Just for fun:
http://www.astronautix.com/poems/whesakid.htm
...and remembering the early magic of the solar system.

When my grandmothers were kids, they had only 8 planets ...

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Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea ...

In direct response to the topic title:

...and I'll go to my grave with over 200 of them.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.

I saw that quote a while ago, and I say -- Pfuy on you! I am 40, and still think latest inventions are cool!

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Fiction has to be plausible. Reality is under no such constraint.

After reading Mike Brown, CalTech university, website: I am now convinced that the IAU did the correct thing to demote Pluto and 2003 UB313 to a dwarf planet. The IAU used the best scientific definition available for a planet. Mike Brown is probably not happy about this decision, but he says it is the best scientific defintion.

When we were kids, back in the ice ages, ha ha, they didn't know about the Kuiper Belt Objects, and so couldn't truly understand Pluto in a true context.

I hope the IAU doesn't change this definition again at their 2009 meeting. I think the world needs to accept the fact that there are 8 planets, and everything else in solar system.

Nice poem.

When I was a kid, the measure of geekiness was if you knew what the furthest out planet was because at the time the answer was Neptune. I guess the answer's the same now, but for different reasons...

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Yes, I have a life. It's quite different from yours.

"Uranus was tipped on its side
and was surely far more interesting visually than Neptune, "

Voyager 2 measured the current value of Uranus's rotation, right? When was it first known? At least, that it rotated on its "side"?

Probably the first clue was the ring and moon system, which was known prior to Voyager's visit. Interestingly, in terms of the most known "natural" satellites (those which formed with the planet,and were not captured later), Uranus is king of the heap.

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I'm not completely heartless, the doctor who removed it told me he'd never be able to get it all.