Tweets From Eric S. Raymond  ## Metadata - Author: [[@esrtweet on Twitter]] - Full Title: Tweets From Eric S. Raymond - Category: #tweets - URL: https://twitter.com/esrtweet ## Document Notes ## Highlights - True story: I was involved in deplanetizing Pluto, and it made me a little sad, but I can't be sorry about it. The whole flap started when somebody at the International Astronomical Union noticed that there didn't seem to be any definition of what a "planet" is other than "these things we've traditionally called planets". Originally there were only five, out to Saturn, visible fast movers in the night sky. Then it was recognized that Earth orbited the Sun, like other visible planets, so it was added to the list as a sixth. After the invention of the telescope people started discovering Sun-orbiters that hadn't been naked-eye visible; Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Yes, for a brief time in the 19th century the largest asteroids were sometimes classified as planets. Eventually, the largest asteroids were dropped off the list out of a vague sense that they were too small. Leaving us in the early 20th century with eight bodies that we were comfortable in describing as planets and one tiny oddball, Pluto, in a high-inclination orbit that made it seem kind of like an asteroid. The trouble started when we began to be able to detect Sun-orbiters roughly the size of Pluto way, way out past it in the Kuiper belt. Suddenly there were way too many "planets", with every prospect that the list would get larger every couple of years. The International Astronomical Union decided to try and come up with systematic definition of "planet" that would include all the bodies that had been traditionally described that way and exclude the awkward newcomers. And the major asteroids. I got involved because the IAU's rules required it to seek input from interested non-astronomers. I was on an email list that was ideal for the IAU's purposes, being stuffed full of highly astronomy-literate geeks and tinkerers. There wasn't any controversy about the first criterion, which is that a planet has to orbit a star, rather than orbiting something else that orbits a star. Beyond this, the debate got spirited and interesting. I think I was one of the first to argue strongly that a main criterion for "planet" ought to be that it's spherical under self-gravitation. The IAU did eventually adopt this as its second criterion. The problem was that with these two criteria we still ended up with way too many "planets", including a potentially endless list of invisible iceballs way *way* out past Pluto. We tried to come up with a third filter that would exactly match the nine planets of 20th-century folklore and science fiction. So did professional astronomers all over the world. Alas, we all failed. The best we could do was to come up with a third criterion that a planet had to "clear its orbit", e.g. not share its orbit with any object of similar size. I don't think that one came from our mailing list, though we did discuss it. Bur this excludes Pluto, because it has a "moon" similar enough to itself in size that they rotate around a common center of gravity (barycenter) that is outside Pluto. (Interestingly, this is almost but not quite true of the Earth-Moon system; the barycenter of the system is 74% of the Earth's radius from the center of the Earth.) Nobody was really happy about crossing Pluto off the list. The IAU compromised by relabeling it a "dwarf planet" that didn't have to meet criterion 3. There are lots of those: currently the list includes Pluto, Ceres, and 4 Kuiper-belt iceballs. It is expected that around 200 may eventually be discovered. Pluto got redefined as "not a planet" not because anybody wanted it that way, but because the three-point definition the IAU now uses was the closest we could come to including the traditional nine planets without sweeping in potentially hundreds of other tiny objects that would violate our intuitive, folk sense of "planet". Which, as I said, is a little sad. But I can't bring myself to regret it. ([View Tweet](https://twitter.com/esrtweet/status/1871539817500078441)) - You're really unaware? High caste Indians are taught to be extremely arrogant, domineering, and contemptuous towards lower-caste Indians, with this presentation increasing in intensity along with the status difference between their jati and the lower one. An unfortunate consequence when they move to the United States is that they often treat American service workers in occupations that would have low status in India rather badly. They have to learn that this is very bad manners here. Some learn the lesson better than others. ([View Tweet](https://twitter.com/esrtweet/status/1883347488951664897)) - One of my regrets about my years of being Mr. Famous Guy, when I had maximum leadership leverage, is that I didn't foresee the political threat to open source. I thought it was enough to be apolitical, invite everybody to be part of our development community, and that everybody would continue to keep politics out of the coding. Including even my own libertarian politics. If I had known what was coming, I would have made a big deal about insisting that the open source community had to have *one* positive political value: free speech and opposition to censorship. That would have been justified on the object level, because we can't function when those political conditions are violated. On the meta-level, having that as a positively asserted community value would have made it far more difficult for the Marxists/wokies to do their entryism thing. They would have been recognized as a fundamentally toxic phenomenon sooner. Failure of leadership on my part. I got a lot of things right, and we've pocketed the gains from my good decisions, but on this I screwed up, and I feel bad about it. ([View Tweet](https://twitter.com/esrtweet/status/1886894357451866309)) - I'm about to do something I think I've never done before, which is assert every bit of whatever authority I have as the person who discovered and wrote down the rules of open source. After ten years of drama and idiocy, lots of people other than me are now willing to say in ([View Tweet](https://twitter.com/esrtweet/status/1971768345188844003))