• skisnow@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    Weird how many people seem to think it’s like a competition or something. It’s a descriptive label.

    The whole Pluto thing taught us a lot about the psychology of letting go of something taught at a young age. People getting proper frothing at how they shoulda just let Pluto keep it, just to save themselves the extremely minor cognitive dissonance.

    • piccolo@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      When people get upset about pluto, I’ll just tell them if pluto is planet, so is Ceres. Which then results in mindless staring because they never even heard about Ceres…

    • Kushan@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Have you seen the lengths people go to in order to not have to change their world view even a smidge? To not have to correct themselves about anything at all? I’ll give you a hint, literally every right wing party in the world doing well is because weak people can’t change a damn thing about themselves.

    • Zamboni_Driver@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      I really doubt more than .001% actually care if it’s called a planet or not, it’s just a meme to pretend that you care. Like pineapple on pizza.

      No one actually cares if you put pineapple on pizza. No one actually cares about Pluto being a planet. But there are many people who see themselves as some sort of white knight defenders of the truth against haters that don’t actually even exist.

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 month ago

      I always suspected that the discussion about letting Pluto stay a planet is especially relevant in the US since Pluto was the only planet to be discovered by US scientists … so it’s a point of national pride.

      • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        I’ve certainly not seen anyone frothing at the mouth about it in the francosphere. It’s a non-subject, we just updated our textbooks and moved on. Whereas in English-speaking media even reasonable actors mentioning Pluto in passing will pointedly remark on its status one way or another. Americans won’t admit it but the only reason that’s a thing is chauvinism.

        It’s funny how being bilingual one spots a lot of small semantic or cultural differences that amount to large paradigm shifts between languages. Like how most French people were taught the hydrocution myth (swimming after a meal supposedly being deadly), older Koreans believe fans to be dangerous to use while sleeping, and English speakers associate vanilla flavour with blandness because of the (English-specific) synonym even though the flavor itself is very powerful and no less overused than e.g. strawberry flavoring.

        What’s less funny is how when you point out such a difference some people get Big Mad about it because they can’t admit that some core belief from their childhood is actually a specific sociolinguistic quirk not shared by the rest of the world. People get tribal about the weirdest, most inconsequential shit.

        • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 month ago

          Koreans believe fans to be dangerous to use while sleeping

          tbf i believe that too (but about ACs and not fans) and i’m not korean. the reason i believe this is because of my real-life experiences. When AC is running, it typically gives me the sensation that the air it gives off is not just cold, but creepy cold, like an iron rod is not just hard, but hard enough to smash somebody’s skull with it. The same intensity is the coldness from the typical ACs that i’ve experienced. At least some of them.

          • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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            1 month ago

            That’s just because it’s dry by nature. Monitor your indoors humidity and adjust accordingly with a humidifier.

    • girsaysdoom@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      I’d agree with you but the definition is arbitrary and is not of Natural Kind. Even worse, instead of making the definition of a planet more clear it just makes the determining what is a planet more difficult.

      Honestly, if they just went with defining ‘Major Planets’, ‘Minor Planets’, and asteroids determined by mass and spherical shape, I think everyone would’ve moved on by now.

      • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        it just makes the determining what is a planet more difficult.

        If this is true, then please tell me what totally non-arbitrary reason there was for Ceres to not be universally considered a planet?

        • girsaysdoom@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          I’m not sure what you mean. It should be a planet by the definition I gave before unless I didn’t convey what I was trying to say correctly. It’s definitely large, heavy, and spherical enough to be a planet in my opinion.

          There’s tons of different sized objects in our solar system and it’s distinguishable enough to qualify in this one.