Funny that they chose the penny because it's classically used in geology to combat the issue of scale in photographs, which it seems is an issue in Mars too.
It's difficult to guess the scale, but at least the caption has some information:
> This rock encountered by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is an iron meteorite called "Lebanon," similar in shape and luster to iron meteorites found on Mars by the previous generation of rovers, Spirit and Opportunity. Lebanon is about 2 yards or 2 meters wide (left to right, from this angle). The smaller piece in the foreground is called "Lebanon B."
The article says "Lebanon is about 2 yards or 2 meters wide (left to right, from this angle)", Lebanon being the largest meteorite (the other one is called Lebanon B).
We have one, it's "they", and it's been in use for centuries. It's just not something we're quite used to with modern usage, but it's fine (we don't shirk from adding plenty of other words), and its far better than 'zhe' - for a start, people already know how to pronounce 'they'. Your own link reports it in usage since the 15th C.
> At least in modern usage, "They" is flawed. For starters its plurality is ambiguous.
In the cases where it is used in a gender-neutral but expressly singular sense, this is false. In cases where whether the number of the referent is ambiguous and might be either singular or plural, the use of the plural they has been acceptable longer, and has never been objected to even by the prescriptives who have tried (and are still trying, though their influence has waned somewhat from its late 19th Century height) to force generic he in place of singular they as part of their effort to impose Latin-inspired grammar rules on English.
The only structural problem (and its a minor one, since the resulting ambiguity is readily resolvable from context) I see with that is that there are two different possible referents for "they" in the preceding sentence; in this particular case the fact that there are both singular and plural uses of "they" is relevant to why both referents are possible, but you can run into the same ambiguity with gender and number specific pronouns.
Of course, there's no real good reason to use a pronoun there except for an excessive fondness for choppy sentences.
Wow, so many cities with same name. Must give rise to loads of issues when geo-locating "Lebanon".
I wonder how Google maps figures out which "lebanon" I searched for.
Being offended about what words are used to name things is exactly how war and other atrocities start. Get over it, and you take a step towards peace for the species.
