Readings, signings, and other events vaguely literary for Monday, February 23, 2009
* 12:00 PM: Seattle Mystery Bookshop welcomes Leighton Gage to sign Buried Strangers. This is Gage’s second in the “Chief Inspector Mario Silva” series of police procedural novels, and is as sophisticated and interesting as Blood of the Wicked. Set in Brazil, mystery fans who enjoy exotic locations and foreign cultures with their crime should give Gage a try. Warning: Not for the squeamish!
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* 7:00 PM: Richard Hugo House hosts Molly Gloss, author of The Hearts of Horses, to read and discuss her work. This is Gloss’s fourth novel. I haven’t read it, yet, but horsey-type people seem to like it a lot. Though for some reason, Hugo House’s website pimps Wild Life, Gloss’s 2000 novel about being lost in the woods. Weird.
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* 7:30 PM: Astrophysicist and science writer Neil deGrasse Tyson visits Town Hall Seattle to talk about Pluto. You know, Pluto, the planet that was kicked out of the club by the International Astronomical Union, for not being cool enough. Turns out that Pluto is just a big rock. Bummer. Tyson’s most recent book is (surprise!) The Pluto Files : The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet.
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No, Pluto is NOT just a big rock. The controversial demotion by the International Astronomical Union was done by only four percent of its members, most of whom are not planetary scientists. It was immediately opposed by hundreds of professional astronomers led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. The reason Pluto is not a "big rock" and different from most other objects in the Kuiper Belt is that it has achieved a state known as hydrostatic equilibrium. This means it is large enough for its own self-gravity to pull it into a round shape–a characteristic of planets and not of shapeless asteroids and Kuiper Belt Objects. There are several other spherical Kuiper Belt Objects that should also be considered planets–Haumea, Makemake, and Eris–as well as Ceres in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. This debate is far from over, and even now, both scientists and lay people are working to overturn the demotion or are ignoring it altogether.