New Mexico and the Poor Man's Galileo

The New Mexico state legislature is voting on a resolution to officially recognize Pluto a planet. I really don't get why there needs to be an official state policy regarding the nomenclature trans-Neptunian objects, even if the underlying aim is more or less harmless fluff: the astronomer who discovered Pluto was from New Mexico, and they don't want to see his achievement diminished. The only reason it annoys me is the government found scientific consensus inconvenient, so they changed it. When scientists are thumbing through thesauruses to avoid using the word "evolve" in any context for fear of losing federal grants, having a state-by-state astronomy policy really doesn't feel right. Though it has long-since been supplanted by biology in this regard, astronomy was the original test case in the West for whether science was allowed to disrupt our world-view, and furthermore, this just plays into the mentality that says we have to hold back information in schools lest kids contradict their parents with new information.

But really, I just want to know what the Galileo of Michigan Avenue has to say about all this. The GoMA was a woman I saw taking an ungodly amount of time in the rarely open Verizon store on Michigan Ave, because she needed a lot of help choosing a phone. Which would be fine, except she only had a choice between two virtually identical phones: one was smaller, but the other one while larger was somewhat more durable. To understand this crucial difference, Galileo jr. posed the sales staff with a hypothetical experiment in which she would simultaneously drop both phones from the same height, and wanted their speculation on the results of said experiment. This is about when the sales staff scolded me for impatiently rolling my eyes and chuckling. I found that unfair because I was only impatiently eavesdropping on this meeting of the Royal Society due to the only other staff member being occupied transferring somebody's contacts to a new phone, a process that took a long time because he was trying to slip his own number in and hopefully get some, and obviously trying to memorize all the numbers attached to girl's names as a back-up plan.

Personally, I don't know why they didn't just send Galileo across the street to the Wrigley building with both phones. And run her a hot bath from which to announce her discovery... okay, that would actually be the Archimedes of Michigan Ave, and probably more of a fond remembrance of the days back in Boston when I used to regularly bathe with a lithe scientist. You know, maybe Archimedes is why religious conservatives hate science and I love smart women, we're both haunted by the image of a hysterical, soapy scientist running through the streets of Santa Fe slippery and nude with nothing to cover themselves but a vacuum cleaner. (Does that sound right? I know there's a vacuum cleaner somewhere in that story.)