No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

makingqueerhistory

Something we have run into a couple of times is the idea that because a queer person was not also a good person, or made a well-known mistake, that we shouldn’t talk about them because they are “bad representation”.

So, let’s all take a moment to recognize that history does not exist to fulfill our needs. Queer people in history have never been perfect, and should not be expected to be to deserve to be recognized as queer. Queerness is not a synonym with moral purity and the idea that it should be, or that we shouldn’t talk about certain people at all if they don’t fit today’s moral standards is not constructive. Ignoring history because someone doesn’t think it’s nice and clean is the reason queer people are underrepresented in discussions around history in the first place.

star-anise

I understand wanting a perfect role model. I understand wanting happy stories that go how they “should”. But this is something we need to learn about history, more than just queerness: Human beings are complicated. Everyone has flaws and makes mistakes. Every villain has a good side. You have to be able to judge the sum of someone’s parts, not try to lump them to all one side or the other.

Traditionally, histories have served politics much more than the truth. History books have often been artfully arranged to tell a story that suits the people in power, a tale about only good people who did good and supported the system, with the bad guys carefully positioned as outliers everyone opposed. Churches only talk about their saints. Countries only talk about their heroes.

Queer history is trying to do two things at the same time: It’s trying to uncover our history, and it’s trying to tell the truth about it. We’re very deliberately not airbrushing them out of the picture. This is the same kind of history that reveals that the glorious battle led by a noble leader was actually a brutal slaughter in an unjust war, and that the virtuous charity led by a kindhearted saint was actually an act of genocide.

It sucks to get the non-airbrushed, non-storybook version of history, if you’re used to histories where Christopher Columbus was an amazing discoverer and George Washington never told a lie and the Roman Empire was the height of civilization. Everything is suddenly so complicated and murky and depressing, and you wanted heroes and saints!

(I still want heroes and saints, but might have to get there by reconsidering a lot of hagiographies and changing the plaques on statues)

But if you take that lens and turn it on the rest of histories, you’ll start seeing that they’re not so bright and noble either. Nobility and goodness turn into much more complicated and elusive issues, and you might have to fight the people in power to achieve them.

This Is Why Black Holes Must Spin At Almost The Speed Of Light

“Realistically, we can’t measure the frame-dragging of space itself. But we can measure the frame-dragging effects on matter that exist within that space, and for black holes, that means looking at the accretion disks and accretion flows around these black holes. Perhaps paradoxically, the smallest mass black holes, which have the smallest event horizons, actually have the largest amounts of spatial curvature near their horizons.

You might think, therefore, that they’d make the best laboratories for testing these frame dragging effects. But nature surprised us on that front: a supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy NGC 1365 has had the radiation emitted from the volume outside of it detected and measured, revealing its speed. Even at these large distances, the material spins at 84% the speed of light. If you insist that angular momentum be conserved, it couldn’t have turned out any other way.”

Have you ever wondered how black holes, ranging from a few times our Sun’s mass up to billions of times as massive, can spin so rapidly? Most black holes, as far as we can tell, are spinning very close to the speed of light: the ultimate speed limit of the Universe. Yet most stars, like our Sun, rotate extremely slowly: just once over a period of many days (or even longer).

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

This Is Why Black Holes Must Spin At Almost The Speed Of Light