An Astronomy-Related Pet Peeve

In August 2006, the International Astronomical Union, the authoritative source for astronomical names and definitions, defined the word "planet" in a way that excluded Pluto. A lot of people who were not astronomers disagreed. After all this time, I still hear many non-astronomers call Pluto a planet. The exclusion of Pluto as a planet happened so long ago now that a senior in high school will not remember that news, yet a lot of people still seem to be living in 2005.

Don't get me wrong, Pluto is a fascinating world. I was one of those eagerly awaiting pictures from the spacecraft New Horizons in 2015. I've even visited the observatory where it was discovered and touched the telescope Clyde Tombaugh looked through when he found it. But just because Pluto was your favorite of the then 9 planets growing up does not entitle you to say whether it is a planet.

The telescope that Clyde Tombaugh used when he discovered Pluto in 1930.

Do those who still call Pluto a planet even know the context of why it is not? Thousands of years ago, a planet was merely a "wandering star" that did not stay in one place like other stars (in fact, we get the word "planet" from a Greek word meaning "wanderer".) The Sun and Moon also do not stay in one place in the sky. For that reason, there were seven "planets" in ancient times: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. However, after Copernicus realized that it is the Earth that orbits the Sun and not the Sun that orbits the Earth (and after a few centuries of heated debate on this), astronomers had to rethink what a planet is. The "wandering star" part was basically the same, but the Earth and the Sun had to switch. It was still obvious that the Moon orbits Earth, though, so the Moon was not a planet. Therefore, there were now six planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Fast-forwarding to the 18th century, astronomers now had telescopes, and a new planet was discovered: Uranus. Neptune was discovered in the 1840s, but before that, astronomers discovered Ceres. Then, a BUNCH of other "planets" between Mars and Jupiter. That's right: MANY objects used to be "planets", not just Pluto! What happened to Ceres and friends? They all got grouped as the new category of asteroids in 1867. And people whine about one object being demoted to dwarf planet.

The asteroids were demoted from being planets because they are all in the same region of the Solar System and they are all much smaller than all the planets recognized so far. Fast forward to 1930, and Pluto is discovered. Pluto was called a planet because it was thought to be even larger than Earth at first, and it was the only object of that size past the orbit of Neptune. Pluto was considered a planet for decades because of that second reason even as its size estimates were reduced to the point that it was considered the smallest planet. However, Pluto was already off from the beginning. Its orbit at times overlaps Neptune's, and its orbit is also at an odd angle compared to those of the planets.

In 2005, Eris was discovered, which was the largest of a new batch of objects found beyond Neptune. Many had so far been considered much smaller than Pluto, but Eris' size rivals or exceeds Pluto's. Fittingly, Eris got its name from a Greco-Roman goddess of discord, and discord between astronomers and the public is exactly what happened as a result, for the discovery of Eris was what really sparked the convention to define a planet in 2006. Just like with Ceres, Pluto was thought to be a planet until astronomers found a bunch of other relatively similar objects in the same region of the Solar System. Therefore, the IAU's final definition of planet was, and has been, "a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit." "Exoplanets" are those that orbit other stars. Unless you'd like to call the Sun, the Moon, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, etc. planets, please don't call Pluto a planet like it's still the early 2000s. You'd also look foolish in presuming to know more about astronomy than astronomers.

Traverse Gap: A Missed Opportunity?

There is a spot on the Minnesota-South Dakota border where water that flows to opposite shores of North America almost meet. Historically, during times of severe flooding, they actually did. Lake Traverse, on the north side of this spot, is a source of water that flows all the way to the coast in northern Manitoba, where York Factory stood. The Little Minnesota River and Big Stone Lake, on the south side, is a source of water that flows all the way to the coast in southern Louisiana. Less than a mile separates Lake Traverse from the Little Minnesota River, and the distance is even within a valley, not a "height of land" that forms most continental divides.

The Traverse Gap almost connects the Red River (forming the MN-ND border) and the Minnesota River (going from the MN-SD border to the Mississippi River).

Anyone who knows about the Suez Canal, Panama Canal, or even the Chicago and Illinois Canal understands the importance of shortcuts for international shipping. Why, then, was there never a canal built in such an inviting place as the Traverse Gap, which would theoretically make an all-water route between York Factory and New Orleans possible? This was the question that bugged me a couple of years ago.

To make a long story short, the Red River and most of the Minnesota River is not navigable, meaning neither of those rivers are deep and wide enough for ships to sail on. The Minnesota River is navigable for only the lowest part, located entirely within the Twin Cities metropolitan area. As for the Red River, it is not navigable for any part of it within the United States. Canal diggers would not only have to cut through the Traverse Gap; they would also have to dredge and widen hundreds of miles' worth of rivers.

There has historically been another use for crossing continental divides: the fur trade. Back when the fur trade was important to colonial and early American economies, voyageurs would canoe along rivers and lakes to get to destinations thousands of miles apart. Everyone in the fur trade had to know where rivers went and what the shortest distances between different watersheds were. Since they mostly used canoes, many more rivers were navigable to them. Why didn't the fur trade take advantage of the Traverse Gap?

To make a long story short again, voyageurs were content with portaging. Instead of digging canals to row their canoes through, voyageurs simply picked up their canoes and carried them along until they got to the next river. A few miles of portaging was not a problem. There used to be a canoeing route connecting Lake of the Woods to Lake Superior (most of which is actually the Minnesota-Ontario border today). This, too, went across a continental divide, making it possible to travel from Quebec City to York Factory. (Maybe not as impressive as York Factory to New Orleans, but still very far). The portage across that particular divide was even shorter than the Traverse Gap, but there was a much larger portage, the Grand Portage, bypassing a large waterfall before Lake Superior. The Grand Portage is nine times longer than the Traverse Gap. Since no canal was dug for the Grand Portage, voyageurs would have been fine portaging across the Traverse Gap. There were other crossings of continental divides as well which fur traders seemed more interested in using. In North Dakota alone, some would go dozens of miles from the Mouse/Souris River to the Missouri River (roughly from Velva, ND to Stanton, ND). Just after 1800, one fur trader pointed out the portage one could make from the Sheyenne River to the James River, which he thought was just "half a league" but is really 10 kilometers, or 6 miles.

Actually, there is in fact a canal crossing the north-south continental divide in North America, but it connects two rivers that are unnavigable at those points: the Missouri River and the Sheyenne River. I speak of the McClusky Canal, which was built not for commerce but for irrigation. Nonetheless, I challenge any very adventurous and experienced canoeists to row from York Factory to the mouth of the Mississippi River, using the McClusky Canal to cross the continental divide. Better yet, go all the way back, like a voyageur or any river explorer would have done.

What Makes a Good Language, and How Can Bad Languages Be Improved?

When learning a language, have you ever been confused by inconsistent grammatical rules, spelling rules, or any other part of how that language works?

I sure have. There are three strange phenomena in some languages that I consider nonsense. The first is when a language has an alphabet with letters that do not match a single sound and also has a sound with no single letter to represent it. For example, in English, "c" does the job of either a "k" or an "s", making "c" a pointless letter, and the "th" sound in English has to be made by two letters that should not make that sound when put together. The second is when a language has inconsistent spelling rules. Anyone learning English as a second language can recognize this inconsistency (just think of how many different sounds in words are represented by "o-u-g-h"!) The third is when a language gives gender to inanimate objects. English doesn't really do this anymore (except saying "she" when referring to a ship or sometimes a country) but Spanish, my second language, does this a lot, and so do many other languages (I'd like to know why the sky is male and the earth is female, among other things).

I don't like the nonsensical things I described above, so I have a mostly bad opinion about the languages that have the nonsense. In contrast, I say a "good" language is one in which these three principles are met. First, every sound, or "phoneme", has a corresponding letter, or "grapheme". Second, building off the first, a word is spelled the way it is pronounced. Will a word be spelled differently depending on an individual's accent? Sure, but I think that's okay. Third, no inanimate objects are gendered. No gendered pronouns is even better, given the silly "pronouns" craze happening in the English-speaking world.

Conveniently, I have over the years been able to read about differences between languages according to the principles I have mentioned. The first and second principles are essentially called "Phonemic orthography". As for the third, there is a list on Wikipedia that has classified hundreds of languages based on what "grammatical gender" they have. I haven't found a nice list of the languages that have ideal phonemic orthography, but I can usually figure out whether a language does by looking at the sounds the letters make.

It would take a long time to list off the languages that meet my criteria for a "good language", but examples that I like include Finnish (the only "good" language I know some of my ancestors spoke) and Dakota/Lakota (the language of the only people who have considered each of the places I have lived as part of their homeland). There are some languages, like Finnish which I just mentioned, that can be frustrating to English speakers because of the many declensions and conjugations that have to be accounted for, but I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing - just challenging.

As for the "bad" languages, if we could just reform their alphabets/writing systems, make spelling rules correspond accordingly, and find a genderless way of writing/speaking about inanimate objects, then they could be "good" languages. That's exactly what I decided to do to English, in fact, when I was in high school.

The Alphabet of Reformed English. Each sound is represented by one letter, and there is no such thing as uppercase or lowercase.

I had the idea of creating a new alphabet for English as a start in the summer of 2015. I then expanded my project of "Reformed English" to eliminate homophones as much as possible and also make sure each letter (and number) looks distinct. I actually wrote my class notes in Reformed English throughout the last three years of high school, hoping that others would catch on and spread my new language (or dialect - that was debatable) far and wide. No one ever did, and Reformed English basically fell by the wayside. Even I went back to standard English a few months into college.

Although I no longer use Reformed English, and I'm writing all these blog posts in standard English, a "bad" language, I think it would be nice to use the other "good" languages more. For example, it would be beneficial for anyone residing in Minnesota or the Dakotas to learn Dakota, Lakota, Cheyenne, or any other language of those tribes who have historically resided there, at least to understand some geographical names if not to speak to those who still speak the languages today. I am learning some Lakota words and expressions myself. Hoka hey! Time to learn a good language!

What Are the Gaps in the Range of Tylosaurus in North America?

This week's blog post is not about Deinosuchus, but instead about Tylosaurus, my other favorite extinct animal, which I actually like slightly better than Deinosuchus these days.

Tylosaurus was a mosasaur, one of the sea monsters that swam in saltwater the world over during the latter half of the Cretaceous period. It was NOT a dinosaur, and instead it was in the same order as lizards and snakes, in a way making them real sea serpents (though not really snakes). Mosasaurs came in a lot of sizes like sharks do, but the largest ones, like Tylosaurus, were arguably apex predators that reached 40 or even 50 feet (12 to 15 meters).

Tylosaurus, like Deinosuchus, lived in North America during the Campanian age, but the temporal and geographical range of Tylosaurus is much broader. The oldest Tylosaurus fossils are estimated to be 90 million years old, and the youngest are estimated to be 66 million years old, which means they lived in the second half of the second half of the Cretaceous. Conveniently, there is a geologic map of North America that has an age label, "uK2", for that exact range of dates. ("uK2" has "u" for "upper", "K" for Cretaceous, and "2" for "second half".) Tylosaurus was also present in other areas besides the North American continental shelf; there are Tylosaurus fossils from such faraway places as Sweden, Jordan, and Angola. For me to estimate a global range for Tylosaurus would be too big of an undertaking, so for this post I'm going to focus on North America.

All Tylosaurus fossils are from marine sediments, such as chalk, limestone, marl, shale, etc., so it would seem that all I really need to do to estimate the range of Tylosaurus is to look at the wonderful paleogeographic maps of North America on Deep Time Maps and observe which areas were underwater. However, as with Deinosuchus, I'm not going to try extending the range beyond the end points where fossils of Tylosaurus are known from and instead focus on the gaps. There is also a taxonomic question: what about the Hainosaurus fossils? A lot of Tylosaurus fossils were classified as Hainosaurus at first. However, throughout the years, paleontologists seem to be moving toward the idea that Hainosaurus is actually just a few Tylosaurus species. Therefore, I will include any Hainosaurus fossils as Tylosaurus fossils.

What are the Canadian provinces/territories, American states, and Mexican states where Tylosaurus could have lived? The maps for 89, 87, 84, 82, 80, 77, 70, and 67 Ma help out here, but the results are so many that I'm just going to move on to the places where Tylosaurus fossils have already been found, which are these: Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba in Canada; Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Delaware, and New Jersey in the United States; and Chihuahua in Mexico. By using the geologic map of North America, I identified places which would be in the range of Tylosaurus but lack Turonian through Maastrichtian marine bedrock, namely the American states of Oklahoma, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, and Virginia. That left me with the places where Tylosaurus fossils should be found but have not been found yet: Arizona, Maryland, Tennessee, and the Mexican state of Coahuila. Putting all these things together, I have made this map, with "hypothetical extensions to the range" included as well.

Some of these places are the same ones where I expect future Deinosuchus discoveries for some reason, particularly Tennessee and Maryland. The Black Mesa in Arizona has rocks too old to find Deinosuchus fossils but not too old to find some Turonian or Santonian Tylosaurus fossils. As for Coahuila, it's interesting that it has Deinosuchus fossils but not Tylosaurus fossils so far. This map is another guide for another paleontological goal. Perhaps, without being a paleontologist, I'll buy my own land or participate in a public dig in one of those places colored in yellow someday.