(biologist - artist - queer)

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You’re the only magician that could make a falling horse turn into thirteen gerbils

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • You didn’t mention it, but have you considered how it would feel if you had a bad day and didn’t live up to this standard?

    You’re framing it like a moral philosophy, but feeling anger is not a morally bad thing. Neither is jealousy, or selfishness, at times. It’s just part of the human experience, and we can avoid it most of the time, but occasionally we’re going to need to focus on ourselves and our needs and our feelings.

    Similarly, it’s impossible to avoid having an ego 100% of the time. Honestly, it sounds like this quality is part of your identity-- would you like yourself less if you lived up to this standard imperfectly?

    I don’t think it’s unusual to want to be a good person and to want to control our worst impulses. But to describe it as “trying to act like a saint”, and saying you’re “deaf to your own needs”-- those are concerning statements.

    I don’t think anyone can speak for you or guess what’s going on from the outside. But if I were you, I’d be exploring if there’s fear underlying these impulses. Fear of judgment: how do you think the world would perceive you if you stopped being so strict about it? Fear of badness: how does it feel when you have a bad day and you fail to be perfect? Do you resent yourself? Fear of impurity: do you feel like other people are bad when they have these natural reactions? Do you fear being like other people who are experiencing and dealing with normal feelings?


  • I want to point out that in the article/interview you posted,

    1. the expert disagreed with the interviewer that the causes of the gap are biological in nature, and

    2. that they both agreed that the causes of the gap are undergoing rapid change due to social factors from the covid pandemic, and they bet it will be decreasing over the next few decades

    Figured I’d clarify in case anyone read your comment and got confused about what the expert was saying :)



  • I want to warn anyone thinking of trying this: don’t.

    Obviously there’s the don’t commit suicide part, and that’s the most important part. But also, as someone who has unfortunately spent time considering various methods, I can tell you: don’t even consider doing it this way.

    Genuinely sorry to be contradictive, but you absolutely would have been in a painful situation if you’d continued. The only explanation is that you didn’t get to the point that your body 100% takes over from you and forces a desperate, painful, writhing attempt to get air.

    You would die of increased CO2 concentration in your blood long before you actually ran out of oxygen. That increased CO2 would be very painful. Like, lizard brain stem absolutely taking over, full panicking levels of painful. Don’t try it!





  • Oooooh I have some ideas! Some of these are paid/premium (but NOT micro transactions) and some have mild ads. But I share the distaste for data-mining, money grubbing, brain-melting-ad-ridden games, so I’m certain they are on the least intrusive end of the spectrum.

    I really love biology (I’m a biologist…) so these are both pet games and usually breeding/evolution games!

    • Fish Tycoon – This one specifically. A classic! Breed and care for cute fish!
    • Niche breed and evolve – so neat and pretty educational about evolution/genetics. There’s a slightly more complicated/difficult pc game if she decides she likes the nichelings/universe.
    • Pocket Frogs – Simple, low stress collecting game. it would take years to collect all the frogs, and there’s a relatively active community of people who trade sets of frogs to other people to help them complete collections. Would be fun to play with her friends at school!
    • Reigns Her Majesty – a game about running a kingdom as a queen. When you die, you become your heir and retain some progress from your last lives. It doesn’t fit the exact criteria you mentioned, but I think she might like it anyway!

  • GLAAD’s Accelerating Acceptance is the most comprehensive survey we have to determine changes in public sentiment about LGBTQ+ acceptance. It’s literally what I cite when writing research papers about queer issues. The difference is absolutely believable, and they validated the results with sampling bias in mind. There is no reason for you to cast doubt on the result like this, and it reads as disengenuine for you to do so.

    Also, you don’t get to decide what queer lives deserve to be in articles about LGBTQ+ people. Thankfully.


  • I don’t think that’s how this usually works?

    IANAL and also I’m a dumbass but from when I’ve participated in these things in the past (and therefore when I’ve read the fine print), by the time they’re soliciting claims they have already gone through the entire process of confirming that the lawsuit is valid and deciding how much the company owes as a settlement. So once it reaches this point, the amount the company pays is already known, and it’s just equally divided among all the people with standing who file a claim.

    So yeah, file a claim, because that’s your money that you deserve because you have standing. But if you don’t file a claim, everyone who did will just get a slightly larger amount of money


  • The point this guy is trying to make is that people are conflating Israel, Judaism, and Zionism in ways that don’t always make sense

    Like, the polls you’re quoting are sentiments of Israelis, so this guy (and the vast majority of Jewish people in the world) are not included in those polls.

    Even within Israel, that’s, what, 3-4 million people that disagree with that sentiment? And Israelis are only ~73% Jewish anyway?

    On top of that, tons of zionists arent even Jewish, they are even likely to be antisemitic tbh.

    So… what you said sounds a lot like “I don’t have anything against one particular group, but the sentiment of the citizens of this one country makes me second guess the perspective of a person in a totally different country just because they share one dimension of identity”… In essence, it sounds a lot like prejudice

    (free palestine, in case that isn’t obvious)


  • because the very first thing you say in this post basically amounts to “I think I have the authority to decide the basis on which we determine who deserves to vote”

    like, yeah, most people can navigate to their secretary of state websites. And it’s not really your responsibility to have to link the pages anyway.

    But doing it for that reason aligns you philosophically with people who think that the illiterate, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, the critically ill, etc. somehow don’t deserve to vote. It aligns you ideologically with other people who think they can decide who deserves to vote, with people who want to disenfranchise others-- in essence, it aligns you ideologically with many Republicans


  • I don’t think you’re wrong, but I think this might be over simplifying.

    For one thing, in the USA, our building codes and standard methods for making apartments makes it very difficult and space inefficient to make apartments with enough bedrooms for families. Affording a SFH is only so desirable because there aren’t apartments big enough for families to grow into, and while moving to a rural area might allow for enough living space, now the family has to figure out how to have a job that supports them.

    For another, we don’t make as many apartment-like buildings you can own part of. This deincentivizes staying in apartments, because with the way our real estate economy is structured, owning any real property is one of the best ways to secure a spot in the middle class.

    Another aspect-- a lot of desirable places to live have populations that literally and directly state they don’t want to build more dense housing, they don’t want people who can’t afford the sfhs to live there. It’s not just about pricing people out of homeownership, it’s literally trying to gatekeep access to specific towns by class. Plenty of people would gladly accept living there even without SFHs, so the housing shortage is not caused by the people who want houses, and is instead caused by the people who don’t want apartments next to their houses.


  • It’s also like, if they made $29,000/year before plus $12,000 during the study, they’re still making less than someone with a full time job making $20/hour.

    $20/hour felt AMAZING as a promotion to a broke-ass food service 20-something, and is a hell of a lot better than $29,000/year-- but having been in that pay-range before, 100% of that increase is going towards stability and comfort stuff.

    Imagine-- you can afford more than just scraping by on rent! Wow, what if I can buy a video game?! You mean I can actually say yes when my friend invites me out for a drink this month??? I CAN BUY THE NICE CHICKEN NUGGETS???

    Like, damn, of course they aren’t like, “starting an entrepreneurial endeavor”, they’re still broke as hell. The might work a little less, but maybe that’s because they’re like, taking time off when they’re sick, where before they would power through to afford rent? Or maybe they will feel more like they can call off work to help for family or friend emergencies? Like it’s pretty obvious that this UBI amount still falls into the category of bringing people out of poverty stress into “normal human decision making” mode, not like into “has the space to be able to dream about visionary possibilities” mode




  • As an education professional: what the hell, dude? It’s not unfortunate that we aren’t just dropping struggling students without first carefully examining why they’re not succeeding.

    You might be right that you can’t let some students detract from the class for other students, but the solution there is advocating for better funding and more staff to be able to give every student what they need, whether they’re above or below the expectation for their age.

    Saying it’s “unfortunate” that students don’t fail (read: ruin their whole god damn lives) as often anymore is blaming our most vulnerable YOUTH for the systemic problems of our society. It’s not their job to be what the school environment wants them to be, they don’t even have a choice about whether or not they are there. It’s our (as educators, and as tax paying and voting community members) responsibility to make sure they get the education they need to be functional members of our society.

    We even have huge bodies of research to reinforce this. It’s not a secret that the school environment excels at making nice workers, not critical-thinking and well-adjusted adult humans.

    Take it up with the school board! Take it up with the local, state, and federal government! Take it up with the voters!


  • The whole point is that we still don’t know what Lucy actually looked like, and therefore whenever we depict her we are “filling in the blanks” with our own interpretations. In the past, we didn’t know whether she was likely to be covered in hair or not, but almost every depiction showed her covered.

    The author of the article, who has a PhD and is the chair of a college’s interdisciplinary humanities department, makes the point that when we exclusively depicted her covered in hair when we didn’t know whether or not she was covered in hair, we were projecting our standards of modesty onto her. We also idealized her as a mother, as exemplifed by her depiction with protective and warm body language toward fictional children and male partners. These are aspects that various artists, researchers, and journalists projected onto a skeleton, not truths about Lucy as an individual.

    When it was revealed that Lucy, in fact, was likely not covered in hair, and instead likely walked around naked and uncovered, we did not immediately revise these depictions. They disrupt the previously held projections and interfere with the narrative of Lucy as a “perfect mother” by modern standards-- not because she can’t be both naked and a good mother in an absolute sense, but because these are disparate and conflicting signifiers in our modern society. In essence, it’s harder to solidifiy her illustration as “the mother of all humans” to an audience of modern Westerners if she can’t be depicted with “chastity and modesty”, because we strongly associate those characteristics with good motherhood.

    It is, therefore, a media analysis of the depictions of Lucy, it’s not about Lucy herself. It’s about how we project onto Lucy, and what that says about the people doing the projecting.

    Of course, humans societies that are alive today are also valuable examples in the process of self reflection. But ignoring the observations made by the author and other researchers is like saying we don’t need to analyze media (books, movies, TV shows) that depict society, because real society is right there!



  • The literature on PTFEs illustrates that it is, at best, uncertain whether there are health harms relating to contact and ingestion. Most of the studies struggle with confounds, controls, and sample sizes because almost literally everyone has been exposed to PTFEs. Toxicity researchers would not definitively agree that it is “completely harmless”.

    The other commenter is right, also, that PFOA and GenX (the chemical, not the generation) are more evidently harmful and both involved in, and released from, the creation of PTFE.

    Just throwing this out here in case someone is like “wait, IS Teflon fine???”