I like the soft world of warcraft allusions

"Exiting vim is hard" is nostalgia humour. It's not funny because it's true, but rather because being stuck in vim while editing a conf file in your first Linux installation, for instance, is a very common experience. Being able to exit a text editor seems like something you should just be able to trivially do, so it's slightly embarrassing to fail at. It's like sharing stories about kicking furniture in the dark, or getting on the bus in the wrong direction. Vim, though, has the benefit of being part of computer culture, so the joke became embedded into that culture while the internet was still a small place. Now, when you need to use vim for the first time in seven years, maybe you get stuck for a moment, and maybe you share that with a community who you know has also been there.

You know what it was like? When people discuss admitting a new state to the Union and someone starts worrying about how it would affect the arrangement of stars on the flag.

Pluto was discovered, declared a planet, named, surveyed, demoted and argued about in less than one of its years. A word to describe humanity: manic

I was in 10th grade when this was announced. I, for some strange reason, thought that the planet was destroyed. It took an embarrassingly long time to learn that it was just reclassified.

It was devastating...watching Pluto up on that platform, in front of everyone... _them_ just walking up and tearing the stripes right off Pluto's little arm...

the "I was really busy in 2006" accompanied by WoW music really really got me

I remember my grandma was very upset and my grandad was very "you're acting like they shot it down, geez"

When you did your "2006 rant", it gave me "angry whispering so I don't wake up my parents" vibes. Which is SO early KZfaq I love it.

This has never bothered me as much as the realization that because Pluto was discovered in the 1930s, it was too late to inspire its own movement in Gustav Holst's "The Planets". I mean, those songs go so freakin' hard! Can you even imagine how badass one about the god of the underworld would have been?! 😭

Ceres was discovered before Neptune and apparently considered a planet for half-a-century before being re-classified as an "asteroid" (and later in 2006 as a dwarf planet of course). But yeah, I get the impression they just didn't want to re-classify Ceres as a planet again. "Doesn't clear out its orbit" seems very deliberately aimed at Ceres because Ceres is in the asteroid belt. And the definition they came up with to exclude Ceres happened to exclude Pluto as well.

one day astronomers may identify a super earth that hasn't "cleared the neighborhood" and declare the discovery of a "Dwarf Exoplanet" that's ironically more massive than Earth. That'll be a fun day for the IAU definition.

The vim thing is relatable because a lot of people don't choose to use vim day-to-day, but every once in a while you have to edit a file on a remote machine and the only thing it's got is vi, and the last time you used it was 2 years ago and no, :q does not work because it's in the typing mode, and you don't remember what to press to get to the command-entering mode, and you search on the internet for the 100th time "how to exit vim" while mentally reviewing life choices that led you to this unfortunate point in existence.

I might be misremembering but there was about a 18 month period between "we're gonna change the definition of planet" and "this is the new definition of planet" during which time we did the thing that's discussed in the video, having those conversations but it it felt like higher stakes because the decision wasn't made yet, it was all, like, anything goes and there were articles in science magazines about how planets could get demoted, asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects could get promoted and moons could be planets, moons like Earth's Moon, this conversation centered around barycenters. But the question was half "is our moon a planet" and half "under what conditions does the barycenter become part of the new definition". Pluto was definitely on the chopping block the whole time but so was Charon becoming a planet, which makes more sense on the barycenter argument, I think Earth's Moon's barycenter is still inside Earth, so that was the counter-argument, to keep things the way they stayed, which is really a mass argument. The big enchilada was the then-newly discovered big objects in the Kuiper belt, some very much on scale of Pluto, what do we do with them if we continue to discover more and more of them, the whole icy planet category thing mentioned was definitely a vibe for some of that conversation. What actually eventuated was the least wild thing that got discussed. I think the popular consciousness ignores the global perspective on Pluto too, non-Americans do not hype up Pluto as much, many Europeans denied and debated its planetary status back in the day and to an extent this never stopped, and we also forget there was a time in the 19th Century when there were 11 planets, and that conversation and demotion back to 8 created the category of asteroid which I think is a super useful category, I feel like definitions of planets are human-centric, which could be why exoplanets get left out?

I remember this being a big thing when I was a kid. Now I'm in the middle of my PhD, and pluto is one of the first things many friends and family members will ask about, or just make rhetorical comments about.

"Did people get upset about Pluto because they thought it was funny?" Yes, absolutely. I was 4 in 2006 but that style of humor stuck around for a while (it's still here although its changed a lot) and I definitely remember people doing that with Pluto specifically. The most similar example that comes to mind is the Oxford comma.

My first thought was "youre the Jenny Nicholson of physics" then you mentioned a numbered list and that solidified it for me. Adjunct physics instructor here. Love your vids!

The existence of "rogue planets" also really challenge that definition. 😂

Part of the reason why Pluto was such an issue in the US is that it was the only planet discovered by an American. When I was a child we learned the list of 9 planets and those of us who enjoy learning about science often form an emotional attachment with the planets. I was an amateur astronomer who for a long time knew where all our planets were in the sky. So, Pluto is not of any practical importance but it has some emotional importance.

The reason the “how to exit vim” joke is funny is because it’s something they can relate to, from their past. The first time trying to exit vim as a baby programmer, sure eventually you just google it, but you probably futz around for a little and get confused first cause it’s just a lot different than anything else. Maybe you accidentally opened vim in the first place which leads to the bewilderment. So this first moment has a, like, emotional connection and a funny memory tied to it. Which is why it’s funny to make an exaggerated callback to that.

You're absolutely correct, the definition of "planet" is specifically written in order to kick pluto out -- it's a _descriptive_ definition, not a _perscriptive_ one. Pluto is extremely similar to Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus, Haumea, Eris, Makemake, Gonggong, and likely hundreds of other plutoids not yet discovered. We exclude them from the list of planets for exactly the same reason we exclude Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea. The point of changing the definition was specifically to limit the list of planets to a half dozen to a dozen objects; given that goal, it makes more sense to exclude pluto than include it. Even though, I still dislike it just for the sort of forced symmetry and numerological thinking that motivates wanting a short definite list of planets at all.

The pilot episode of the magic school bus had an epilogue where they discussed how until 1999 Plutos orbit was within Neptune’s orbit so it wasn’t even considered the 9th planet then. I remember watching as a kid and that’s the first thing that popped into my head when the Pluto downgrade swept collective consciousness. They even had a little visual of the crossed orbits.

You get the whole "how dare you correct a generalization I learned in primary school" thing in linguistics, too, where the broad generalizations you use to teach formal English and English reading to children or even second-language learners turn out to be just that - broad generalizations or in some cases "an opinion of some dude in the 18th century which makes a great quote". Collectively, I think the reaction is far in excess of the Pluto thing, but because individually there are so many and the reaction is spread out across a person's entire life (and longer, but perspective is important), it can't reach that Pluto Problem hinge point of being a Media Moment.

The way science is communicated is not only a like a game a telephone. It is like a game of telephone with financial incentives to miscommunicate, and social incentives to not correct the other misunderstandings. You are very good at communicating how disparate incentives affect scientific communications. I hope you keep it up.

It will happen at least one more time. In fact, what is coming will dwarf the whole Pluto thing.

I was really glad you went into why the new definition is bad. It's deeply ironic that people thinking "Pluto is a planet" is mostly about people being nostalgic for learning planets in school because that is like, legitimately why planet was redefined. They were finding new objects around Pluto's mass, and got worried there'd be too many and the list of how many planets there are in the Solar System would become unwieldy to memorize or recite.

The vim thing is funny because the first time you're faced with vim it shocks you that a program's interface could be so shit that even as someone with experience handling random bullshit interfaces you still need to google how to even exit the software. The joke is that vim is comically complicated.

I think for children, it was all about a lovable Disney character being named Pluto. For those who were already adults at the time, there were a couple of factors: 1) there was always this buzz about a "10th planet" possibly being discovered, and the average person had no knowledge of the Kuiper belt and the complexity of what was being discovered. Reducing the number of planets seemed to be regressive, not progressive. 2) The focus was on the "demotion" of Pluto, not the recognition of Eros and other planet-like objects. That would have been a cool thing to focus on. 3) Popular science seems to have this "Ministry of Truth" aspect to it where all its current pronouncements are to be taken as absolute truth, but this truth can change at any time. So you grow up knowing about a dinosaur called a Brontosaurus, and then you take your kids to a museum and "Ackshually it's called an Apatosaurus" and you don't know why the name changed and eventually you see a documentary that explains that two different scientists found two different skeletons which were thought to be different species but were later determined to be a younger and older specimen of the same species and "Apatosaurus" won the naming wars, and then you're writing this post and check Wikipedia and nope, in 2015 it was determined that Brontosaurus is a separate genus after all and you don't think they've dug up that many more bones, they're just interpreting the evidence differently, and it seems that they're just changing stuff up arbitrarily to confuse the olds. So that's why the cranky nostalgia for What They Told Me Was Definitively True When I Was In Third Grade.

I read tons of pop sci growing up in the 00s and Pluto was always my favorite planet, so I was so peeved when it got "demoted." I feel like a lot of people never got past that part of the press narrative. Looking back, Pluto's reclassification just opened me up to the cool world of Trans-Neptunian objects. When I talk with students and get a question about Pluto (still happens!) I show them a picture of some of the named objects and all the confusion turns into fascination. Why be mad about Pluto when we get cool things like Sedna and Quaoar? 😎

In my computer science labs, we would make the "it's hard to exit vim" joke, as a reference to something that's easy when you know how to do it, but the first time, you may have to stumble around to figure it out.

This video was uncharacteristically quiet for you which is fine as I just turn my volume up. but oh man, KZfaq getting rid of the "ad in x seconds" warning was sooo cool ... Literally just had my eardrums blown out by an unsolicited ad

Hi Angela! Having lived through this at a different phase of life, I have a rather different recollection of the same events. Back in the day, I wrote a submission to the IAU 3rd division working group (and it probably went straight into the circular file) and proposed a definition that was not close to what was adopted. My set of planets would have denoted most of the circular moons (i.e. rounded by gravity) to be planets, probably all the way down to about Enceladus. The definition that was adopted compares with the well-known aphorism about a camel being a horse designed by committee, but I can say for my part it wasn’t for lack of people trying to suggest a better alternative. Much of the hullaballoo about Pluto that you remember was obviously driven by the media at the time and for that reason it seems only too likely to happen again, if some other quite popular scientific classification has to change, and this will be recognised with varying levels of scientific understanding in the community. At the time it was obvious that all these new TNO and Kuiper belt objects similar to Pluto had to become planets if the common meaning was to retain any logic; if not, then Pluto had to suffer the same fate that Ceres, Pallas and Vesta did back in the 19th century. Categories are not fixed in stone forever, and that's good. For example, when I was a child, the brontosaurus was named the brontosaurus. It was a big sauropod dinosaur of the Jurassic era, no problem. At some point in the mid-twentieth century the brontosaurus was deemed to be the same species as another dinosaur that had been classified in the same family, the apatosaurus. So there were suddenly no brontosauri; they were all apatosauruses. In 2015 a new paper has revived the idea that the brontosaurus is a separate genus, but this is not universally accepted (if we can believe Wikipedia, which is always a crap shoot). So the brontosaurus walks again, provisionally. For the brontosaurus, just substitute any other category or identification which the media thinks that the public cares about.

exiting vim... if you stumble on it for the first time it feels like a trap. ctrl-C doesnt work. Esc doesn't work... There no clue on the screen... what do I do now!? It's kinda funny to think back to that moment. like the monkey that's caught his hand by a box containting a banana. if he'd let go he'd be fine

"... The last time it will happen." *ChatGPT drops in to say hi and the entire world freaks out*

She single handedly added like 20 planets to the solar system... Wow.

I think the reason why we have this vague definition of "planet" is because we are working backwards from what our current understanding of "planet" is. We had the list of 8 planets and if we want to add Pluto to that list then we also need to add Ceres, Eris, and other spherical objects that orbit the sun to it, so they needed to make a definition that would uphold our current list. I would like to see some more detail added to the definition of planet though, and also expand the definition from "orbits the sun" to "orbits a star" so that exoplanets are included in the definition.

I'm sad that you didn't mention Eris and similar objects that lead to the dwarf planet definition

Never gave it much thought, as I also just figured astronomers knew best. It does seem weird that if your orbit wasn't clear, you're not a planet, but then when you clear it, you become one. Also doesn't seem fair that if your orbit is 3,000 times longer than a planet of similar size, you get penalized for not clearing it out as well :P

one of my big pet peeves with media articles on science is how few of them seem to actually link to the scientific paper or press release they're covering (even if it's just a paywalled jstor/research gate/etc. link). Especially if you're reading an older article, it can take like half an hour just to find the paper so you can *start* to read it yourself!

Oh my god I was so happy to see you mention the "moons are planets" article! That article made me do a full 180 on my stance on Pluto, and it made me tread even further into thinking that if there's a dichotomy to be had between the spherical, non-star bodies in the solar system, it should really be between telluric planets (including moons and "dwarf planets") and gas giants. There's a graph in that article (page 53) that shows the shared properties between the different bodies. All the telluric bodies are spread around with a bunch of different properties shared between some but not all of them, and the four gas giants are hanging out together in their own corner. That hasn't left me since.

my theory is that the real reason was to reclassify it so that they didnt have to add all the increasingly large number of similar TNOs as planets so they had to come up with another classification to exclude it. and I'm fine with that

Well, you’ve convinced me that the definition is not very good! Can’t really comment on the vim thing because I’m on the comfortable and easy going beach resort that is nano. It seems like getting into vim and not being able to get out seems to be an almost universal experience, so I think it’s just highly relatable

I really like your planet definition. It's internally consistent. That's always satisfying. It's also interesting to watch this after seeing you talk about science crackpots.

I like how it was explained to me by an astronomy teacher I had a few years after the big event. I think CGP Grey's video touched on it too. Basically, the definition resulted in fairly nice and tidy categories of solar system objects-you got the rocky inner planets, then the asteroids in the asteroid belt, then the gas giants, then the objects in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, and finally the satellites orbiting all the rocky planets and gas giants. Pluto just seems to fit in well as an unusually large Kuiper belt object. I think it's fair to say the definition should be more scientifically rigorous though.

I think the reason people think exiting vim is funny is because the first time most people use vim, they can't figure out how to exit it. I certainly had this experience. It's not that it's hard. It's that it's confusing the first time. It honestly made me feel quite claustrophobic, especially at a time when I only had one device, and thus could not exit vim to access the internet to find out how to exit vim. So I think it's just nostalgia for that initial experience, which can be baffling.

It's because we all went through that brief moment where we knew enough to enter vim, but not enough to exit it. We assumed it would be the usual "control C" or "exit," but when it wasn't, we panicked. Of course, you could look it up. But at that point we thought we were beyond having to look something up just to exit the program. Am I trying to explain a joke? Yeah...

I can't wait until someone decides that planet 9 hasn't sufficiently cleared it's neighborhood despite being like brown dwarf sized or something and they're like "it's a dwarf brown dwarf."

The rant comedy bit was spot on. People were using these outrageous claims as some sort of shortcut for a personality. Nobody actually cared, and we knew they didn't care, but they enjoyed getting angry and pretending that they cared. Because it meant they didn't have to care about meaningful things, and they liked the attention.

You don't have to exit. Just launch another shell from within Vim. Then, if you can't exit the shell, launch another Vim from within that shell etc.

I agree with my planetary scientist argument that an object being a planet should depend on that object and it's properties, not what is in the space around it. And yes, Ceres should be a planet too. Is a star in a stellar cluster not a star because it moves in a way to cross the paths of other stars around it?

You've convinced me (a high school senior) with the 2006 talk to stop using my phone around others forever to rekindle that conversational energy

Two things. Taxonomy, the classifying of organisms creates more controversy than any other aspect of biology. So, no surprise that Pluto was a thing. The word planet (courtesy Online Etymology Dictionary) is "...directly from Late Latin planeta, from Greek planētēs, from (asteres) planētai "wandering (stars)," from planasthai "to wander," a word of uncertain etymology..." So a planet is a wanderer, as opposed to a star, which remained in a fixed position in the night sky. In a universe where everything orbits everything else, the word planet really refers to something from an earthly perspective. Of one thing I am certain. Neither Pluto, nor any other bodies in the universe care what they are called. They just go on about their business. If they were sentient, they would view earthlings as extremely short-lived scum that formed on the surface of one of their neighbours.

For me the VIM thing was funny because early on I was told to use it to modify a conf file but no one told me how to exit and there were no clear instructions. Now I know and it's not a big deal to me anymore. I think it's just that shared experience we can bond over

11:35 "It doesn't matter what it says, you've clicked it, you saw the ads! Capitalism baby!" 😂😂😂😂😂

"planets must orbit the sun" So if earth got thrown out of orbit and became a rogue planet and somehow we all survived ... would we not live on a planet anymore? "Oh isn't it another beautiful day, sorry, night on our cold plan-, sorry, um, lonely spherical hunk of rock?

I really enjoy your videos @callierastro and how you examine different ideas and really dig in, examine the facts and discuss all of it in a relatively understandable way. I like feeling like you are discussing these things with me, not holding back and being as honest and open as you can be.

Defining planets solely by their intrinsic properties does make sense. From what I understand, there was strong consideration for coming up with a definition that limited the number of planets to an amount that could be memorized by a ~9 year old, and the committee was unable to come up with something that included Pluto without including a bunch more.

You're a very engaging speaker, and I'm also really impressed by your ability to make larger observations about society. "I don't think it will ever happen again where the primary mode of exchanging information about a piece of scientific information is going to be conversation with peers." Extremely insightful, I was taken aback! It's very comfortable to listen to you.

what annoys me the most about the whole ordeal is that nobody on pluto’s side ever sticks up for eris or ceres or the other rocks ceres especially because it’s been literally through the exact same experience as pluto and yet it’s completely ignored by everyone in pluto’s favor

Just discovered this channel last night and I love it. You’re like the science nerd version of Big Joel, which is legitimately a great combination :)

You're a great storyteller for these stories! (I started with women in space, and just went through the set -- spiders, chess, and pluto)

Maybe since Neptune and Pluto-Charon are in resonance they should be re-classified as a trinary planet.

I think the main reason pluto got kicked out was because we want to keep our 8 main planets but if we extend that definition to something that includes pluto we have to include the other 150 rocks that also qualify as dwarf planets and our main 8 bois will not sound so special anymore

Was not expecting the Red vs. Blue reference in a video about Pluto

I came across you while studying for a class project, I'm so glad I did! youre very informative and entertaining to watch :)

A lot of the vim jokes that I've seen have been in the context of "text editor wars". Which yeah, is the same sort of thing as AVGN and "console wars" etc. Like even on Google if you google "vi" you get "did you mean emacs" and if you google "emacs" you get "did you mean vi?". My opinion (and lots of others') is that we know vim is objectively better than anything else, but has a big learning curve since all of the commands go against muscle memory learnt from any other experience with Windows or Mac computers. With that said, vim is my go-to if I'm using command line, but if I can use a mouse I'd rather use vscode.

I really appreciated the moment of vulnerability around the humor of "exiting vim is hard."

the usage of "They wanna name me Pluto?" in this video has real "I'm losin' to a bird!" kind of vibes.

i genuinely think the definition is all about making sure the solar system has a nice small number of planets. if we consider pluto a planet, there's a bunch of other stuff in the solar system that should also be considered planets, i guess somebody somewhere was upset about that

I want to say something positive: You are awesome! Thank you for the great videos and the way you are and/or represent yourself

So as a software engineer I think the exit VIM thing is funny cause it’s a shared experience. Everyone who has to use VIM at some point has to figure out how to quit it and maybe gets frustrated but eventually you look it up. Honestly I sometimes still forget, but maybe that’s just me lol

It is pretty obvious what happened. There were a load of other objects discovered bejond Pluto. And in the beginning, they just went "Yah those are too small to be planets". But then some objects were larger than Pluto. And the society was dead set on NOT giving anyone the honor of having discovered a planet. They could just not deal with that. So they met with the express goal of finding some definition that would exclude all those objects and stop people from claiming to have found a planet. That is the whole reason. It had nothing to do with Pluto. Pluto was just the sacrifice they were willing to make in order to prevent more plantes from being discovered.

Your definition is simple and elegant. I also appreciate how you incorporate the traditional conception of planets as all those wanderers who do not maintain a fixed position in the sky to justify the more expansive definition. Debates like "Is Pluto a planet?" "Are tacos sandwiches?" and "Is the ocean soup?" are definitional debates. Regardless of which side wins, we do not gain any new information about the subject matter. This, I believe, is what makes them popular. They are "safe" debates, because there are no real stakes. They can be funny in the same way the Abbott and Costello sketch where Abbott "proves" 7*13 = 28 is funny. By going through a series of seemingly valid steps, one is able to arrive at a ridiculous or counter-intuitive conclusion. In the case of the aforementioned debates, both sides can present solid arguments that result in contradictory conclusions. This is also a meta-joke about the nature of debate itself, since the tools needed to win a debate are not the same as those needed to determine the truth of a statement.

In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, I was always confused how Checkov could mistake Ceti Alpha V for Ceti Alpha VI. Now I see why! Even in the 23rd century, they're still arguing "what is a planet". 🤦‍♂

So I'm not an expert on tacos, but in 2006 every single hotdog was definitely a sandwich, regardless of the pineapple content of any local pizza.

I think a lot of people, on some level, just enjoy arguing, but a lot of the things people argue about, like politics, they can also get genuinely angry about it, and it isn't fun anymore. But with something like Pluto, people don't actually care enough to get genuinely upset about it, so they can just have fun with the arguments

I appreciated the mention of paywalls. I had to do my first research project in my first semester (first generation student) and it was very depressing to find that everything on Google Scholar that seemed vaguely relevant cost at least $40 just to look at. I eventually found a good source on the college site but it took a while. It reminded me of how legitimate news sites are mostly paywalled (another problem with the same course and just life in general), while most/all news sites of dubious origin are free and plastered with ads. Is it any wonder that we have such a disinformation problem?

I'm not a scientist - or even a retired engineer - but my view is that if an object is small enough to be blown up by Bruce Willis with a single bomb then it is an asteroid. If it is too big for NASA trained oil drillers to blow up then it is a planet. I call it the Bay Limit and by this definition I believe Pluto should still be classified as a planet. I tried to think up other classifications, but they all ended with Earth being demoted from planet, which probably is no great loss overall. I too was playing WoW during 2006, so I missed most of the arguments around this debate. Regardless of whether Pluto is actually classified a planet by scientists, my view is that it should be TAUGHT as one to children. When I was younger knowing that planets came in all sizes and that there were tiny ones out beyond the gas giants really helped shape my understanding of exactly how the solar system exists. Having a named object such as Pluto taught to you and having its extreme conditions explained really helps make the solar system that little bit more interesting. For the Horde!

The fun thing about the icecream and drowings is that, yes, corelation does mean a causation. It’s not A -> B, but C -> A & C -> B. It’s a single cause for both datapoints. All sufficiently long corellation chains can be traced back to a common cause.

OMG, I love your videos!

People love science like they love a circus. They only like the fun stuff. Nobody considers the crazy hard problems that we work on, things that take over your soul.

i was also a kid in 2006 so i wouldnt have had the greatest awareness of stuff going on but I remember the pluto thing being mostly a meme, in a "nooo my childhood was a lie" sort of thing basically just driven by nostalgia bc we all learn about the planets in the solar system pretty early in school. Kind of similar to how some people reacted to learning that dinosaurs likely had feathers, bc it made them seem less cool and scary (those people are wrong btw dinosaurs having feathers is fantastic). it was also something more people would be aware of bc kids were aware of it, I remember in elementary school the teachers were always not really sure if they should teach us about pluto like they were used to and theyd usually do something like include it in the list of planets but say yeah its technically not a planet anymore. I think people still discuss scientific news with each other just like before, and have "debates" over silly things that are just fun to argue about like whether a taco is a sandwitch or not. I think its just harder for scientific news (and any kind of news really) to stand out now compared to the past, we mostly get our news from the internet's 24 hour news cycle so theres just so much more news we see on a daily basis than when we just got our news from tv. anyway i wish more of the public scientific discourse was like this and not like, conspiracy theories about vaccines and climate change.

good job assembling clips for this one ... thats the part of making yt videos that makes you look back and go ... damn im not really sure if I wanna do all that again lol. gj

Damn i cried at the end. Thanks for painting that picture.

I've seen a few popsci article that mention planetary scientists' criticisms of the IAU's definition, but like you said, a lot of popsci seems to prioritize mass-producing soundbites over accurate science communication

Re: 16:30 jokes about exiting the Vim text editor -- why are they funny? I think people find them funny because they're poking fun at the supposed inferiority of new Vim users who are used to Microsoft Notepad or maybe Nano, and who did not bother to run Vimtutor (or even to read the splash screen), and who don't understand the concept of a modal / non-GUI / non-WYSIWYG editor, and who would rather sink in stupefied frustration than read the manual (I think most of those jokes are older than Google being a quick way to get useable info about a niche topic). Also, for many of us who find those jokes hilarious, there is a twinge of sympathy because we remember the first time *we* heard about how wonderful Vim was, and we tried it... and we couldn't even enter any text! And we said, "Well, this sucks, I'm going back to Notepad"... and we couldn't even quit the program! (Most of us don't have what it takes to be astrophysicists.) So for some of us, it's funny because it happened to us, and we have to laugh at how stupid we were. (Better than crying about it.) In my case, I figured that if so many people with proper grammar were recommending Vim, then maybe it was worth a second try; and after working through Vimtutor some 15 years ago, it is now really painful to use any other editor, such that I install it on any Windows computer I have to use more than once or twice. (At organizations where installing software requires special permission, IT departments are usually very happy to help install Vim, in my experience.) And I still find the jokes pretty funny, even though the punchline is always the same (and even though I certainly know to use ":x" to save and quit). There's another group who make jokes about how hard it is to exit Vim -- people who kind of hate using Vim, because it is so counter-intuitive (maybe they grew up on Atom or Front Page or VS Code or etc.). So they're making fun of how bad a piece of software is Vim, and Vim users are making fun of people who won't take the few minutes needed to read the directions, and both camps think the jokes are at least mildly entertaining. Not sure which camp your computational physics colleagues are in. (But, yes, at root, it's kind of a dumb joke. The Three Stooges of computer geek humor, maybe.) Or maybe it was a joke?

Another great video. Like you, I was also very busy in 2006, for what seems to be identical reasons. I always assumed that the first criteria was "orbits a star" because it didn't occur to me that a group of scientists could be so sloppy as to just say "Sun". But I just looked it up, and that really is a red flag for how little care was taken in the definition. Perhaps that was hopelessly naïve of me, as a physical *organic* chemist that studies *aromaticity*. Also, I am sure that your shirt says "PLUTO", but that was not the first thing my brain read it as at 22:07 O_O

I think the attempt to rigorize the definition of the term "planet" just isn't that important for scientists at the end of the day. Pluto is still a term that refers to a fixed object in the solar system, whether we call it a planet or a "dwarf planet" (how important is this subcategory, btw?) is basically arbitrary. "But we have to have a scientific definition for the word whose greek origins literally means 'wanderer!'" Actually no. I certainly don't, anyway. Neither do most people, and, as a matter of fact, probably neither do most astronomers. We could just arbitrarily say, "the definition of a planet is X (whatever the specific technical definition of planets is), +, for reasons having to do with the historical development of solar system astronomy, Pluto." "But why would I grandfather Pluto into my astronomical definitions?" Because history is a thing, because there's more than one domain that concerns itself with the question of what Pluto quote unquote "is," and because astronomers don't actually have a special authority in the naming of things or the semantics of terms. This is, very technically, the domain of poets, actually. In this specific case, scientists absolutely overstep their bounds by claiming to be able to dictate the common usage of language itself. Put it another way, I neither presume in my usage of the term "planet" to impose this definition upon the IAU (they can construct their taxonomies however they like), nor do I accept their authority to impose their definition upon myself. There is an irreducible political element to linguistic change, it isn't enough just to change the dictionaries (although, of course, that is an enviable tool to have at one's disposal).

Yes! Another great rant expressing all my feelings about the 2006 planet definition. And yes yes yes for the Metzger paper, which is the most sensible thing written on this topic. Thanks and keep up the great work!

I thought this was going to be about why Mickey Mouse has a dog named Pluto, who can’t talk, and his best friend is a dog named Goofy, who can talk.

New Horizons launched in 2005. I remember when my dad pointed it out to me in the newspaper. We were sending a spacecraft to Pluto, the most distant planet - and it'd take ten years to get there! I was ten at the time, so from my perspective New Horizons would take a literal lifetime to achieve its goal Then Pluto was demoted. This far-off rock, formerly one of the few planets in my very own solar system... was no longer special. It was no better than a dumb asteroid New Horizons sent back its images many years later. I set my profile picture on all relevant social media to the first black and white image of Pluto. All my friends thought it was the Moon, but... no. Obviously not. The Moon doesn't look like that Pluto is special because it was very relevant during my lifetime. It was an unexplored frontier, so distant as to be unattainable but yet so close to us. Reclassifying Pluto was dumb

I was 20 in 2006 and while we didn’t have smartphones, most people didn’t dial up internet either (well, not if you lived in a city) broadband was pretty widespread in most North American/European cities by then, and I even had WiFi. I also was the kind of person who did start the day opening my laptop and checking email, going on Facebook etc but I probably wasn’t normal.

I'm also going to say... it's also a pretty western view of planets because in chinese 'star' and 'planet' are the same word. At least in casual usage, it's just a big round thing in the sky you can see. And if you can't see it, you don't know it's there but once you do it counts.

This was incredibly useful context. Gonna keep watching

Thanks for the reference to the Arxiv paper, it's fun, and I find myself agreeing with it.

It's not hard to exit vim... unless you compare it with the ease of exiting literally any other non-console text editor. To me, it's funny because there's a contingent of people that swear by VIM compared to other text-editors (or even IDE's). Sure it's not difficult in a vacuum, but with the context of other options it's the difference between choosing to sweep a rug or vacuum it. And the vacuum is like, a dyson or whatever is considered to be a good vacuum.

That article is a really great read, it was worth my two hours when I found it a year or so back ^^ But yeah, the whole Pluto thing is weird to me, because on one hand, (speaking as someone who was admittedly on the "it is still a planet" track mainly because of that third grade nostalgia thing until finding said article) the general sentiment of "well they're wrong because I don't like it" feels bad to me, and another possible contributor to like, public opinion turning against science in a way that's led to a lot of the nonsense conspiracy theorist stuff that's so big today. Meanwhile, until finding that article I couldn't really articulate the problems with the definition so I felt like I had to reluctantly go with it. But on the other hand, I just generally really don't like the sort of, dismissive Sheldony tone a lot of the anti-Pluto people tend to take when they talk about it. "Well they said it so it's right, you ignorant phillistines, get over your nostalgia and get with the real world!" Like that's kind of an exaggerated version, but still, that's the kind of smug vibe I usually pick up, which makes the doubling down in spite in the face of that, feel a bit more understandable to me, idk. So I kinda agreed and disagreed with both sides of the argument simultaneously; my gut reaction was saying "Pluto Is A Planet, dammit", and then I checked myself and went, "No, the scientists know what they're talking about, so just deal with it." --- And then I read that article, and it really clicked for me. I have mixed feelings on that my petty Third Grade nostalgia was evidently vindicated, but I'm still not going to complain too much. For one thing, realizing the conference that voted on it was like, general astronomers and not actual planetologists, just made the whole thing weirdly make more sense to me? Like no wonder the decision and definition was so weird and arbitrary, this is like a chemist without much Particle/quantum physics experience trying to redefine quarks out of existence or something. Then there's the fact that planetologists were saying that like, the important factor was more whether something was geologically active in some form, and a funky venn diagram with all the different categories of types of that, and which planets and moons had which ones. So that was really interesting to learn, along with the realization that hey, moons can count as planets too, which actually made a weird amount of sense and was easy to accept for some reason? (Which like, I think, I think that last part ties into where I'm going with all this.) --- But like, the big thing that got me, was learning the real main unspoken(?) motivation behind all this, the existence of the other trans-neptunian objects past Pluto. And it's like, despite what the IAU may claim to the contrary, this whole thing was very much a Demotion, not a sidegrade, with the intent of curtailing the amount of recognized planets at just the eight, because I guess going into the double digits was too much or whatever. And that in of itself just feels kinda fundamentally wrongheaded; science is a process and we're always discovering new things, so why are we just like, saying "no, the buck stops here" in the first place? Like, it is functionally putting a premature stopper on Planet Hype, for lack of a better word. We have the eight, we don't need any more, anything else we find around our system is only a Dwarf planet, and thus beneath the general public's notice. They're not the headliner events going into third grade textbooks anymore. The idea of Planets in this solar system? Is stopped. Done. No more. And that, I feel, is like, cutting off a free and easy source of science positivity for no good reason other than, ironically, the sort of reactionary traditionalism that pluto supporters get accused of. Imagine if the narrative was not "Pluto isn't a planet anymore" but "Look we have a few more cool planets for you to fall in love with!" I guess the controversy got more attention overall, but that doesn't make it any less a negative-sounding headline, and a net negative for science communication IMO. For me at least, back in like 2014 or so, learning that there were these other Trans-Neptunian objects past Pluto, also named and also with their own quirks and interesting elements, again was far easier to accept and become interested in, than the idea of Pluto's demotion. So when anti-Pluto people point to them (and Ceres in the asteroid belt, and Jupiter and Saturn's bigger moons) to be like "well if Pluto is still a planet, then these ones would have to be planets too! >:(", my only response is "Exactly! :D" On the same grounds that I still think of Pluto as a planet, I have accepted them into the fold as well, and keep thinking it's rude that they're still being excluded from the current third-grade textbooks. Sorry for the essay in the comments. You were wondering if this whold controversy was a joke to most people, and I don't know either way, but I'm one of the people who's legitimately really (prolly disproportionately) opinionated about this.

Well done. Thank you for settling the issue once and for all. We still have a few of these questions to answer: 1. Are pterodactyls dinosaurs? 2. Are hot dogs sandwiches? 3. Are tomatoes vegetables?

There was a time when you really wanted to know enough vim and emacs to be able to exit correctly, because you could end up with your terminal screwed up and not be able to do anything at all on the computer until you somehow reset your connection, losing all of your current state. Kind of like if you had an app get hung with focus, and your only option is to reboot, losing all of your unsaved work in the three other apps you were working in. Fortunately these days terminals are windows and you aren't using a primitive manual connection, so usually you can just close the window rather than having to figure out which escape codes correspond to which bit of connection tech you are currently using. I can't tell whether vim or emacs is worse. Emacs has the downside of treating every combination of keystrokes as something valid, so while you're trying to figure out WTF is going on, maybe you're telling Emacs "Go to my home directory and overwrite everything with lorem ipsum". vim was in some ways better because it was very file-focussed, but if some program dropped you into vim when you weren't expecting it, say when you assumed something else and were typing away, you can end up in a pretty random mode. So you have to know things like hitting ESC to get out of some mode or another. Usually you can C-z out of either, but ... sometimes that would leave your terminal in a crazy mode, like no-echo or something. I know how to fix that, but most people at that point just have to burn down the terminal and move on.

Grade school children should be made to learn that Pluto is a planet and just to bust their stones they should also be made to learn the names of the other 2,000 Kuiper Belt objects that we have discovered so far. The defining line on whether Pluto should be a planet to me was when Neil deGrasse Tyson explained that if Pluto was at our orbit distance from the Sun that it would have a tail , and that was no way for a planet to behave. Thank you for the video and thumbs up.