oops

Did you know that after they switched to blind auditions, major symphony orchestras hired women between 30% to 55% more? Before bringing in “blind auditions” with a screen to conceal the the candidate, women in the top 5 major orchestras made up less than 5% of the musicians performing.

The case of blind auditions for orchestras and how it dramatically changed the gender makeup of orchestras is a very illuminating example of gender bias, and an interesting possible way of countering it.

You can be sexist without knowing it. You can be racist without knowing it. This is not a moral failing; it is a moral imperative to remember that you are fallible, and take steps to limit the damage your squishy ape brain’s foibles can cause.

"If you masturbate you're a filthy gooner" you sound like a fucking nazi and I'm not kidding, why are people so eager to turn into pearl-clutching reactionaries about normal sexual activity

The word you are looking for is “selfish.” Not narcissist, not sociopath, selfish.

yesterday i had a nice southern teenager call me "ma'am" and then look at me and go, in a well-meaning tone, "uhhhh, if you go by ma'am. sorry if not." and i had to be like yeah man ma'am is fine. appreciate you being inclusive though. i could almost see the little warning pop up in his UI-- hold up! people with blue hair often have pronouns. are you sure you want to address this individual with a gendered term?

the way the internet facilitates a sort of memetic decay of phrases related to sexual attraction to slowly, inexorably point towards the same conventionally attractive people in their 20s instead of the original meanings is so disgusting to me

people want to claim the allure of the unconventional while still treating it with disgust. "fat boy summer" about average men. "DILF" but only if he's under 40. "bear" about a man built like a superhero. "butch" but not if she's too butch. "monsterfucker" about an anime girl with horns. it's exhausting

Resisting the urge to Um Actually this dragon novel because it has the dragon eggs be like three or four feet wide but there is simply a limit to how large hard-shelled terrestrial eggs can be. No matter how large the animal is, the embryo needs oxygen, and oxygen needs surface area. The larger an object is, the lower its surface area relative to volume, and the less oxygen the embryo can receive. We think of large animals as having porportionately large young because mammalian pregnancy has the unique benefit of allowing for the size of the young to scale with the adult because their oxygen is provided directly through the placenta, and almost all the megafauna remaining on Earth are mammals. But this is not the case for species which lay eggs! For fuck's sake even the sauropods hatched out of eggs barely larger than basketballs! Your hatchling dragon would be impressively enormous if it were the size of a house cat. Stop trying to make me believe that this (ROUND!) dragon egg somehow supplied enough oxygen to develop an infant the size of a large dog or even bigger. If it were possible the dinosaurs woulda been doing it!!!!

I love you /lh. Experts going off on their particular fascinating cool topics and adding unexpected context to things we take for granted is like my favorite thing this was delightful. Talk to me more about eggs and geometry and biology all you want :D