The Whippet #182: The Least Charitable Reader

Better late than even later than that, as they say!

I thought of another tautophrase: "The heart wants what it wants." Traditionally used to justify dating someone you absolutely should not be dating, but fun to use to explain weird but harmless whims.

If you like little self-quizzes, answer this before scrolling:
There are only four 'precious gems', but there used to be five.

• What are the current four?
• What's the fifth gem that got demoted?

Weird thought about Dark Matter: It's in the room with you right now

One of Isaac Newtown's revolutionary discoveries wasn't just "gravity makes the apple fall down", it was "the force that makes the apple fall down is ALSO the force that keeps the planets in their orbit". The same rules apply everywhere, the heavens are subject to the same laws as the earth (as above, so below). Previously, people thought the planets and space were all 'out there' rather than operating in the same 'world' as everything on earth.

Now, where do you think of dark matter as being? Because I tend to think of it is being 'out there', in space.

But it's not.

"There are roughly 1 billion dark matter particles passing through you every second, but they interact so rarely that you can't tell," [astrophysicist] Daniel Jardin said.

We know Dark Matter exists because everything has more mass than it 'should'. Like, an apple should be pulled towards the earth with a certain intensity, based on what the earth and apples are made of. But it is actually pulled in more intensely, as though the earth and the apple were heavier. Dark Matter is a term for whatever that extra mass is.

(We can't actually detect the extra mass in the apple, but we can at planetary scales.)

Dark matter is probably not that cool, sorry

It's dark, literally, because it doesn't absorb or reflect photons. If it did, we'd be able to see it: photons either bouncing off things or being absorbed by things is how we see stuff. Not just photos: sonar detects soundwaves, radio telescopes measure interferences in radiowaves, etc – but we 'see' stuff by the interactions it has with its environment. Dark matter has not been detected yet because it doesn't interact with anything except gravity.

It's very important:

All galaxies are believed to be wrapped in an invisible halo of dark matter, and this envelope is vitally important; galaxies are rotating so rapidly, that without dark matter, they would have been torn apart long ago if they were held together only by the influence of their stars, gas, dust and planets [CERN page on Dark Matter]

but it's hard to see how something that barely interacts with anything could turn out to be something really cool, from a non-physicists perspective on what 'cool' is.

[I am imagining a reader being mad at me for the oversimplifications in the above. I don't know if you really exist, uncharitable reader, or if you're just in my head, but if you do exist, I challenge you to write a 300-word explanation of dark matter without oversimplifying anything.]

Esoteric Sidenote on the (Western) Five Elements

The fifth element – not the movie – always annoyed me because people would say it was 'spirit': fire, water, earth and air put together. But that would make it not an element. It's like saying "humans have five elements: arms, legs, head, torso, and whole body." No! That's not how categories work! They have to be at the same level!

Anyway, so the fifth element was developed by Aristotle. You have earth (solids), water (liquids), air (gas), and fire (plasma). Earth and water both want to contract and move down, air and fire want to rise up. Aristotle could see that these substances behave differently, and he also noted that they were corrupt: they break down and decay / dissipate / burn out.

But the planets and stars were clearly NOT like that. They moved in (what appeared to be) perfect circles, they did not fall down to the earth or float away. And they also appeared not to decay at all – the Greeks had records and starmaps going back centuries.

So, they must be made of something else: Aether, or quint-essence (which just means 'fifth element'). So the fifth element is astral; the element of stars.

[The fifth element and medieval cosmology]

Deleted content: another paragraph about the four/five elements, classical philosophy, and Captain Planet. I'll put it in the comments.

The Four Precious Gems (there used to be five)

Just like elements! The four precious gemelents are Diamond, Sapphire, Emerald and Ruby.

Everything else is semi-precious. Opals are technically semi-precious, but are valued just a highly, and pearls aren't stones; they're clam-made.

Until the 18th century, amethysts were considered precious gems, until huge deposits were found in Brazil, and everyone agreed amethysts weren't that pretty after all. [Wikipedia]

(Amethyst: the Pluto of precious gems.)

It did make me think, like, the reason amethysts don't seem so valuable to me, is because I'm used to seeing bowls full of big amethyst lumps, instead of tiny single ones in a ring.

Because they're not as valuable, people don't put the effort into carefully faceting then like diamonds, because you'd still never be able to sell it for as much

I've mentioned this before, but it's such a good fact. The word 'amethyst' means 'not drunk' – a-methys – and ancient Romans and Greeks believed it could let you drink without getting drunk. [Source]

A good poem

I like this poem a lot, but I don't know enough about poetry to explain exactly why. It's longish but very easy-reading; I generally prefer poetry with simple, direct language (I love a fancy word, you know this, but not in poetry so much.)

Snake
By D. H. Lawrence

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
 
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough
            before me.
 
He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over
            the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.
 
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.
 
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused
             a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels
            of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
 
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold
            are venomous.
 
And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
 
But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink
            at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
 
Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.
 

Poem continues here. You're about halfway through:
poetryfoundation.org/poems/148471/snake-5bec57d7bfa17

The Least Charitable Reader

At the end of the Dark Matter bit, I mentioned the uncharitable reader who lives in my head, who gives everything a bad-faith reading, insists I detail out every possible exception to a statement, and put disclaimers in for the people my writing doesn't apply to.

This Least Charitable Reader is a big part of why I found it hard to return to The Whippet, and I know a lot of other content creators struggle with it.

The thing is, that it's not COMPLETELY made up. I really do get bad faith interpretations, and people saying "you forgot to say X" when actually I deliberately left out X because I'm writing a paragraph, not a PhD thesis.

(Please note: I love and am always happy to get comments saying "here's another cool thing about the topic!" The ones I don't like are "You forgot to say X", as though I made a mistake by not including their fact.)

(I also don't mind if I've made a genuine and significant error and someone tells me. I mean I don't love that experience obviously, but it doesn't annoy me, I'm just like... dammit.)

So, anyway, the Least Charitable Reader in my head is real but only kind of. It's every unfair reply I've ever got to The Whippet over the last 7 years or whatever, rolled up into one, and with something to say about every single sentence I write. I get unfair comments sometimes, about some things, but I don't get them about everything, all the time.

I was quite worried about sending the last issue. I don't really know what I expected. "Where have you been, young lady?? Your mother and I have been worried sick. You've got a nerve just waltzing back in here..."

But everyone was so nice, oh my gosh. (And thank you.)

I don't have any advice, exactly. I'm just writing this for the other people with Least Charitable Readers in their heads. Try to keep a sense of perspective about the gap between the real negative replies you get, and the ones you predict?

Idk. Advice welcome.

Relatedly...
** AI postscript
The cosmapple is to me an acceptable use of AI because it's a situation where I would have otherwise used a free stock photo, not one where I ought to have hired an artist, and because it's not possible to mistake it for a real image. But I understand if you're in the Never-AI camp