The feud about the number of planets is starting to calm down, as New Scientist reports that the latest, and so-far best received, proposal is to demote Pluto and simply say that the definition of a planet is a significantyl large object which is “the dominant body in its orbital zone”.

This makes me wonder what happens if we discover twin planets, where two planets orbit one another, as well as their sun.

It also makes me wonder what the new mnemonic is going to be for the solar system. “My Very Excellent Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas” used to be the trick to remember the order of the nine-planet solar system (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto), but obviously the sentence will not make any sense if Pizza is omitted. A recent Language Log article actually set out to construct a mnemonic for the original proposition that included thirteen planets: My Very Excellent Mother Could Just Send Us Nine Cheerleaders Playing Xylophones. I remain waiting for their suggestion about the non-Pluto mnemonic.

Before:

After:

So, that is one more thing crossed out of my “list of things to do before I die”. I am actually also quite happy with the result: it may not make me look like Johnny Depp, but then again I don’t really want to look like Johnny Depp, either.

Ok, maybe I do, but never mind that…

The whole process took me just under an hour, about half of which went in trying to find suitable scissors, a comb and a hand mirror. I could in the end only produce kitchen scissors, a hair brush (which I think we at some point used for our cat?) and a wall mirror that we haven’t put up yet. These, however, turned out to be adequate enough for my purposes - actually, the wall mirror that I propped on a chair behind me to get a reflection of the back of my head from the bathroom mirror was probably even better than a hand mirror would have been.

The hardest part, obviously, was cutting the back, and the left side was harder than the right (I am right-handed). The left-side back of my head I ended up doing by sitting on the bath tub in a weird angle to the propped-up mirror, where I could see a reflection of the main mirror giving a reflection from the propped-up mirror.

Needless to say, my brain had quite some trouble guiding my hands at some point, as it tried to make sense of the three-dimensional world through mirror-reflections. It is a weird feeling when you give your hand the command to move upwards, and it starts going right… or, at least, what you perceive to be right (and what definitely is not “upwards”).

I actually still don’t have a clear idea how well I ended up doing the back of my head. For that, I will need to wait for my other half to return from work so that she can give me her opinion.

Yet, all in all, I think I did better than I expected. Of course, it is not the most demanding haircut ever, either. Yet, I still have both of my ears and all of my fingers, so for a first ever try in cutting anyone’s hair, I am ready to call it a success.

Guardian Unlimited reports that not one, but two film projects about the life of the novelist Philip K. Dick have been announced within just weeks of one another. Interestingly enough, Tony Grisoni who co-penned Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is set to write the screenplay, and in quoted in the Guardian as saying that he is planning to mix elements from Dick’s fiction with his life, and that he is “not really interested in the literal truth”. This strongly reminds me of a PKD biography that I am at the moment reading, titled I am alive and you are dead.

For those who have asked, here is a list of relatively good sources for science and technology news. Obviously not a complete list of such news sources, it simply includes the feeds that I follow. I hope you will find the list useful.

General Science News

BBC News Science/Nature (RSS feed)

National Geographic News (RSS feed)

New Scientist (Breaking News) (RSS feed)

Nature Magazine (RSS feed)

Popular Science: Top Stories (RSS feed)
See also the individual news feeds for specific subjects.

Science NOW (RSS feed)

Scientific American (RSS feed)

SciTechDaily (has email news delivery)

Science Press Releases

Brightsurf (RSS feed)

EurekAlert! (RSS feed)

ScienceDaily (RSS feed)

Technology

BBC News: Technology (RSS feed)

Boing Boing (RSS feed)

InfoWorld (RSS feed)

Newsforge (RSS feed)

Slashdot (RSS feed)

Wired News (RSS feed)

Is it just me, or is the virtual world Second Life all over the place these days? You try to read some music industry news, and what you get is an article about Duran Duran performing in Second Life. You browse technology news, and there it is again: Toyota and Adidas are the latest companies to jump into the Second Life bandwagon. Dodging reports about business consulting in Second Life, conventions in Second Life, Universities opening courses in Second Life, and everything else Second Life related has in fact become so difficult that it makes me wonder what all the buzz is about.

Fortunately, there was a rather good article on Second Life at Popular Science that I read today. If I had more time - indeed another life - I would probably try Second Life. As it is now, however, there’s way too many things to do in this life for me to try and handle another one, as well.

Again, I think this was already making the news rounds a while ago, but since BBC News has an article about it, let’s just go with the flow and note that a team of American astronomers think that they have discovered the gravitational signature of dark matter when observing the collision of two galaxy clusters.