You're Fired

Image via PhysicsWorld.com

Pluto has dropped further down the astonomy food chain. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has decided that Pluto, along with other dwarf planets in the solar system, will now be classified as "plutoids". To be a "plutoid", a dwarf planet must also be orbiting at a greater distance than Neptune. Some critics believe that the new reclassification is not robust enough. Alan Stern, lead investigator for NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, has already mocked the new "plutoid" definition. The president of the IAU does not believe there will be a big reaction, overall, within the astronomy community to the reclassification, however.

Annoyed with XML

Advancements in technology are fantastic, don't get me wrong. But it's always annoying when some things advance faster than others. I've been messing around with widgets and trying to add one or two to my blog. I keep running in to snags, however, because the widget code is not set up to automatically cut and paste in to the xml schema of my blog. I try to go through and fix it, but it's been so long since I've done any web coding in any detail that it's just not happening. So at 8:40 on Friday evening, I think it's time to call it quits and try again tomorrow. Maybe someone much smarter than me can give me some pointers in class tomorrow.

Wired Wednesday

Going political. Clinton supporters are all fired up and getting online.... for McCain. Some are even so angry and anti-Obama that they've launched a pro-McCain website. This website was launched by the founding member of the "Hillary Clinton Supporters of John McCain" group, who incidentally happens to be a 63-year-old rancher from my tiny little hometown in Texas. He is quoted in a blog on Wired.com as saying "We have doctors, lawyers, CPAs, the blue bloods, and then we have rednecks like me. It's a very diversified organization." The group claims 5,000 supporters so far, with over 37,000 hits to the website. Former Clinton White House special counsel Lanny Davis sent out an online petition on the Web Tuesday night calling for Obama to choose Hillary Clinton as his running mate. This has not gone over very well amongst avid Clinton supporters, however.

Wikipedia Meets Google

Well, sort of. It's called Wikia Search. The idea is to take a basic search engine and apply the Wikipedia community model to it. The product is search results that can be edited, deleted, re-ordered, added to, rated, annotated, and commented on. The re-released site uses an Ajax interface that allows users to drag results up and down the page, as well as edit the title or description of a result using an edit-in-place feature. Wikia Search is not as robust as search engines such as Google or Yahoo! with an index of only 30 million pages. The community-driven aspects also open Wikia Search up to spam and abuse. There is promise for Wikia Search, however, with the involvement of Wikipedia's founders and Jabber creator Jeremie Miller.