That is an interesting infographic fail.
The shadow cast by the sun is colored green,
The opposite side is coloured … shadow?
I guess it is always dark on the other side. I was totally wrong.
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Or the B-side
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With you on this.
That plus @tuhu 's observation re: the source of light on the Earth.
BUH!
“Dark” also has the metaphorical sense of “obscure”, “unknown”, which is exactly what the dark side of the moon was for the many centuries it’s been called that until it was photographed by Luna 3 in 1959. Nothing anti-science about it. Nothing embarrassing about it, either.
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Wouldn’t we want to carve it on the side visible to us? They don’t call it mooning for nothing.
You don’t need to be polite here. The arse end of the Moon is acceptable.
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People did use the phrase “Darkest Africa” as either a synonym for “the unknown” or a way to be racist, or both at the same time. That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be embarrassing to make a defence that it only meant the nicest interpretation, ignoring the impact of the phrase on actual people.
And it’s not 1958. Calling it dark is anti-science, even if it is pro-Pink Floyd. Using that phrase introduces an error to little science learners for no reason, instead of just being accurate in the first place.
(I’m also skeptical that the phrase most strongly associated with the P.F. album was actually used for centuries, as you say.)
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Or the flip side.
I always assumed that dark meant radio silence. You are right about the anti-science view though, not even “lies-to-children” can excuse it.
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That’s a bit pearl-clutchy. There are any number of metaphorical and idiomatic turns of phrase that cause children confusion at first: e.g., “the four corners of the Earth”.
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I’m not talking about all phrases.
Just this one, where some people routinely show some introduced confusion about the amount of light the other side gets.
You call it what you want. I’m certainly not against poetic description. This one makes people sound ignorant of basic science, though.
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Fair enough. And I concede I may have been exaggerating in my assertion of “many centuries” of usage of the phrase. I still reckon it’s older than the album, though.
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You’ve really made me curious how much older.
Sometimes language that we take for granted is a lot younger than we thought, or older.
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People have been saying that for centuries.
I much prefer that to “Southern Hemisphere”
As has been pointed out, you yourself are the one interpreting the term to be an ignorant one. So that means… erm…
Also, maybe don’t tie moon exploration into racial discrimination!
The observation recorded for the record was
all dark. The only thing that makes it look light is the sun.
which, though the speaker was not a professional scientist, is entirely correct.
The moon is approximately the same color as asphalt.
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I think “many centuries” is reasonable Google reports at least one book from 1702.
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