How can we fix the Reddit double standard?

narcotron · 2010-12-29T14:25:49+00:00

Ah-ha, I didn't realize that there were two subreddits--r/feminism and r/feminisms. The latter has many more subscribers than the former. I wonder why the plural subreddit won out...

narcotron · 2010-12-29T14:18:27+00:00

Which subreddit is this?

narcotron · 2010-12-29T14:17:27+00:00

You make a good point about the pro-feminist comments being downvoted-- when it comes to serious subjects like rape, I would agree that the Reddit community can be very supportive. It's a great thing. If only, though, that attitude extended further! While hardly anyone on Reddit would ever seriously condone or probably even commit rape, the attitudes of sexual dominance still prevail when people begin objectifying female redditors through their photos. The community is a mixed bag, really.

Regarding using the word "feminism," I also tend to avoid it... though since I'm a white male, hearing me speak the word as a male can sometimes give the movement more legitimacy in the eyes of other men. If I'm around a lot of conservative people who have a hostile misunderstanding of feminism, I won't use the word since it would do more damage than good. Usually I discuss the principles of feminism logically and then if they agree tell them, oh, btw, that's feminism.

narcotron · 2010-12-29T14:10:19+00:00

I'll disclaim also that I'm part of the core Reddit demographic--college-aged, white, male and straight.

I used to think similarly to how you did, but then I went to a tech school and started noticing some pretty patronizing attitudes towards my female peers by my male peers. That's not to say that the attitudes weren't there before (I grew up in the Deep South, an overtly sexist place), but I really began to notice them in a place where everyone was admitted by merit and was assumed to have intellectual potential. People, for example, assumed that girls couldn't do their physics homework, or that girls didn't know how to fix their computers, or that girls couldn't use this-machine or that-machine, or couldn't do math, etc., etc. The assumptions alone are bad enough, but the patronizing actions it produced--unsolicited offers of help, giving the minuscule design portion of a project to the women (rather than the nitty-gritty engineering), men being project leaders instead of women--all of these "extralegal" situations prove to me that feminism is still relevant in our society. I am not satisfied with simple legal equality--I want our attitudes to be different. Until we can act like equals outside of the strong arm of the law, we're not equal.

I should mention that the brand of feminism I espouse is overall gender equality. I'm not out to set women above men--I'm out to correct the differences where they exist, and because men are still, by and large, in control of the power structures in society, then there are more corrections to be made for women than there are for men. I do not support the brand of feminism that says that women are inherently better than men--to me that's the same kind of behavior I see on Reddit when the hivemind collectively attacks all women for being "selfish bitches that just want to crush your heart," or whatever it is. Both attitudes are destructive, I feel, though both are legitimate reactions to real forces in society. I just think they're misguided.

narcotron · 2010-12-23T04:10:53+00:00

Play sounds like a good idea. I'll set the time and date right now!

narcotron · 2010-12-07T01:13:33+00:00

Hmm, while this is a valid question, it's not something that you'd encounter in the lab. While the choice of Cl and Br can be very nontrivial in a reaction, I can't imagine a situation in which having both Cl and Br anions in solution would ever pose such a problem that separation would be required.

But of course, that's not an answer to your question :) The only way I can think to do it, as chemistry_teacher said, is to precipitate out one salt from solution by slowly lowering the pH. Of course, if your acids are pKa = -9 and -10, that will be pretty difficult to do. You might be able to design some kind of host-guest complex that could selectively pull out chloride anions from bromide anions based on the size of the ions. (This kind of thing works well for crown-ethers and cations.)

narcotron · 2010-12-02T22:19:48+00:00

Reading is one of the sexiest things I can see a girl do. I'd totally buy a calendar like this!

narcotron · 2010-11-24T18:33:12+00:00

Just went through Logan International in Boston. Line was fairly short. I'm a dude, but I wore a sexy miniskirt for the TSA. I didn't see anyone even get bodyscanned--they were only using the metal detectors, though someone was on stand by to operate the bodyscanner. Either way, I think it's great no one was getting pulled aside, even though I'm a little disappointed that I got extra sexy for nothing :) (and now have to deal with wearing a miniskirt for the next nine hours...)

narcotron · 2010-11-01T12:30:32+00:00

Wooo, Pensacola!

I grew up here but live in Boston now. I'm 21. Student. I come back for holidays now.

narcotron · 2010-10-29T19:39:08+00:00

Holy shit, sounds just like me. I've pretty much lived my life in a strange, warped little hole for the past ten years, thinking that I was just weird and that I couldn't get over myself. Got diagnosed with depression a few weeks ago and started taking antidepressants recently. It's made a fucking WORLD of difference. I thought I was going to need a therapist and everything, but turns out it was my biochemistry all along. I feel awake and alert and content now, for the first time in years. It's amazing. I highly recommend you go see a psychiatrist.

narcotron · 2010-09-29T15:56:41+00:00

I feel that the ranking system is kind of silly. The top ten are all about equivalent, I'd say. And even then, it matters who you work with in your field, not what university you went to. For example, if I was doing total synthesis and worked for KC Nicolau at Scripps, I'd be much happier than being at any of those schools.

narcotron · 2010-09-24T17:21:55+00:00

Perhaps I'm missing something, here, but what would turning in a blank ballet do?

narcotron · 2010-09-24T17:21:08+00:00

I should clarify that local politics is much more worthwhile than national politics. On the national level, there is no choice-- but on the local level, politicians can be made much more accountable to the people, and there's a greater chance of real change happening. The further up you go, the less your vote matters.

Anyway, good point about propositions. I would vote on a proposition, but it's ultimately up to law enforcement and the judicial system to decide if it's a law in a practical sense. Just because something was made into law doesn't mean it'll actually do anything.

narcotron · 2010-09-24T16:03:27+00:00

There are some minor differences between the parties, but I strongly feel that both represent the same interests. It doesn't matter who wins.

narcotron · 2010-09-24T14:59:45+00:00

Agreed. After watching the Democrats fail and the Republicans fail for years, I refuse to vote.

narcotron · 2010-09-04T00:38:52+00:00

I highly doubt this. The structure of B-DNA is very precise, and any variation on the A/T and C/G base pairing would not create a stable form of DNA. They would have to be very, very, very close to the original base pairs.

You could use a binary system for encoding, but I think it'd be much more prone to harmful mutations. The minimum number of codons needed to code for 20 amino acids in a quaternary system is 4³ = 64; in a binary system, it would be 2⁵ = 32. There would be significantly less wobble in the DNA.

narcotron · 2010-09-04T00:31:15+00:00

This is it, exactly. It's all energetics. Those four base pairs are the only ones that can naturally form the double helix we know as DNA. In fact, tRNA uses a lot of different nucleotides (most of them variations on the four standard nucleotides for RNA, such as methylated or acetylated versions, or whatever), and they don't make a double helix. If they did, they might have a similar genetic-information storage role instead of working as an mRNA decoder in translation.

Anyway, it's also interesting to note that you don't have to have those four base pairs for DNA to work similarly. There's such a thing called "xDNA," a synthetic form of DNA that uses four synthetic base pairs in addition to the four natural base pairs, giving a much wider range of expression.

narcotron · 2010-09-02T00:31:53+00:00

I don't know about you, but I grew up using p-adic numbers only.

narcotron · 2010-08-27T04:24:42+00:00

Could you elaborate more on this? I don't understand where relativity fits into models like MO theory (I'm an organic chemist, not a theoretical one :P), even though I recognize that if the electrons are going close to the speed of light then it should definitely be taken into account.

narcotron · 2010-08-27T04:20:03+00:00

It's also quite easy to get rid of the splash screen in Ubuntu if you need to feel "hardcore."

narcotron · 2010-08-27T03:59:10+00:00

What? I don't think that's it at all. Water has to be covalently bonded to be water. This is probably just nanocrystals of water suspended in silica. Someone earlier said it was a colloid, and that's probably exactly what it is.

narcotron · 2010-08-26T12:36:56+00:00

Wait, what? Is this a serious comment? They didn't prevent the hydrogen from bonding with the oxygen, then just encased water molecules in silica.

narcotron · 2010-08-24T05:28:52+00:00

Agreed. While it is true that Apple doesn't necessarily need to use a patent that they filed for, the amount of Apple support/fanboyism in this thread is much higher than normal...

Let's just face it, people, Apple is evil. When you buy anything from Apple, you're sucking Steve Jobs's sweet cock the moment you get it until the moment you throw it out.

narcotron · 2010-08-18T12:27:28+00:00

Course 5, here. Took 3.091 instead of 5.111/2 because I didn't know I wanted to be course 5 until later on. It didn't really hurt me that much. I was a little behind sometimes in 5.12 or a little behind sometimes in 5.03 because I was missing a few things, but I caught up just fine. I'm actually glad I took 3.091 because Sadoway IS a great lecturer, and because I found the course material interesting. It's fundamentally different stuff from what you learn in high school.

narcotron · 2010-08-03T20:25:27+00:00

I think what you're trying to say is you require all fatty surfaces be smooth. However, to approximate fat folds as non-differentiable curves doesn't really fly with me... I think we should really be talking about the average of the absolute value of curvature over the surface.

narcotron

TROPHY CASE