Terra,sexadecimal : Sometimes name changes just bug us.

Erik Hansen erikhans08 at yahoo.com
Thu Aug 24 19:15:52 EDT 2006


Hate to tell you this, but many young
college graduates would refer to your chrished
astronomy book as a "novel" because it is a
hard copy offering.

--- Dar Scott <dsc at swcp.com> wrote:

> Sometimes name changes just bug us.
> 
> Scientists have been debating for a while what
> is the definition of a
> planet and this week a bunch at a scientist
> club have voted that
> Pluto is not a planet.  I don't mind and my
> grandkids are excited.
> The only problem is that sometimes scientists
> think that the
> scientific jargon meaning of a word is the only
> meaning.  For
> example, some people call all insects bugs and
> some entomologists say
> bug applies only to Hemiptera.
> 
> When I was a small boy I read SF and books
> about astronomy.  I knew
> from those books that the names of our sun,
> planet and moon were Sol,
> Terra and Luna respectively.  Then at the start
> of the space race
> NASA started talking about planet Earth.  The
> press followed.  In a
> short time most people thought of the name of
> the planet as Earth.
> Now, that bugged this boy.  I wanted to be
> excited about astronauts
> and rockets and such, but somehow that turned
> it into a PR game.
> 
> I wonder if some mathematicians or word lovers
> were bugged when IBM
> changed the name of sexadecimal to hexadecimal.
>  DEC used octal,
> perhaps to avoid an offensive chimeric word
> with magic spell
> connotations, being based in Massachusetts and
> all that.
> 
> Sometime late last century I vaguely noticed
> that there weren't any
> Datsuns around.
> 
> Dealing with name changes is part of how we
> cope, I guess.

erik at erikhansen.org    http://www.erikhansen.org

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