Moving the Mississippi?

All right. Time for another science spotlight. This time, we sit right back at home.

The Mississippi River. Arguably one of the most importantant rivers in the world (3rd in length), they are thinking of moving [nytimes.com] the exit of the Mississippi from it's current home, and split the river past New Orleans, in the hopes of adding sediment to some of the areas at the end of the delta. This move will have to be planned out carefully, and the meeting they've scheduled for later this year is just to plan on the planning phase of this procedure.

I can see why they would want to do this: each year, the Mississippi dumps tons of sediment out of it's mouth. In order to build more marshlands and bird-wading areas, they want to direct the sediment outward. Implementing this would be difficult, though - it would involve a lot of complex calculation: how much force the water would push on a barrier, where the sediment should be dumped, how redirecting will change the velocity of the water, how much interference a barrier could create in the water, and other factors playing in and interconnecting.

I say we leave it be. Why should we, as humans, try to mess with something nature has been creating for the past thousands of years? It seems that the river knows what it's doing, as long as we keep out of it.

Pluto... What happened?

Well, guys: it's official. Pluto's no longer a planet. The IAU (International Astronomical Union) [iau.org] voted in the past couple weeks to demote it to a "dwarf planet;" I like to use the term planetoid, but that's just me. There are a couple other planetoids that they are now looking at as well. One of these, before known as 2003 UB313, is now to be known as Eris[slashdot.org]. Also, there are a lot of other objects flying around in space that can be classified as planetoids, that exist in an astronomical formation known as the Kuiper Belt[nytimes.com].

In physics, we had just finished talking about the different types of measurements, and how they are important to our society. In this case, since Pluto, Eris, and the other strings of planetoids that exist in the Kuiper Belt were too small by definition, they were all brought down into the status of "dwarf planet."

Personally, I think it's going to be hard for teachers the most. How many times can you remember one of your elementary school teachers telling you some form of mnemonic so you can remember the 10 planets? What are they going to do now, when there's only nine? Will the children of tomorrow suffer from a lessened education?

I doubt it. It still makes a fun argument though.