Word: pluto
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When NASA first considered a mission to Pluto more than 15 years ago, the idea was to visit the last and most distant of the nine planets, an oddball whose icy composition, tilted orbit and tiny size made it unlike anything else in the solar system. But when the New Horizons probe finally takes off from Cape Canaveral?as early as next week, if all goes well?it will be heading for something else entirely. "This little misfit is now central to our understanding of the origin of our solar system," says Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute...
...Oscar-baiting performances in which straight actors play gay, transvestite or transgender characters.” Think about it—Philip Seymour Hoffman is the mincing Truman in “Capote,” Cillian Murphy is a pretty cross-dresser in “Breakfast on Pluto,” and Felicity Huffman is a midlife-crisis pre-op in “Transamerica.” And all that’s in addition to the Jake Gyllenhaal/Heath Ledger vehicle, “Brokeback Mountain,” which is almost universally known...
...planet. How about defining a planet as an object that is massive enough to be squeezed into a spherical shape by gravity, does not orbit another such object and orbits the sun in the same plane as the eight objects that we considered planets before 1930? Then Pluto and others with tilted orbits could be called planetoids. There, that was easy...
...years schoolteachers have used a version of the mnemonic phrase "My Very Eager Mother Just Sent Us New Pajamas" to help kids learn the names of the nine planets in order of distance from the sun [Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto]. Now if Pluto loses its planetary status, I suppose we can get used to "My Very Eager Mother Just Sent Us Nothing." Things just won't be the same, though, without those pajamas...
Stewart has an inherently likable role, our bemused Virgil in the Inferno of media clichs. Colbert plays the devil himself: the millionaire pundit pretending to stand up for the little guy. He can even demagogue astronomy. When astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson told him Pluto should not be considered a planet, Colbert debated him thusly: "Isn't that just East Coast liberal intellectual ... did you go to an Ivy League school?" "Yes, I did." "... Ivy League-- educated people telling us what is or isn't a planet...