I prefer waitron -- even more impersonal, almost machinelike.

Yeah, the Weatherbug sound is super annoying. This is some shit from the Weather Channel, so it just makes thunder noises in case of emergency -- or it did, before I turned the sound off.

I like the indeterminate gender-ness of waitron....

Weatherbug alerts are awful, I agree. Not just the chirping sound, but they alert you to everything, not just changes. So if it's raining, it will chirp every friggin' three minutes to tell you OMGSTILLRAINING!!

Another silly girl I learned about through Gawker: [link]

Nowhere in the ballpark of JMPP, but the writing is hilariously awful.

I prefer waitron -- even more impersonal, almost machinelike.

Too much so for me. I use "server" because that's what servers I know say.

Not just the chirping sound, but they alert you to everything, not just changes. So if it's raining, it will chirp every friggin' three minutes to tell you OMGSTILLRAINING!!

Totally. HEY! NOW IT'S NOT RAINING UPSTATE ANYMORE!! STILL RAINING IN THE CITY!!!!!

What the eff is with bloglines today? I am sure I do not have 600 unread Defamer posts!

I like the indeterminate gender-ness of waitron....

I just call all waiters waiters, whether they are boys or girls. I also call girl-comedians just comedians. Because "comedienne" is the dumbest word ever.

There used to be all sorts of gendered words, like baker/baxter and thatcher/thaxter and I don't know what. But English isn't formally a gendered language, so I mostly don';t bother (unless the word is cool, like murderess!) In Spanish, where word-gendering persists, people sometimes use the male version for females because the female version has come to mean "the wife of the guy who ____". Which is why a female mayor is usually called la alcalde instead of la alcaldesa.

Still and yet, more planet definition stuff (regarding one of the criteria being "[A planet] is large enough that it has cleared the orbit through which it moves"):

Update: A telling comment from Hal Weaver at Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory. apropos of dynamically cleared orbits:

“Regarding the resolution itself, I’m with Andy Cheng in concluding that the situation is still somewhat muddled. What exactly is meant by a planet ‘clearing its neighborhood?’ Since many ‘plutinos’ … (including Pluto) …cross Neptune’s orbit, I’d say Neptune’s neighborhood still needs some clearing! … It just seems a bit risky to me to base a definition on a theoretical construct (’dynamically cleared regions’) that’s only approximate at best and may change significantly as our understanding of planet formation evolves over time.

“I further note that there have been particularly large swings in the theories of outer solar system dynamical evolution during the past decade. What was ‘conventional wisdom’ five years ago has been replaced with the latest fad, and I don’t expect that situation to change any time soon.”

[link]

And some good news for those depressed about losing a planet:

And so we come to Mu Arae, a G-type dwarf star much like our Sun and catalogued as HD 160691. A new study by Krzysztof Gozdziewski, Andrzej Maciejewski, and Cezary Migaszewski re-examines this already intriguing planetary system to discover yet another planet, the fourth to be found there. These radial velocity measurements were made by the Anglo-Australian Planet Search project and build on the earlier detections of three worlds, two being Jupiter-style companions with orbits projected at 630 days and 2500 days respectively. A third planet has been characterized as a ‘hot Neptune’ in a 9-day orbit.

(Ooh baby - hot Neptune on Jupiter action!)

The new analysis finds an interesting fourth planet of about 0.5 Jupiter masses in a 307-day orbit. That fourth world makes Mu Arae the second known four-planet system, the other being 55 Cancri, and in both cases the planetary orbits are nearly circular, an architecture not so different from our own Solar System....

[link]