... ends with a Medium article.

The first online site whose interface is so horrible that I specifically check to see if links go there before refusing to click them.

The answer has been known to be about 3^361 for ... probably longer than the notation for expressing 3^361 has been known. That is approximately 10^172.24, but you need to correct for the number of board positions which are not legal. That's not going to be a simple function of board size, I suspect.

What is the financial interest is solving this?

It's Go ; it's more important than mere finance.

There is a ha-ha-but-serious school of thought about Go that it's not a matter of life and death, but something much more important. You'd be harder-tested to find a room full of Go players who could meaningfully give an opinion on whether Go was more important than the heat death of the universe. I suspect that given such qualified people, you'd get an affirmative on the question.

Feith said that turning off the communications and taking the aircraft to the remote Indian Ocean was a course of action consistent with someone trying to purposefully lose an airliner. "It's 20,000-plus feet deep there,

Errr, no. 20,000 ft deep would put it in a fairly deep oceanic trench. Since we don't know where it landed, the appropriate depth to pull out of ones arsehole is the average depth of the oceans. Which is 12-14 thousand feet depending on who you ask.

Being wrong by a factor of about 50% doesn't suggest that any of the rest of TFA would be worth reading.

Did you teach them to read first?

Eyeball tattoos have been done for several years.

The cops will be sent on a wild goose chase and whoever had the tracking device attached wont get tracked anymore.

The tracking will continue undisturbed by the discovery of their decoy device.

I never understood the whole 'take your passport' thing. I was under impression that if I show up at the US embassy,

First you've got to get to the Embassy. If the country in question requires you to carry your ID card, visa and passport at all times, then the odds of you making it to the Embassy are pretty slender.

Remember, Dorothy, you're not in Kansas any more. The rules of home don't apply there because, uh, you're not at home any more.

It has the orbit of a comet and it may vent particles like a comet.

Citation required.

I do make a reasonable effort to keep up to date with the scientific literature, and i've not heard that claim.

Are you perhaps thinking of Chiron?

That way, maybe we will finally get to name its companion "Goofy", rather than that dumbass Charon moniker.

I'm going to assume that you don't know the origin of the name of Charon. It's quite a sophisticated semi-private joke between the rules of astronomical nomenclature and classical literature. "Goofy", on the other hand is just some stupid cartoon joke.

some sort of sensible criteria to separate them from asteroids

It does - gravity high enough to deform it into a sphere.

Making Ceres and Vesta planets.

That's OK, I'm cool with an 11-planet solar system. Given the near certainty of there being other spherical planets in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, I'm cool with a solar system of a couple of dozen planets.

when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft slingshots around the icy rock and sends us back a detailed picture of its composition.

For certain values of "slingshot" that include hardly any deflection at all.

Really, the only categorization issue that I'm adamant about is that Pluto-Charon is called a binary.

What does describing Pluto and Charon as a binary bring to the conversation? Does it allow you to describe the properties of the entire system without having to individually describe the component parts?

The Greenpeace and FoE speakers who I know would be justly ashamed to make such inaccurate claims. Plus they know that if I'm anywhere about, I'll tear them to shreds for such inaccuracy, Which rather destroys the effect they're trying to achieve.

Then again, they're something approaching scientists of one form or another. They have more attachment to truth than to politics.

That was the underlying theme of a story I read by IIRC Greg Benford a year or so ago. I recall being moderately disappointed, to the extent of not being bothered to go to the library to get the second or third volume of the trilogy.

Hmmm, maybe not Benford. Nothing in his bibliography strikes a resonant tone. I'll have to fish it off the shelf (I remember feeling somewhat conflicted between the writer's reputation and my lack of engagement with the characters, scenario and underlying re-building of the laws of physics. So I don't think I've sent it off to the second-hand-bookshop in the street.)