Christopher Lansdown

The world is, fundamentally, *about* God. All we call pleasure is some creature being given the privilege of showing us some aspect of God's goodness for us to enjoy. What we call "doing good deeds" is being given the privilege of being God's creative love to another creature.

@robkroese Bonus points if you only get to draw your finger against the stone once per day, so you have to wait extra long!

@robkroese Think of how much greater the books would be if you carved the stone with your fingernails.

This is why I carve my books into stone with a spoon

@TheCatholicEngr Canonically, they're correct. Baptism leaves an indelible mark and once Catholic a person cannot cease to be Catholic.

>"I'm a Catholic" >Goes to Mass once a year Be for real right now I don't know who needs to hear this but weekly Mass isn't optional

(Except, of course, in episodes in which the only thing alleged was natural, such as Never Ape and Ape Man or The Beast Is Awake in Bottomless Lake. Then it just didn't come up. But they still initially believed in the respective unusual beasts.)

This is hilarious, and also true in the bigger picture. But people forget that in the show the gang wasn't out to prove the supernatural wasn't real. They always believed the supernatural explanation until they came across evidence which contradicted a supernatural explanation.

@AStratelates This is also true of women.

Yes

If the vikings had gone to the moon, would it now be named Thick Atmosphereland?

@AStratelates I assume they're trying to reenact the scene from Terminator 2 with the guy who invented skynet, except they don't have a terminator to cut the skin off of his own hand to prove he's a robot from the future, so they're improvising?

What

@TheCatholicEngr somehow, I feel you need to see this if you haven't already.

@AStratelates That really needs to be revisited in the age of modern voice generation software.

Polygraphs not admissible in my state but conversations recorded by one party using deception to get the other one to admit to wrongdoing are.

I just had to do a captcha that asked me to click on all pictures of motorcycles and it was a picture of a moped.

@JimmyLevendia Also, he'll probably be shot in the back of the head for having collected it.

If the state can sell it for hard currency, it becomes The People’s funko pop collection, comrade!

@EileenChollet @EgoTell @ThoughtEnjoyer @IAU_org I guess I phrased it wrong - I should have said "the first 9 massive bodies (etc)" 😊

@ctlansdown @EgoTell @ThoughtEnjoyer @IAU_org Since Eris is 27% more massive than Pluto, this definition would make everyone angry (except me, I would be amused).

Inside baseball on Pluto's demotion, told to me contemporaneously by someone who was at the 2006 @IAU_org meeting when they voted on it. An American scientist at Caltech named Mike Brown had found a handful of icy planets similar to Pluto but further out in the solar system. The IAU vote was supposed to be to make those bodies official planets as well. However, the Europeans realized that bunch of new planets + Pluto would mean that the Americans had discovered more planets than the Europeans. That was unacceptable to them, so they all voted to demote Pluto from planet status by creating a scientifically non-sensical definition of "planet". The 2006 definition requires that a planet must have "cleared the neighborhood around its orbit". This definition of a planet excludes Earth (we have the Moon in the same orbit around the Sun) and the gas giants (which also have large moons.) Demoting Earth to a dwarf planet and the gas giants to "solar system bodies" would have caused an uproar, so they voted Mercury through Neptune back in as planets by non-scientific fiat. To those readers who thought "I'm The Science, and pointing out that my nonsensical dictates are nonsensible dictates is disinformation and violence" started with COVID, well, the Pluto incident was 14 years prior.

@EgoTell @ThoughtEnjoyer @EileenChollet @IAU_org Or for that matter, "up to the first 9 most massive objects orbiting the star which aren't a moon of a more massive body". It would be more honest.

@EgoTell @ThoughtEnjoyer @EileenChollet @IAU_org Possibly, but that no one seems to have bothered strongly suggests that what we're seeing is what is technically known as "motivated reasoning". In which case, why not just define "planet" as not-a-moon, above a certain mass visible with a 1920s-era telescope?

@ThoughtEnjoyer @EileenChollet @IAU_org Thank you for making it clear you don't understand how to rigorously define anything.

@ctlansdown @EileenChollet @IAU_org If an object’s orbit shares a similar path to that of another object, they are in orbital vicinity of one another. These are not difficult concepts

@ThoughtEnjoyer @EileenChollet @IAU_org What is the astronomical definition of "vicinity of its orbit"? Also, what's the actual technical definition by which meteors coming near a planet don't temporarily demote it as a planet until they leave the vicinity?

@ctlansdown @EileenChollet @IAU_org An object has cleared the neighborhood of its orbit if there are no other objects in the vicinity of its orbit that are not gravitationally bound to it.

@ThoughtEnjoyer @EileenChollet @IAU_org Why haven't you defined it, if it is easy?

@EileenChollet @IAU_org They “chose not to adopt a definition” because it already has an established definition in astronomy. You are the only one that’s proposing a different definition for “clearing a neighborhood around its orbit.” This is not a difficult thing to define

@AStratelates Enormous numbers of women are not perfectly regular at 28 days. And why go to all the trouble of cycle counting on a bone, rather than something softer and less durable?

Prehistoric man didn’t live with women, apparently.

@CTrefugees Couldn't we just get a short summary of the propaganda? Reading all the propaganda sounds like a lot of work... ;)

If you want to know what happened at the Council just read propaganda. After this, just read Time Magazine's coverage- anything other than just looking at it in terms of its documents.