Archive for April, 2022

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In The Dark Mode

Posted in Biographical with tags , , on April 4, 2022 by telescoper

One of the many spoof posts that appeared on arXiv on April Fool’s Day was one about Dark Mode:

You will note that In The Dark has been using a kind of Dark Mode for over 13 years. The style is actually called Black Letterhead and I picked from among the available themes when I first started blogging because it seemed to me to match the title. This theme has actually been “retired” but still seems to work and I don’t feel any urge to change it.

A few people over the years have complained that the white text on black background is quite hard to read, but only a few. If you don’t like it you can easily change the colour via your web browser settings, of course. I think Dark Mode works better with a sans serif font, by the way.

I actually find it easier to read than black on white, actually, consistent with the fact that I find a chalkboard easier to read than a whiteboard which is why I have one in my study:

Although the paper was intended to be a joke, it does make some interesting points and is well worth reading!

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Census Day

Posted in Bad Statistics, Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on April 3, 2022 by telescoper

Today is April 3rd 2022 which means that it’s Census Day here in Ireland; I’ve just finished filling in the form, which is 24 pages long but it turns out lots of the pages are duplicates for use in homes with multiple occupancy, and others don’t apply to me at all, so in fact I only had to complete 8 pages and it didn’t take all that long.

The Census should have taken place last year but was postponed because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Apparently the corresponding 2021 census in the UK went ahead, though I wasn’t at, and couldn’t get to, the property I still own in Wales so couldn’t participate. Although I was initially threatened with a fine, the UK Census people seem to have given up trying to chase me. I blogged about the previous census in Wales in 2011 here.

On the holiday after St Patrick’s Day I was at home when I noticed a card had been pushed through my letterbox while I was still in the house. It was from a ‘Census Enumerator’ who said he had tried to deliver the form but I was out. I wasn’t out and he hadn’t rung the doorbell. More importantly he hadn’t simply put the census form through the letterbox. In the UK the census forms are just sent out in the post. This little episode didn’t inspire me with confidence. Anyway, the bloke came back a week later and gave me the form. He also asked me for some personal information such as my phone number, which I naturally refused to give him. Apparently he has to collect the form in person too, which seems daft to me. Why can’t people just send their census returns back in the post?

On the last page there is a so-called ‘time capsule’ in which to leave information for historians to read 100 years from now. All I could think of to write was any historians reading this in 2122 would probably think that it was absurd to be doing this wasteful paper-based census when the digital age started some time ago, so I just said for the record that I was one of the people who thought that in 2022…

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Rory O’Neill aka Panti Bliss

Posted in Biographical, LGBTQ+, Maynooth, Politics with tags , , , on April 2, 2022 by telescoper

Yesterday I attended an event at the Maynooth Students Union featuring Rory O’Neill, an LGBT+ rights activist who strongly involved in the campaign for Equal Marriage leading up to the referendum of 2015. Rory is perhaps better known in his drag persona, Panti Bliss. Rory left Panti at home for this event but it was extremely interesting and enjoyable – and a bit sweary! – to hear him talk about his life and experiences, especially why he became an activist and how he started out as a drag performer.

One of the things I remember very well was how he has spent time in countries where homosexuality is still unlawful talking to young LGBT+ people who a lack of hope that life can get better. He countered that Irish society even just a couple of decades ago was deeply homophobic and is now much more inclusive towards LGBT+ people. It’s not perfect, of course, but it’s a heck of a lot better than it was. Ireland proves that things do get better.

Although I’m a bit older than Rory, didn’t grow up in Ireland, and have had a very different career, much of his story did nevertheless resonate with me. I’ve said a number of times on this blog that if someone had told me back in 1988 (when the infamous Section 28 was brought in by the Thatcher Government to attack a community already reeling from the effects of AIDS) that in 25 times there would be equal marriage in the UK I simply would not have believed them. Rory said something very similar yesterday.

Anyway, although there wasn’t a huge turnout for the event yesterday I’m very glad I attended and am grateful for the Maynooth Access Programme for organizing it. The event also gives me an excuse to post this clip of Panti Bliss giving a brilliant (and now famous) speech at the Abbey Theatre in 2014.

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Distant Things!

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on April 1, 2022 by telescoper

I’m a bit late passing this on but there was a great deal of excitement this week at the news that the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has made an astonishing discovery about the early Universe as illustrated by the above picture published in Nature. As well as an individual star (?) observed at redshift 6.2, so distant that its light set out when the Universe was just 8% of its current age, the image also reveals the presence in the early Universe of large geometric shapes (such as rectangles) as well as a remarkable giant arrow. The presence of these features at such high redshift is completely inconsistent with the standard theory of structure formation.

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