Big Damn Heroine

23rd April 2017

Post reblogged from Looking for a path with 349,804 notes

braincoins:
freshfriedtrash:
skazuhira-miller:
glenjamin-danzig:
who was the fool who was tasked with naming the galaxy and the only adjective they could think of was ‘mmmmmmmmmmmmilky…’
scientist: (gazing up at space)
scientist: ……….. it sure is a milky boy
NO
YOU DONT UNDERSTAND
ASTRONOMERS ARE THE SHITTIEST EVER AT NAMING THINGS I KID YOU NOT.
When it came time to name the two theoretical particle types that might be dark matter THEY INTENTIONALLY CHOSE THE NAMES SO THAT THE ACRONYMS WOULD SPELL “WIMPS” AND “MACHOS” I SHIT YOU NOT
THEY ARE FUCKING TERRIBLE AT NAMING ANYTHING
I just listened to a talk by Neil deGrasse Tyson himself LAST NIGHT and he went on about this more than once.
“I’m walking down the street and I’m like ‘ooh pretty rock…’ and some Geologist is like ‘actually, that’s anorthosite feldspar’ and I’m like ‘Nevermind, I don’t want it anymore.’ Any biologists in the audience? [some clapping] Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. The most important molecule in the human body, what did you name it? It has NINE SYLLABLES and it’s so long that even YOU GUYS abbreviate it as ‘DNA’!
But astrophysicists and astronomers? No, man, we call it like we see it. Star made of neutrons? NEUTRON STAR. Small white star? WHITE DWARF. You know that big red spot on Jupiter? Know what we called it? JUPITER’S RED SPOT.”
my favourite one is rocks which they mis-identify as meteorites but then turn out to just be regular rocks,
they are called meteor-wrongs

Just makes me think of Holly trying to explain why she didn’t see a black hole coming…

Tagged: astrophysics naming things space dorks red dwarf