From Inside Higher Education's pseudonymous columnist Fleur LaDouleur, on the planet-naming process, the farewell to Pluto, a 1907 tryst between the sun and the moon, and other bridges and burned bridges between the Two Cultures:

Those of us in the humanities were reminded recently of our place in the universe. Here’s the deal: When space was handed out, we were out having coffee and lost our place in line to ... wandering cognitive scientists. But the coffee was good and gave us a chance to ponder yet again what we thought were the very serious questions: Was Heidegger a Nazi? Was Manet an Impressionist or was that Monet? Is the universe — oops, the university — in ruins? We learned on August 24, however, that a decision of importance to those interested in knowledge in general was made without our input and that — on top of it all — this decision involved shrinking the available space in the university — oops, the universe — allotted to humanistic endeavors. Is this gerrymandering? You bet. And Pluto’s out. We’re down from nine to eight in our naming rights, and that’s what humanists do — we name things.
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Other recent decisions in the scientific community have also been pushed through committees without the input of the humanities. As everyone knows, any bona fide humanist reads The New Yorker. The bona fide among you will recall a recent article in that magazine on the “Fields Medal,” the big shot medal in mathematics (we thought it was the Nobel Prize — wrong again). According to The New Yorker, this Fields Medal business could lead to increased global warming, as Russian and Chinese scholars duke it out. (By the way, the Russian guy, who lives with his mother and has no friends, sounds suspiciously like a humanist). I am not saying that if someone from, say, modern languages and literatures had been on the committee that world peace would be ensured; I am saying that that person could have communicated in the native tongues to help sort out misunderstandings — translation is, after all, just another way of naming things.

I can't agree with LaDouleur that all physicists have a God complex, but I laughed when I got to this line: "I know many people of my generation who would much rather have seen a man walk on Pluto than on the Moon, even if it took him 2,000 light years to get there and even if he never came back." And I'm very pleased that she mentions H.A. Rey's Find the Constellations, I book I loved that taught me how to pronounce Betelgeuse years before the Winona Ryder movie.

Related on Emdashes:
Math Is Hard
You're Always a Planet to Me, Pluto