I went to an American website a couple months that bans certain IP addresses. It had banned China IP’s which included mine. The message to these IP’s was a “no access” message along with the jab: “No Rice”. In other words, if you access their site from China you are banned, they don’t want rice eaters on their site. There was a time I might have thought that was funny. But being the recipient of that made me embarrassed for the website owner, and embarrassed that other Chinese would see that same message.

Today on a discussion forum someone commented “what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” And instead of reading that and understanding that they meant the recipient was not making a valid point; my first reaction was to actually wonder where the price of tea in China was involved. Perhaps this is part of a larger paradigm shift. It may seem trivial, but if you have been an Expatriate working in another country then you probably understand the strange perspective on things. The price of tea in China IS relevant to me, as is the attitude of my native country towards my host country.

Also today in the news were complaints from Iran that Hollywood movies are full of slurs against Iran and it’s people. I would normally discount that as more political drivel. But maybe there are more put-downs in our languages against different countries than we realize.

According to the new definition, a full-fledged planet is an object that orbits the sun and is large enough to have become round due to the force of its own gravity. In addition, a planet has to dominate the neighborhood around its orbit.

Pluto has been demoted because it does not dominate its neighborhood. Charon, its large “moon,” is only about half the size of Pluto, while all the true planets are far larger than their moons.

Pluto is now officially a “dwarf planet”. But it’s no longer part of an exclusive club, since there are more than 40 of these dwarfs, including the large asteroid Ceres and 2003 UB313, nicknamed Xena—a distant object slightly larger than Pluto discovered by Brown last year.

Update Feb 2009: You can talk about this topic in the discussion forum at (and play video games too!):
http://forum.conradaskland.com/showthread.php?t=9

Update May 2009: Here is information about the “Planet X” theory and information on why Pluto was initially considered a planet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_x

Update August 25 2009:
The debate rages on. Did you know that 90% of the critical letters complaining about Pluto’s demotion come from North America? Food for thought, here’s the article:
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/08/24/pluto.dwarf.planet/index.html