Re:It rains solid diamonds on Uranus and Neptune
by tpeo on Friday August 25, 2017 @07:52PM
(#15103195)
Why is it that it bothers you that it's a Greek name and not that there's a planet named after the sky?
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Re:It rains solid diamonds on Uranus and Neptune
by int_handler on Friday August 25, 2017 @08:31PM
(#15103388)
It's not named after the sky. It's named after the God of the Sky, which doesn't bother me any more than other planetary bodies being named after deities of couriers, beauty, war, thunder, agriculture, ocean, the underworld, and so on.
The main reasons to rename Uranus is 1) consistency and 2) the puns. Either name it Caelus to be consistent with the naming convention used for the other planets or name it Ouranos to be closer to its Greek spelling and pronunciation.
I prefer (1) because the current situation is similar to having a codebase where all class names are PascalCase but there's this one class name in Upper_Snake_Case.
Re:It rains solid diamonds on Uranus and Neptune
by planteen on Friday August 25, 2017 @09:42PM
(#15103609)
Is it really worth the waste of time it would be to debate this at the IAU and the confusion it would cause? Dwarf planets don't follow any set mythology (e.g., Makemake follows Easter Island mythology). Most people aren't experts of Greek and Roman mythology. The English language is full of inconsistencies.
Re:It rains solid diamonds on Uranus and Neptune
by tpeo on Friday August 25, 2017 @08:46PM
(#15103434)
It is named after the sky. Or rather, it's named after a deity which was named after the sky: οὐρανός is/was the common term for sky in Greek.