ofthe5thkind

Dude. Congratulations on your sobriety.

I'm really glad that you are OK, because you're fucking funny.

Thank you for reminding me of something Richard Feynman once said:

“You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."

I cannot fucking stop laughing

Shortly after his discovery of Neptune in 1848, Urbain le Verrier said:

"This success allows us to hope that after thirty or forty years of observation on the new planet, we may employ it, in its turn, for the discovery of the one following it in its order of distances from the sun. Thus at least we should unhappily soon fall among bodies invisible by reason of their immense distance, but whose orbits might yet be traced in a succession of ages with the greatest exactness."

I want to congratulate you, @NASANewHorizons, on your greatest exactness!

My question has to do with how we classify these objects. Since Pluto and Charon orbit a shared point/barycenter in space, is it finally time to stop calling the latter a moon? Thanks to all of you, it seems to me that we have our first up-close, composite photograph of a binary dwarf planet!

...and if we continue with that line of thought, aren't Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra really scattered Kuiper Belt debris that fell into orbit around Pluto's system, as opposed to traditional moons?

It's exciting to wonder about these things. The Kuiper Belt seems so fun!

Can you describe for us the moment when you realized that Slashdot was no longer a pet project, but something legitimately successful? What was the moment, and what did it feel like to know that your venture was actually going to, well... work?