There's a certain nominative-deterministic inevitability to all this. There are these things called black holes that apparently are a full of a lot of stuff and aren't completely understood. And there's this mysterious stuff called dark matter that has to exist but seems to be hiding. My mom would be yelling "'Come on guys, join the dots". And who would blame her.
You seem to be thinking that nobody considered black holes as dark matter candidates, but that's not the case. The two big theories around the origin of dark matter are called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) and MACHOs (massive compact halo objects), and MACHOs include black holes. The reason MACHOs aren't widely accepted is because the evidence (e.g. lensing measurements) doesn't suggest there are nearly enough massive invisible objects to account for a significant portion of the dark matter.
I'd kinda worked out that people who know about this stuff didn't think it was a good account. Was more remarking that calling things dark and black (and, indeed, wimps and machos) sort of invites simplistic and erroneous pop-science assumptions.
This triggers some thoughts that I haven't quite joined up yet.
Likewise, some reds and some greens are interchangeable to me.
I imagine the different colouring of intervals that you hear in different keys is due to tempering. I don't have anything close to AP, but I tell chord progression in C# from the same in C. But purple is pretty much just a shade of blue to me.
I studied Indian classical music for quite a few years, which involved a lot of listening to and repeating phrases. I was fine with the longer stuff, but eventually found out I had some sort of deficit with interval recognition and struggled with replicating standalone 2 note phrases.
I have good harmony and rhythm instincts in practice, but am almost 'dyslexic' when trying to describe them formally.
I'm slightly wondering if this collection of deficits and compensatory mechanisms is what has led me to a fascination with flamenco. (Albeit with a little frustration at some of the more puritanical traditionalism.)
Surely you make your own intellectual life and take it with you wherever you go? You will think more interesting thoughts in a terrible place. Most ideas that matter are born from adversity or quiet reflection. And depth requires a bit of focus. For accessible culture and sophistication the candidates are fairly obvious.
Nigeria is going to be interesting and is full of independent thinkers. And I've heard good things about Panama City. But both possibly pricey. Belfast is way cheap.
Great article. The entanglement of The Enlightenment in everyday thinking is the source of much confusion and irony. I imagine we'll grow out of it.
I'm reminded of a 1980s BBC film of Alan Bennett's "The Insurance Man" in which a Dr Kafka struggles with a claim and eventually end up helping his client by getting him a job at his uncle's factory. The ending is stunning: we linger on the beautifully photographed dust-filled air of the factory. Feel happy for the man. And learn that the uncle is in the asbestos business.
Whenever mine has gone much above 30% (70ish prob highest ever) it generally turns out to be an unattended app left open on the android device I have hanging off the back of the TV. I recall the NYT app, for example, pinging home every 30 seconds or so.
You can trace offending devices and traffic via pi-hole logs. The UI is a bit clunky but gets the job done.
My enduring memory of Burgess was on a highbrow literary quiz show where he failed to identify a passage from Proust. Chagrined and with as straight a face as he could muster he explained that he had only ever read Proust in French.
I kinda imagine the HN bait (not taken up) was the guy who simply needed space to count to a million and back. I've read a lot of books less interesting than this story.
If born a few years later, would he have retreated to his room and got his spectrum or commodore to quickly do the counting and then moved on?
