FaceDeer

I don't know what you're suggesting is going on here, those images you linked don't work as far as I can tell. Firefox throws a security certificate error. Are you hosting them yourself and collecting IP addresses from people who click on them? If so, that's not exactly a Lemmy-specific flaw. That's just basic Internet 101.

Oh no, the Russians are angry. Oh dear oh my.

Anyway.

Yeah, but it's still kind of odd that it happened twice.

Note that the second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, no longer uses proof-of-work to validate its chain. So any regulations or data on electricity usage will be basically irrelevant to it.

Someone shot the elderly Republican former actor with dementia? If I had a nickel!

It sounds scary, and that's all that's needed to get clicks.

I will ALWAYS cast my vote to most effectively suppress the republican traitor filth.

And so you're going to vote for Biden, yes?

Okay, even more complexity. Still not relevant to the reason the case was dropped.

Using system dynamics to classify parts of a system is all well and good when you're, well, disecting systems, but this was about defining individual bodies.

No we're not, unless you're going to include dozens of moons as "planets" as well. Moons and planets have nothing to distinguish them except their system dynamics.

Using extrinsic contexts rather than intrinsic ones is how you define dolphins as fish.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you suggesting that dolphins and fish are defined based on where they are, rather than what they are? It wouldn't make sense to do that. But that has no bearing on whether it makes sense to classify astronomical bodies that way because in their case extrinsic contexts actually are relevant.

Spherical due to being in hydrostatic equilibrium is all we need.

I actually don't much like that part of the definition system either since it has the same "unclear fuzzy boundary" problem that a simple mass cutoff has. There's no physical reason to expect there to be a gap between "round" and "not-round", objects will be expected to have a smooth continuum. Some objects will change their roundness over time as their material slumps, even. But fortunately it's not really relevant to the distinction between planets and non-planets, it only comes into play for distinguishing dwarf planets from smaller bodies. And there isn't much public sense of investment in whether the formation of Rheasilvia should or should not invalidate Vesta's claim to dwarf planethood, so it doesn't come up much.

Definitions aren't a waste of time when they're based on meaningful distinctions and natural classifications. As Plato once said, "you should cleave nature at the joints."

In the case of the IAU definition of "planet", they picked a very good joint to cleave the population of objects at. For sound physically-based dynamic reasons you tend to get objects that are either really good at clearing their orbital neighborhood of other objects or not at all good at doing that, you never expect to see objects that are somewhere in a fuzzy middle ground.

The Wikipedia article on clearing the neighbourhood has a table of values for the planets and also for some of the prominent dwarf planets, and there's a very clear multiple-orders-of-magnitude gap between the two populations under all of the various mechanisms by which neighbourhood-clearing can be measured or calculated.

Frankly, this is a way better approach than an arbitrary "at least this many kilograms" cutoff. With a cutoff like that you can easily get objects that straddle the line and are impossible to classify. It's not based on any meaningful dynamic orbital properties of the object. I don't like this proposal for exoplanets, they should use the same one that we use for solar system planets.

They are when you're holding an actual trial. You can't try both criminal and civil charges simultaneously, the two processes are quite different from each other.