by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show: Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson appeared on The Bat Segundo Show #265.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is most recently the author of The Pluto Files.

segundo265

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Reconfiguring his planetary paradigm, with the aid of minatory electrodes.

Author: Neil deGrasse Tyson

Subjects Discussed: The Great Planet Debate, sensible classification systems, “reorganizing” the solar system, why the International Astronomical Union wasn’t approached before the Rose Center display was established, the usefulness of the word “planet,” playing 20 Questions to gain insight into what Tyson talks about, Copernicus, acceptable groupings, quibbles with the New Horizons reconnaissance mission to “complete” the exploration of the solar system, government and space exploration, Sedna vs. Pluto, efforts to explicate Sedna’s orbit, the ethical implications of scientists who write popular books, scientists and get rich quick schemes, pedagogical paradigms, manned missions to Mars, the celebrity culture of astronauts, manned space program vs. robotic expeditions, how science can endure in the face of looming budgetary cuts, the financial return of science, communications with the Obama Administration, and the possibility of the asteroid Apophis colliding against the Earth in 2036.

EXCERPT FROM SHOW:

ngtTyson: We just reorganized the solar system, combining objects of like properties together. And at the time, more frozen bodies — small with tipped orbits, crossing the orbits of other planets — were found in the outer solar system that looked more like Pluto. And Pluto looked more like them than any one of them looked like anything else in the solar system. So all we did was group Pluto with its brethren in the outer solar system. Then we grouped the gas giants together as a family. Then we grouped the terrestrials — Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars — together. So the family photo of the solar system was presented in these groupings. At no time did we recount the planets in the solar system. And, in fact, the word “planet” is undervalued in the exhibits entirely. We prefer to focus on physical properties of these objects, rather than try and salvage a word that hasn’t been formally defined since before Copernicus.

Correspondent: Well, to talk about the notion of introducing this exhibit and not tipping anybody off initially, until this New York Times reporter ran with the ball and created something of a media storm, you…

Tyson: Something of a media storm?

Correspondent: Something of a media storm.

Tyson: Just say “media storm.”

Correspondent: Well, I’d like to use reverse hyperbole here. But in the case of this considerable media storm, you didn’t tip anybody off. And I’m curious. I mean, the sentiment in this book that you express multiple times is “Science is not a democracy.” And I’m wondering though why you didn’t approach the IAU to essentially get them to get with the program. That Pluto is not a planet. That it is essentially a TNO, and…

Tyson: Trans-Neptunian Object.

Correspondent: Yes, exactly. Exactly. I’m wondering why. Perhaps you could have smoothed things over a little bit with the IAU before introducing this. Does the IAU really not matter in this particular group?

Tyson: IAU cares about what a planet is. And we didn’t. It’s that simple. We didn’t present a case for planethood or not. All we did was say, “Here’s an interesting way to look at the solar system.” Put Pluto with the icy bodies and present it as such. We didn’t say Pluto was not a planet. We made no such claims. We were widely stereotyped for having done so. And that’s the simplest — if you don’t have the time to read what we did, then that’s the simplest thing that people did. Many interviewers — media — would come up to me and say, “So how many planets are there in your exhibits?” And I said, “We don’t count planets.” We just simply don’t count planets. So I had no interest in lobbying the International Astronomical Union. Because they’re concerned with the definition of planet. And when they do, fine. Define it however they want. It doesn’t change sensible ways to organize the information content of the solar system.

Correspondent: But in the minds of people. You had to be aware of the public perception. I mean, in this book, you point, of course, to the Caltech parade in Pasadena, the funerals for Pluto, the endless editorial cartoons and the like. In fact, I actually saw a Discover magazine headline that said, “Beyond the nine planets.” That was a week ago. So people are still struggling with this taxonomy, even though it’s clearly not a planet. I mean, you had to have been aware of this in some sense. What kind of adjustment period do we need? What kind of outreach do we need? Even to the IAU members. The 10% who voted against the idea, who voted for Pluto being a planet.

Tyson: Obtaining its planet status.

Correspondent: Yes, exactly.

Tyson: A mere 10%, I might add.

Correspondent: Yeah.

Tyson: Well, let me make it clear. There are people who have a lot invested in the word “planet.” Odd. Because like I said, “planet” had no formal definition. Not since ancient Greece. Planet means — it comes from the Greek “planetas,” meaning “wanderer.” And it referred to the objects in the night sky, from night to night, would wander against the background stars. There were seven of them — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the sun, and the moon. Did I get the seven there? Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the sun, and the moon. Seven. That’s an unambiguous definition. No argument there. Seven planets. Copernicus says, “Wait a minute. The Sun is in the middle. Earth is one of these objects that goes around the sun. The moon goes around the earth.” So Earth became a planet. The sun became not a planet. The moon became not a planet. And so, okay. But even at Copernicus’s time, the word “planet” did not get a formal definition. It was only, “It just seems right. Let’s just keep it.” It was not formally defined until the IAU in August 2006. I’m fine with their definition! Because it doesn’t matter to me. The word is not useful.

BSS #265: Neil deGrasse Tyson (Download MP3)

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by Edward Champion

Another New Review

There’s a lot of fresh content that will be unloaded onto these pages over the course of the day, including three podcasts and a film review. But while you’re waiting on all this, you can find my review of Christopher Moore’s Fool in today’s Barnes and Noble Review. About a month ago, this assignment caused me to delve into any number of King Lear adaptations and reworkings, getting in touch with a rather obsessive interest of mine that I’ve kept quiet about (for reasons cited in the review). And while I’ve long championed the work of Christopher Moore (who was interviewed on The Bat Segundo Show in 2007), this review asks a number of very important questions about the satirical novelist’s present output. To find out what those questions are, and what my ultimate conclusion about Fool was, you can read my review.

by Edward Champion

Amazon Profiting Incommensurately Off Bloggers?

As I pointed out more than a year ago, Amazon has been offering monthly blog subscriptions to Kindle readers, but, in some cases, it hasn’t been paying the bloggers a reasonable cut of the revenue. And as my investigation revealed, in some cases, Amazon didn’t even bother to ask permission from the bloggers. While the monthly subscription cost has gone down to 99 cents per month, as Rebecca Skloot discovered on Twitter this afternoon, Maud Newton’s site is now for sale on the Kindle. (Maud has since revealed that a nonexclusive contract she signed with Newstex gives them the right to distribute her content through the Kindle.)

But there’s a big question here. If Amazon makes 99 cents per subscription, how much of this goes to the bloggers?

I am now in the early stage of a major investigation to determine, once again, if the bloggers listed on the Kindle store are collecting any commensurate revenue or granting their permission to Amazon to have their blogs distributed. And I will be updating this site with my findings. If your blog is listed on the Kindle Store, please contact me so that we can begin to hold Amazon accountable for seizing content generously offered for free and selling it to others on the open market.

There are currently 1,280 blogs listed at the Amazon Kindle Store.

by Edward Champion

Success

successNow imagine living a life, like Elizabeth Gilbert, in which you’re convinced that your greatest success is behind you. That seems to me a boring and not particularly ebullient existence: you’re holding onto a trajectory in which you’ve done the best you can and there isn’t anything better that you can do. You’ve hit the big time, and that’s it! Finito! It’s all downhill from here! But at least some elitist organization meeting out in the middle of nowhere will pay you a good sum of money to speak to a bunch of people who seem to believe they are successes based on a few large sums they’re filling into the blanks of their 1040s. And it’s all a bit confusing because the speaker has already reached the highest form of success possible! And the people who are gathered together at the secluded retreat have already predetermined that they are successes, based on being better than the sad Joe Sixpacks who must settle for the YouTube videos kindly distributed on the Web. I suppose, if you’re Gilbert or one of these dutiful attendees, you’re not really planning on being a better success, or the success that you have is somehow proportional to the amount that is in your checking account. But is that really success? Or is that boasting? And since boasting falls into that regrettable terrain occupied by arrogance, are the TED folks, in this particular instance, arrogance enablers?

Is it becoming for any artist or curiosity seeker to boast about any particular success? Or to put a final value on what success is? Is success, as Booker T. Washington once suggested, something to be measured not by the position one has reached in life, but through the obstacles that a person has overcome? And is it not incumbent for any decent person to create new obstacles so that success becomes meaningless? (Eat, pray, and love all you want. But if your soul is hollow and solipsistic in the first place, you’ll never get anywhere.)

By that measure, success becomes something unmeasurable and, in all likelihood, unattainable. It’s a bit like an experiment that the Caltech folks spring on first-year students. The story told to me about two decades ago is this: You put a girl at the end of the gym. You tell a group of boys that if they can get from one end of the gym to the other, they can kiss the girl. But the deal is this. They must constantly move one-half the distance that they started out with over a series of stages. Now it seems at first, particularly in the early stages, that you’re going to get to the other end of that gym. But, of course, as we all know, if you’re constantly moving one-half the distance, you’re constantly splitting the distance. One half becomes one fourth becomes one eighth becomes one sixteenth. You get the picture. But the incentive to kiss that girl — perhaps similar to the value of success we’re bandying about here — overwhelms any rational sense. You’re never going to kiss that girl if you constantly move forward by one half of the distance with each move. But perhaps you will if you never agreed to this condition in the first place.

Success then, like the Caltech experiment, is one of those tricky yardsticks that really doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if you’re quite happy putting your efforts into evolving, trying to get better, creating more obstacles. The honest person in this situation will tell you that she really hasn’t a clue as to whether she’s a success or not, because the honest person is forever shifting. Not letting some weird economic qualifier hinder or destroy what she does. Not letting some mythical unit called “success” put a cap on what she does. Casablanca, as we all know, was just a studio picture. It’s a fine motion picture, but it wouldn’t have happened if Michael Curtiz and everybody else had worried about how much of a success it should be or whether it represented the maximum amount of success that the cast and crew would ever obtain.

Such a burden seems counterintuitive to the wonderful impulse of being. Why should a subsequent failure matter so much because it follows a “success,” if, after all, the person working on the project is simply pumping the work out in the same daily manner performed in producing the “success?” (Unless, of course, there was never any plan to be distinct in the first place, and a convenient “book advance” permitted the person to live in a sad bubble.) Is this the way that we ferret out the frauds? We’re fond of penalizing the “lesser” work, when we really should be looking at the person’s entire trajectory. The real element to be concerned about here is the person who refuses to set up obstacles, the individual who settles into a declivity rather than fails quite naturally (and accidentally) in the act of producing more work. The person who takes the check to spread misinformation. The type who doesn’t understand that risk and failure are virtues. The austere soul who refuses to hop on board the wild rollercoaster of life.