Unscientific certainty

I asked my eleven year old niece what Pluto was, and she looked at me funny and said "Mickey's Dog," and went back to staring at the stars through her telescope.

Apparently Pluto is not longer a planet. It is now a dwarf-planet. I thought they liked to be called "little people?" So, size does matter? It isn't the orbit that counts? The part that really irks me is that they voted on it. I'm sorry, I didn't know that democratic principles could be applied to science.

This tells me two things- 1) definitions matter and 2) even the most acute minds dedicated to a particular topic can vehemently disagree about concrete data. At the end of the day, there is still a 'thing' out there called Pluto, and whatever you want to call it doesn't change the fact that it is really far away and really cold. It is not like changing its celestial status is going to keep me from visiting the next time I am out that way. This is a semantic debate. I don't like semantic debates - I am an anti-semantite.

The other thing that this tells me is "They vote? Who? I didn't vote? How do I get a vote? Why are all the stars named after Hercules villains? Maybe we can rename the Big and Little Dippers after Jack and Olivia (NDP - Crazytown)?"