What's the most petty/pointless/pedantic hill you're willing to die on?

NotNotMike@programming.dev to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 456 points –

For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don't want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That's ludicrous!

That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use "less" when they should use "fewer"

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The main issue is that if Pluto is a planet, there's like 30 or so others that have to be also, for consistency.

Do they orbit on the general plane of the other planets in the system? COOL! Add them to the list!

IDGAF if we have hundreds of planets, it's always been an arbitrary number and the only reason to keep it small is so kids can memorize the list and that isn't good enough to DISRESPECT motherfucking PLUTO

The only reason pluto was listed as a planet is because it was thought to be bigger than it actually was. And noone bothered challanging it until the dwarf planet category was created.

Do you also get upset when animals change families in taxonomy?

DNA gives us insight into ancestry that has no parallel in astronomy. When we finally sequence a creature, we pretty much know right on the tree where it goes and stupid fucking crabs and everything that look like them can all get placed in their proper relations when previously purely dissection and observation misled those taxonomy pioneers.

you can't have that kind of bait and switch on celestial objects because what we see is what we see.

The reason that Pluto was smaller than predicted was the fact that the mass calculations assumed a single central object when the perturbations were made by the PLANET/moon system. That doesn't change the fact that it has enough mass to deform into a spheroid and orbits within 20% of the orbital plane.

DNA has made it a lot easier to deterimine ancestry yes. But most of of taxonomy has been created on nothing but observational data.

For example, rabbits, hares, and pika used to be classed as Rodentia until they were placed in their own order, Lagomorpha, in 1912.

Also, the other dwarf planets were considered large asteroids until they were upgraded to dwarf planet status... so if you wanna be upset, you should be upset pluto isnt an asteroid.

Nah... Just take the current definition of planet and append "and also Pluto because we're emotionally attached to it" and you're good.

Or, you know, reverse the stupid as fuck arbitrary definition of 'clearing its own orbit' being appended to the definition of a planet. It's that easy.