From the Bookshelf....

It was a pleasure to burn.


It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.  With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history.

What an opening to a wonderful book...one that I try to read at least once a year.

In it we meet Montag, who is a Fireman in the distant future... a future in which books are outlawed and those found hiding and reading them are dealt with harshly.  These Firemen, however, do not put out fires; they are summoned to the scene to find books and then incinerate them with flamethrowers before scattering the remaining ashes.

One day on his way home Montag is approached by his neighbor, Clarisse, an impressionable and silly girl who is on probation to become a teacher, but is sure she isn't going to be accepted as she 'didn't say the right things in her interview'.  She begins to pepper him with questions about his work and just what it is that he does.

"Is it true that a long time ago, firemen used to put out fires and not burn books?" she asks.

Montag laughs and wonders why should firemen ever put out fires.  She asks if he has read any of the books before he burns them, but he can only wonder at why she would ever even consider reading a book.  After all, history has shown that books cause people to be unhappy and antisocial.  It is understood that the only way the people can be happy is to be exactly the same as everyone else.  In theory, anyone who has read Socrates must think themselves better than anyone who hasn't, and fiction is just a way for people to be unhappy with their lives and want for it to be more.  Biographies are even worse as they are nothing but people saying "look at me, look at me, look at me" and philosophers can do nothing but argue that they themselves are right while everyone else are idiots.

Instead of reading, society is now a group of video watchers, with people striving to add more and more video walls to their homes so they can watch without interruption. The population is turning into mindless drones who not only can't think for themselves, but are addicted to painkillers and stimulants.  Suicide attempts are a daily part of life; one that is taken rather lightly as med techs just stop by, swap out your overdosed blood and you awaken the next morning completely refreshed and with no memory of what you had done.

But Clarisse gets him thinking.  At a raid he is horrified to find an old woman who would rather be burnt with her books than to stand aside and let them be taken from her.  What is it in these written pages that could inspire such devotion?  Montag's curiosity gets the better of him and he smuggles home a book he saves from the flames and hides it away.  Curious, he begins to read it late in the night when his wife is asleep. 

Montag still goes to work in order to keep up appearances...and to smuggle home more books.  He begins devouring them at an increasing rate and begins to form opinions for himself, rather than what society says he should think.  Montag is surprised one day to find that the next stop for the Firemen is his own house.  His wife has informed on him.  Montag is forced to pull the books from the walls, heating vents, etc before he is handed the flame thrower.  To everyone's surprise, Montag not only ignites the stacks of books, but the very house itself, burning away his old life.

A book one could easily say as being against censorship (and in a sense it is), I believe this is more against the complacency of humanity to allow such things to happen in the first place, throwing all of our rights away and allowing a hard won democracy to become a dictatorship without complaint or thought as to how those rights came to us in the first place.


Ray Bradbury created an intriguing world, one that has lasted since its original publication in 1953.  The beauty of his writing still pulls you in to this day.  It is no wonder that the world mourned with his death this week at the age of 91.  He attributed his long life to a carnival performer touching him with an electrified sword when he was 12 and announcing that young Mr Bradbury would live forever.  Inspired, Ray began a lifelong habit of writing something every little day.  From those young writings came great stories, including "Something Wicked This Way Comes" and "The Martian Chronicles".

An engaging author with rich prose, Mr Bradbury is someone worth remembering when you are searching for that new book to read.

The one in which I compare myself to a cart horse...

Confused?

Maybe you should run over to Four Perspectives and read all about it....

Hello, IAU? I've got some questions for you....

A little off topic today, but I have a question for the IAU about their decision to demote Pluto from a full-fledged card-carrying member of the planetary club to merely a wanna be.... a hanger on from the edge of the solar system.

I know this discussion is a bit like beating a dead horse, after all, no matter what things the New Horizons probe finds out when it arrives in 2015 is going to change the fact that Pluto is no longer a planet... but I still want to ask anyway.

The definition of what now constitutes a planet is something that circles the sun, has enough gravity to pull itself into a spherical shape and also manages to clear its orbit of other bodies.  Pluto is not a planet because it hasn't cleared Neptune from its path?  What about Neptune?  Neptune has failed to clear Pluto from its path, so do we demote it?  How could we, after all, its a gas giant and certainly can't be demoted... but Pluto is an oddball... the black sheep of the family so to speak.

But that's not the reason I have against the demotion.  No, my question has to do with Lagrange points.

Lagrange points are like eddies in the orbits of planets (so far discovered in our own orbit, as well as that of Mars, Neptune and Jupiter).  These points in space are a balance where bits of celestial bodies (called Trojans) can gather, either leading the planet or following at fixed points that can be determined mathematically.  Earth has one Trojan than we know of so far, but Jupiter has a load of these both leading and following in its wake.

So here is my question.

If the definition of a planet is something that has cleared its orbit.... what about these bodies lounging in our Lagrangian points?  If you take the IAU at face value, then Jupiter isn't a planet because it still has thousands of Trojans still in its orbital path.  Neptune isn't a planet because not only has it failed to clear Pluto from its path, but it also has Trojans in its orbit.  Heck, Earth isn't even a planet now because we have a body called Cruithne that doesn't appear to be a true Trojan, but is still using one of our L.P.s as the fulcrum of its own short orbital path.  So if you discredit Trojans from the things that need to be cleared, why excuse the Earth, because Cruithne isn't a true Trojan after all.  Which is a moot argument for Earth anyway seeing as how our own moon is slowly drifting away from us at a rate of about 4 cm a year.  It'll take awhile, but eventually our own moon is going to wander off... so, wait... does it mean that we are not only so wimpy that our gravitational pull can't hold onto our one and only satellite, but that we aren't clearing it from our path as well?   

So why not demote more of our planetary system as planets, since many of them don't follow the rules either?

Is it the atmosphere thing?  Well that can't be, because Pluto does have an atmosphere... at certain points of its orbit when the temperature warms up enough during its closest approach to the sun the frozen atmosphere thaws and returns to its gaseous state.  As it moves away from the sun the atmosphere (such as it is) freezes and falls back onto the planet.  Which means it could be said that Pluto, in a warped sense of the word, has seasons.

So after the demotion, people tried saying that Pluto was now part of the Kuiper Belt.... but Pluto only shares part of its elliptical orbit with the Kuiper Belt.... the K.P. has a circular orbit, not elliptical.  And Neptune's orbit is actually within the K.P.  At least one of its own moons is thought to be a stolen K.P. object.  So did Neptune kick it out of the K.P. and send it on its current path?  But then, why would Pluto have its own satellites?  Not only does Pluto have its large moon Charon, but it also has the smaller satellites Nix, Hydra and the blah sounding S/2011 P1.  So wait, Pluto and a bunch of smaller units were tossed out together and yet managed to form their own little planetary unit?

Not that I expect anyone to answer this little conundrum, but it really would be nice to have some authority on hand that could actually explain the rationalization behind Pluto's demotion despite some pretty compelling evidence. 

I do look forward to July of 2015 when New Horizons will be able to give us further insights to this fascinating little puzzle piece.  Even if Pluto is no longer considered a "real planet" at least it is still a planet in the hearts of its fans.  Regardless of its status now or in the future, Pluto will keep spinning on, not caring in the least what label we lay on it.