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Cake day: January 12th, 2025

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  • Rant? Oh don’t get me started on how we’re dropping the ball on the naming of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. This is by far the largest object in the entire galaxy. The center of centers. The pit at the bottom of the world. The bottomless pit that pulled the whole galaxy together. The monster of monsters. The terror of terrors. The thunder upon the deep. The ravenous maw that devours entire Suns. And what name do we call it? What ancient monster or demon do we invoke to give voice to the howling terror around which the galaxy revolves? None. We call the bloody thing Sagittarius A*.

    Yes, that’s it. That’s as good as astronomers can do right now apparently. How could you call such an unholy terror a name that’s more appropriate to an IRS accounting file? How could you use such a mundane name when Charybdis is right there! Or Scylla works too!

    Like JFC. Where’s the sense of romance? Where’s the passion and the fire? We’re talking an object with the mass of three million Suns. It has a whole retinue or stars that orbit around it, and it throws them around like playthings. The Earth and the Sun already dwarf humanity to cosmic minutia, and this monster does the same to them. It’s a monster lurking in the depths of space. And the best we can do to name it is fucking Sagittarius A*. The thing is a literal cosmic monster, something right out of mythology.

    Like, I’m not even some Eurocentric who thinks everything needs to be named after Roman or Greek sources. I like keeping the planets specifically Roman for consistency. But there are no shortage of wonderful names out there coming from other mythologies. Laniakea is a beautiful name. And I would be fine with naming the big black hole after some terrifying monster in any number of mythologies. But we have to stop calling it A*. It’s just wrong.


  • Uranus is such a stupid name. The proper name for the world is Caelus. All the other planets use the Roman names of the gods. But for some reason, we decided to go with the Greek name in the one case that would obviously cause problems. The only reason “Uranus” and “anus” sound similar is that they have different roots. “Anus” comes from the Latin, while Uranus is Greek. The ancient Greeks didn’t have this problem, as they only had the word for the deity. The Romans didn’t have this problem, as they named their god Caelus. But for some asinine reason, we insist on calling the Seventh Planet Uranus instead of its proper Caelus.

    We should rename it. I don’t care if scientists at the time of its discovery preferred Uranus. We’re allowed to move to more sensible names. We shouldn’t be stuck with this forever. In fact, Herschel, the original discoverer, wanted to name it George. Bode came up with the name Uranus, apparently unaware of the Latin/Greek mismatch.

    It’s high time we give the Seventh World in our star system the proper respect it is due. The seventh planet is Caelus, not this ridiculous Uranus. We can do better.


  • For me, the best version of this is Avatar: The Last Airbender. Aang spends an entire arc lamenting how he may need to spill blood and kill the Fire Lord. Meanwhile the very same Aang had previously sunk an entire naval fleet single-handedly.

    How many thousands of sailors, most of them probably people drafted against their will, did you kill that day Aang? Remember when you literally sliced entire ships in half? Your hands cut through steel, would you have even felt the flesh you were cutting through? Or how about all those ships you sank? A fair number sank instantly. You think everybody got out safely from those ships? Or how about that time you destroyed that giant drill machine, the one manned by thousands of soldiers, outside the walls of Ba Sing Se? You think everyone managed to miraculously escape that fireball? And those are just the major battles. How about the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of fire nation soldiers you casually tossed around like rag dolls with your powers of air, water, and earth during dozens of minor skirmishes? What are the odds you managed to toss all these men around like playthings and NOT have a few of them have their skulls bashed open on rocks when they hit the ground wrong?

    The point of this is not to condemn Aang’s actions through the series. His actions were fully justified, as he was fighting a war against an expansionist colonial military power. What he did was an objective good. But by the time he’s hand wringing about having to kill Fire Lord Ozai, Aang had almost certainly already taken hundreds of lives. Hell, he probably killed hundreds just in that final climactic battle against the airship armada. The Hindenburg disaster saw 1/3 of the passenger and crew parish. And that was from an airship that crashed when it was already landing and close to the ground. Aang was dropping ships from miles in the sky. Maybe some soldiers with fire bending powers could somehow slow their own descent enough to survive, maybe they had some parachutes. But there’s zero chance that Armada didn’t have a fatality rate at least comparable to the Hindenburg disaster.

    So Aang blithely kills hundreds of conscripts without a second thought. But then he has a crisis of conscience that takes multiple episodes to resolve, and that crisis of conscience is all about…Fire Lord Ozai? This is like if someone nonchalantly participated in the Firebombing of Dresden and then suddenly developed complex moral doubts about putting a bullet in Hitler’s head. Aang had already killed hundreds of people that Ozai had sent to their deaths. No one was forcing Ozai. He wasn’t a conscript. He had full autonomy; he’s the absolute ruler of the Fire Nation. He doesn’t even have a Congress or Parliament to answer to. He has absolute total moral responsibility for every evil thing the Fire Nation has done. Yet, when it comes to actually holding the powerful accountable, suddenly Aang wants to talk about the morality of killing.