It's a proposal for a definition of "planet." I feel bad asking this, since I'm studying for a Masters in the humanities, and really should be able to decode basic failures in English syntax, but this is so badly written it's beyond me. It is a fragment of a small article in a Prague astronimical journal

http://astro.cas.cz/nuncius/nsiii_02.pdf (look for it on the top right of page one)

and claims to have been written by a native English speaker. I am unclear as to whether this was the proposal or merely a proposal. I really hope it's the latter, because, quite frankly, it sucks the big one.

__________________
Wikipedia: A MMORPG for self-denialists.

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

Heh heh... as my English major friends would admonish: "grammatically correct, but stylistically horrendous!" (I think it's an ugly proposal, not only in wording but in content as well.)

Those paragraphs in nicer English:

Pluto has been considered a planet for seventy-five years, and the IAU decided to keep it that way at their Manchester meeting. We agree, but propose the following as well. Xena, because it is brighter than Pluto, will be called the tenth planet. Any other object brighter than Pluto (absolute visual magnitude brighter than -0.76) will also be given planetary status. It's important to get this done, because the people finding and naming the objects need recognition immediately. This has been mentioned before (in the cited sources), but the IAU isn't listening. It is infeasible to base planetary status on roundness, because it's hard to do, especially for distant, dim objects.

A compromise is to give Pluto and any new planets the celestial equivalent of dual citizenship. They not only get a planetary label, but also a comet/asteroid label.

__________________
"It's turtles all the way down."

Apparently, the guy who wrote that was Tom Gehrels, the founder of Spacewatch. Someone "tactfully" mentioned that to me on Wikipedia when I made my feelings known about the quality of the article and the linguistic ability of its author.

__________________
Wikipedia: A MMORPG for self-denialists.

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

I've seen far, far worse proposals.

The good thing about this proposal is that Pluto remains a planet. So does "Xena," which must be a planet if Pluto is, because it's larger. (I put "Xena" in quotes, because its actual name will ultimately be something else.)

Another good thing about this proposal is that a plethora of objects almost no one has heard of (Ceres, Sedna, Quaoar, etc.) will remain nonplanets.

Yet another good thing about this proposal is that when new objects are found, they can be quickly classified planets or nonplanets.

The potentially BAD thing about this proposal: What if someone discovers a really DARK object that's bigger than Pluto? Its absolute magnitude could be fainter than Pluto's. Of course, that might not happen, because large objects, such as Pluto and "Xena," should have atmospheres that create snow, thereby coating the objects with highly reflective ice.

By the way: For those who don't know, absolute magnitude here means the apparent magnitude an object would have if it were 1) 1 AU from the Sun and 2) 1 AU from the Earth. (One AU is the mean Sun-Earth distance, about 93 million miles.)

That "someone" is me.

I was somewhat surprised on your comment, because I didn't notice his English was that bad (what does that tell about my English skills...)

But really, I think your criticism is justified. A professional scientist should know how to write good text.

__________________
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
-- Richard Feynman