6 posts tagged “utoronto”

Surprisingly, I was able to get into every class but one I wished to enrol in. But that one was somehow full a few days before I could even enrol, so I had planned for having that one lacking anyhow. I remember in my first year it took a good hour to register for classes because of slow servers and such, but for the past couple of years, the process has been smooth. In fact, I managed to get 9 classes regstered in just about two (2) minutes. Surprise! Efficient.

I still couldn't fit in the basic Korean history classes I wanted into my schedule, but I got a couple other Dae Han Min Guk related classes in there. I am done with all but two half year courses in the way of tedious required stuff. I couldn't fit them in in previous years so, I am left with taking Phonetics and Sound Patterns this year.

While Ken is a closet linguistics geek, your's truly is a closet astronomy geek. Since the topic of Pluto, plutons, dwarfs, etc. has been the dead horse, I will only kick it a bit more. 

I want to weigh in long enough to say, "so what?"

I had the opportunity of hearing Mike Brown speak at last year's astronomy symposium, which took place at UofT's Convocation Hall. He, of course, is the man who discovered the until recently potential "planet" 2003 UB313 (aka "Xena"). Since Pluto was kicked out so was Xena (try to imagine how many nerd jokes about Gabrielle followed this..then add 10). Part of his discussion, and resulting questions, was related to whether or not this object would be determned a "planet." Short story is that he didn't particularly care either way. The only difference it would have made was in the official naming convention (planets use Greek and Roman gods). Calling something a planet is almost arbitrary and does not at all discount the importance in finding new, large, orbiting masses.