I was awakened at about 2:30 AM with ideas, oddly enough for next week’s newspaper article that I wrote on Thursday; I write a weekly article for a small paper in Northern California.

It was an added paragraph to conclude the thing. I did the article on 2003 UB313, the newly discovered planet beyond Pluto and the issue of whether to call it a planet, or for that matter, whether Pluto is really a planet, or just one of the estimated 100,000 Kuiper Belt Objects that are out there (about 600 found so far, including the very large Quaoar and Sedna, plus this new object and another (2003 EL61) 70 per cent Pluto’s size that was announced the same day). The addition to the article was to point out that the conflict is a conflict between categories. We have the traditional category called “planets” and this new category called “Kuiper Belt Objects” and that’s the source of the conflict.

I thought that perhaps–and this is what woke me–that a resolution of the conflict would be to simply refer to Pluto, Sedna, Quaoar, 2003 UB313 and the other new object, 2003 EL61, should be designated Kuiper Belt Planets; after all, we have what are called the “terrestrial planets” which are Mercury-Mars and the “gas giants” which are Jupiter-Neptune; seems a nice compromise solution to me. And since I can write anything I care to in the article, why not? So that’s what I did at 2:30 in the morning. Odd thing to be awakened from a dead sleep to write down I suppose.

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