Darker matters

I recently learned that there is another type of dark matter than the one we are usually searching for. Apparently "dark matter" in electronics jargon refers to some kind of dirt that accumulates on circuit boards and other equipment. So dark matter sometimes gets in the way of the seach for dark matter! (Wikipedia does not now this second meaning of the expression. At least not yet.)

By the way, Sean Carrol in a recent post at Cosmic Variance concludes in a somewhat sarcastic tone that dark matter still exists. This is a comment to a science news story about modified gravity. The efforts to explain some of the observations with modified gravity seem far fetched compared to the explanatory power on all scales of the hypothesis of dark matter. Sean Carroll:

Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy that some people are continuing to work on a long-shot possibility such as replacing dark matter with modified gravity. But it’s really a long shot at this point.

Talking about dark things I wonder if goth is very different over here. You might have a hard time to be taken seriously in a black velvet dress if it's automatically considered to be a Halloween costume. But maybe it's safe if you wear it at another time of the year. (I'm not very goth, but I do own a long black velvet dress. And it's not a costume. At least it didn't use to be.)