developing or occurring without apparent external influence, force, cause, or treatment
Pretty much the definition of spontaneous if you ask me.
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
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Yes, afaik in science community that is in fact the correct use of the word, meaning from "environmental" conditions (well, it's test conditions for the environment in this case) and not from an active, localised influence.
I mean, if you put some stuff in a room, then slowly start to heat the room up, would you describe the things — which will at one point or another catch fire —as "spontaneously" combusting?
I'm not arguing the use is wrong here, just a thought I had.
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Again, who’s recreating Twitter screenshots really badly, and why? There’s a person on Reddit with like five alts who’s been spamming these posts, and I’m so confused by it.
Wow dude, the irony is insane. Can't belive you would steal this.
The entire picture looks completely fake like somebody tried to create a twitter screenshot from scratch in paint.
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This post literally has the watermark of the account that creates/posts these. Other people or bots are reposting them, sure, but they're coming from some kind of aggregation account that has this particular style of recreating Twitter threads in a space that fits into the Instagram preference for square images.
Bots building histories. (Not this post, on Reddit)
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I hate the mansplaining accusation, especially in this context
Fucking let ideas compete. Call him out for being pedantic. If you have to bring gender into nearly any conversation about science, you've already lost
Just shame them with better science
The mansplaining thing in this context is more about an unfounded assumption of ignorance in the other party. Usually one would assume an astronaut to know basic thermodynamics, but the tweet's phrasing implies the other other person doesn't. It's less "you're wrong" and more "why do you think she doesn't know that."
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The term "mansplaining" is not just about a man being pedantic. It is a man being pedantic or overexplaining to a woman either about something she is likely more knowledgeable on than he is or about something that is such common knowledge it should be assumed that she knows these facts as well as he does. It is a demonstration of misogyny through the assumption that you, a man, knows better than her, a woman, despite all liklihood to the contrary and yet you condescend to her anyway. It's the arrogance and gender bias that is the problem, not the pedantry itself.
The thing I don't like about the mansplaining accusation is it makes lots of men out to be sexist/misogynistic when they are really just pedantic twits that very well could have commented the same stupid thing to a man. But because it was to a woman someone has to accuse them of being sexist too.
Don't get me wrong there are a lot of sexist assholes, but just assuming it to be the case off a single comment irks me.
they are really just pedantic twits that very well could have commented the same stupid thing to a man.
Yes, but men experience this at a slightly lower rate.
So if an astronaut man were to get, say, 10 of these comments, while an astronaut woman gets 15 of these comments, it's fair to infer that about 5 out of the 15 comments wouldn't have been made to a man. Problem is that you can't exactly tell which 5 they are. But you know it's happening.
Of course, if the ratio is actually closer to 50 versus 10 comments like this, then you've got a pretty good sense that 80% of the pedantic overexplainers-to-an-expert are doing it because the original poster is a woman.
And one thing you find for these types of examples with a woman who has clear, unmistakable, objective indicators of expertise (literal astronaut) in the topic at hand is that the ratio is much higher for women than men, in a way that might not have been obvious for lesser credentials (like a high school science teacher). But yet, it still happens.
It's a name for a phenomenon that has existed for a long time. It's a concise way to describe that phenomenon, and I still think it's a good word to have in the vocabulary.
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(New person here)
The big issue is that we don’t see men being pedantic towards other men at nearly the same rate. Absolutely it happens, but there is definitely a problem with men not respecting women specifically.
Part of it, I think, comes from social conditioning and it’s more of a reaction than anything on purpose when it comes to a large subset of the people doing it. Even still, it’s important to gender it at least sometimes to highlight why we might be doing it and to give us the correct thing to reflect on. I’ve done it before where I could say it to a man but I realized that I what I was saying or doing was fueled, at least in part, by some internalized misogyny. Knowing that has helped me get to it before I do something stupid.
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I just saw a person in a suit, then read the "mansplaining" comment, then went back and saw the posters name.
It feels so forced or I am just oblivious. I thought the response was an asshole being an "acktuallllllly" response.
Did you just mansplain mansplaining!?
When will men learn to stop trying to share information?!
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- Water in space boils, freezes or evaporates?
- Yes
I hope she brought enough tampons
For those who don't get the joke:
Sally Ride, first female NASA astronaut to go to space: "I remember the engineers trying to decide how many tampons should fly on a one-week flight; they asked, “Is 100 the right number?”
“No. That would not be the right number.”
I mean, the 10 ish day long mission that recently took 9 months happened, actually with a woman on board. If you said "100 is too much lol" and opted for 10, you'd be laughing out the other side of your face when you started having to improvise sanitation supplies after month three.
Except that 9 months took place on a space station. There were regular cargo missions to the station. And they could have been brought back at any nearly any point if necessary. Other astronauts literally went up and came back from the Station in that 9 months.
The timeframe being so long was almost entirely about the Starliner itself and what they were going to do with a known defective and potentially unusable spacecraft, where the only trained pilots were those astronauts, not anything with the astronauts themselves.
If the station wasn't an option for whatever reason (despite it literally being part of the planned mission), then other contingencies would have been available or at least planned already. This wasn't an Apollo 13 situation where not making it back was a serious concern.
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People say the same thing to other men. Is it mansplaining then too?
Yeah, Men do it to each other all the time too. The sociological context when that happens makes it much less difficult to manage though, as there isn't the cultural tendency to dismiss other men when they imply they have an understanding of a field that is perceived as typically male-exclusive (hard sciences, mechanics, etc.). It's a term to describe a complicated and fairly important topic, that has unfortunately become a meme for people to rail against because it's been characterized as a criticism of an entire group (men) and not as it's intended (as a comment on a specific person's behavior).
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