Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Pluto has the dubious distinction of being the only one that got thrown out of the Planets Club. So why did Pluto get downgraded? It wasn’t a simple case of the telescopes back in those days not being sophisticated enough (although that did play its role too). Rather, people were looking for a planet. Why were they looking for one? Well, because Uranus’ orbit appeared to be disturbed in the 1840’s. They suspected another planet beyond Uranus was the culprit. And thus they found Neptune. On further analysis, it looked as if Neptune couldn’t have done it alone. And hence the hunt for another planet started. Percival Lowell (of the family referred to in the ditty about Boston being the home of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells spoke only to Cabots, while the Cabots spoke only to God) assigned his observatory to finding Planet X, as it was called then. Clyde Tombaugh found Planet X after Lowell’s death. And that’s why Pluto got to be called a planet. Then the questions sta...

S&P’s downgrade of the US government’s credit rating is all over the news. Will that be the straw that pushes the US into Round 2 of the recession? And if the US situation worsens, will it take down most of the world with it? Who can say? So I’ll just stick to some other aspects linked to the downgrade. Even as S&P downgraded the US rating, the US treasury officials pointed out a $2 trillion error in S&P's math . S&P has acknowledged the error. So how reliable is the downgrade assessment then? (I don’t know how big an error that is with respect to the US, my only reference is that $2 trillion is the size of India’s GDP!). Secondly, the other rating agencies haven’t downgraded the US… yet. Then again, all these rating agencies were assigning high ratings to all the crap that the investment banks sold before 2008. So how much trust should one put on anything they say? Or are the rating agencies now in the “boy who cried wolf” situation? Maybe it’s a case of nobody bel...