a search to find banned books in a library near you.

Star Trek came on unceremoniously 40 years ago today with a love story between a doctor and what turned out to be a salt-seeking creature disguised as a former lover.  I was immediately hooked.  I didn’t even realize that Kirk was the main character – Bones had the lead role that episode.  With the remake of TOS with modern special effects, Christie’s auction of ST artifacts (ironically Bones used what in reality was a salt shaker as his diagnostic tool), a Star Trek XI movie in the works, and lots of fan-made productions (like New Voyages), I just want to say where can I get one of those time portals and get my 40 years refunded?  Happy 40th!

David Bau has written a Sudoku Generator with output in PDF, Postscript, plaintext, and HTML.  Nice thing to do.  Difficult ones, requiring lots of guesses, have ratings above 3.00, while a rating of 0.00 means no guesses required.  Enjoy!

By a 183-186 vote, the IAU failed to classify the dwarf planetary object, Pluto, a Plutonian Object.  What is clear is that, despite the struggles to find it, Pluto is no longer a planet.  So there are 8 planets and a new dwarf for Snow White.

The UK’s Astronomy Blog reports that the final draft proposal for the definition of planet not only doesn’t create the twin planets Pluto and Charon, but actually demotes Pluto to a dwarf planet (= not a planet) because it hasn’t cleared the neighborhood around it’s orbit.  Pluto actually shares part of its orbit with Neptune.  By symmetry doesn’t that disqualify Neptune as a planet? 

{Above} Lia and Alan get the news.  Alan expresses pffffft!  Lia is just stunninged.  They jump in the car heading back to Prague to vote down the draft proposal.  You can watch the vote online starting at 9:00 AM EDT.

As first reported by Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, the IAU will (a week from today) vote on a new definition of planet which will denominate 12 planets in our Solar System instead of 9, with many more – perhaps millions – waiting to be discovered!

Lia and Alan discuss the proposals before the IAU on the swings.  Checking the mail, they happily report that it looks like Pluto and Charon will be designated as the first twin planets! 

Why Pluto-Charon when our own Moon is larger than both Pluto and Charon?  Because the barycenter of the Pluto-Charon system is outside Pluto, while, for the Earth-Moon system it is 1700 km below the surface of the Earth.  Phil points out that, with the Moon receding from Earth at 4 cm per year, in about 40 million years [correction: make that about 3 billion years] the Earth-Moon barycenter will be outside the Earth and the Moon will then be designated a planet (that is, if the IAU doesn’t redefine planet before then). 

Below are the 3 new planets, and some planet candidates.

Later Lia and Alan prepare for travel to Prague for the conclusion of this planet-shattering IAU meeting.

From a Nature article (based on Technorati ranks):

0	Pharyngula	179
1	The Panda’s thumb	1647
2	RealClimate	1884
3	Cosmic Variance	2174
4	The Scientific Activist	3429
5	Respectful Insolence	3639
6	Aetiology	4989
7	Cognitive Daily	5820
8	Effect Measure	6186
9	Adventures in Ethics and Science	7844
10	Deltoid	8635
11	Uncertain Principles	8635
12	Thoughts from Kansas	9143
13	John Hawks Anthropology Weblog	10234
14	blog.bioethics.net	11423
15	In the pipeline	12353
16	Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology A Group Blog	12729
17	Stranger Fruit	12729
18	The Disgruntled Chemist	14551
19	A Blog Around the Clock	14858
20	Evolutionblog	14858
21	Gene Expression	15102
22	Mike the Mad Biologist	15258
23	Mixing Memory	16383
24	Archives of The Cheerful Oncologist Volume 2	16383
25	The Questionable Authority Archive	17403
26	Biosingularity	19236
27	Evolgen	22859
28	bootstrap analysis	24095
29	Evolving Thoughts	24405
30	Terra Sigillata	25174
31	Prometheus (Roger Pielke Jnr)	26411
32	A Few Things Ill Considered	27774
33	75 Degrees South	29544
34	Discovering biology in a digital world	33296
35	A Concerned Scientist	35121
36	Invasive Species Weblog	39698
37	Developing Intelligence	40444
38	The Daily Transcript	40444
39	Biopeer	40444
40	Stayin’ Alive	41239
41	On being a scientist and a woman	42065
42	Flags and Lollipops – Bioinformatics Blog	43778
43	The Quantum Pontiff	44796
44	Good Math, Bad Math	45603
45	nodalpoint.org – A bioinformatics weblog	46627
46	Climate Science	50909
47	The Lancelet	50909
48	Afarensis	50909
49	Three-Toed Sloth	51100