Declarations and Exclusions, a blog devoted to California insurance law, is hosting the current edition of the Blawg Review, and has devoted it to The Music of the Spheres. [If you don't know about the Blawg Review, it's described as "the blog carnival for everyone interested in law. A peer-reviewed blog carnival, the host of each Blawg Review decides which of the submissions and recommended posts are suitable for inclusion in the presentation. And the host is encouraged to source another dozen or so interesting posts to fit with any special theme of that issue of Blawg Review. The host's personal selections usually include several that reflect the character and subject interests of the host blawg, recognizing that the regular readership of the blog should find some of the usual content, and new readers of the blog via Blawg Review ought to get some sense of the unique perspective and subject specialties of the host."
To organize the post, the editor uses Gustav Holst's The Planets, and one of the planets included is Uranus, The Magician. So very kindly, he or she refers to the Law and Magic Blog in that part of the post.
Note that when Holst composed his piece (1914-1916), Pluto had not yet been discovered (1930). So Holst didn't write a "Pluto" section. However, Colin Mathews updated the piece with some Plutonian music called "Pluto, the Renewer," that has been included in some recordings. Poor Pluto! It's now been reclassified as a planetoid sort of thing. For more on Pluto's reclassification (some would say declassification, and some would say it's discrimination) read Neil DeGrasse Tyson's The Pluto Files (2009), an entertaining explanation of the flap over dislodging the ninth planet from its favored spot. Even if you still have a fondness in your heart for tiny, faraway Pluto, and Dr. Tyson's book doesn't convince you, you will come away having learned a lot about astronomy, and about the inner workings of the agencies that regulate what we call the bodies we see in the sky.
Tyson provides only one side of the ongoing debate over Pluto. The other side, supporting Pluto's planet status, is well told in Dr. David Weintraub's book "Is Pluto a Planet?" The demotion of Pluto was done by only four percent of the IAU, most of whom are not planetary scientists, and was immediately rejected by hundreds of professional astronomers led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto. Stern and like-minded scientists believe a planet is simply any non-self-luminous spheroidal body orbiting a star, and some are working to overturn the demotion while others are ignoring it entirely. Please do not present only one side as reality when this is far from being the case.
Posted by: Laurel Kornfeld | March 31, 2009 at 12:53 AM