this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] cleanandsunny@literature.cafe 87 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (2 children)

Name dropping TU Delft is surprising to me! ETA: found more info here, but not about the lawsuit piece.

https://delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/a-no-thank-you-to-the-person-who-assumed-i-was-the-coffee-lady

[–] EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 66 points 8 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Lumidaub@feddit.org 6 points 4 hours ago

He really didn't coin the term for her specifically, as nice as that sounds.

[–] regrub@lemmy.world 60 points 10 hours ago

Now I want an anti-acknowledgment section in my dissertation too

[–] yesman@lemmy.world 55 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

There is an excellent Science channel on Youtube and Nebula with a Physics PHD who's made some eye-opening content about harassment and misogyny in STEM and Academia.

https://www.youtube.com/@acollierastro

[–] DaveyRocket@lemmy.world 24 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

She’s a great science communicator. Another famous Youtuber (Captain D) called her “the Jenny Nicholson of science” her Dark Matter video is my favorite, though her Gell-Mann Amnesia video is a “must watch” imho.

[–] BlemboTheThird@lemmy.ca 7 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Watch her dark matter video. And the follow up. But for the love of God, dodge the comments. SO MANY people read the title of the video and then went to make comments calling her wrong, even though she spent like an hour specifically addressing the arguments they make.

Dark matter is not a theory. It's a problem. Fuck!

[–] DaveyRocket@lemmy.world 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

The only thing you should post in those comments is:

Dark Matter

Where is it?

How much?

Where is it?

How much?

[–] Goodman@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 hours ago

Do we need it?

[–] RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I thought it was a theory like how gravity works is a theory.

[–] BlemboTheThird@lemmy.ca 5 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Like I said, watch her video. She goes into lots of detail and gives a much better explanation than I could ever hope to. But here I go anyway:

The gist of it is that "dark matter" isn't really an attempt to explain anything. Like, theory of gravity, we have some good rules, things accelerate depending on mass and proximity to other things. Theory of dark matter? Not so much.

Dark matter is a problem in the sense that it's an observable phenomenon we can't really explain. When we observe really far away stars and galaxies, they interact in ways that imply far larger amount of matter than what we are actually observing. So where's that matter? We don't know! Dark matter! But unfortunately that nomenclature and the many ideas surrounding what does cause the dark matter phenomenon have deeply clouded the conversation.

Dark matter is not a theory of how things work. It's a problem to be solved.

[–] RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

So it's more we know it's there we just don't currently know what it is.

It isn't theoretical much like the stink around me rn isn't theoretical even if I cannot see or smell it with my stuffy nose because when I farted the dog barked at me and ran out of the room. I might not be able to directly observe it but clearly it is there.

[–] ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 44 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Shoutout to the physicists dismissing biologist experiment design as a whole instead of across sexual or gendered lines.

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 21 points 5 hours ago

I read that as the subtext still being sexist because Biology tends to have more women in the field compared to Physics.

[–] GrumpyDuckling@sh.itjust.works 7 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I don't really understand how that one was a problem if they're also a physicist, or even if they're a biologist. Nothing wrong with some fun rivalry.

[–] Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 15 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

There's always rivalry between physicist and biologists. Or chemists and biologists. Or biologists and biologists. Damn biologists, they ruined biology!

[–] TacoButtPlug@sh.itjust.works 40 points 6 hours ago

Fucking relatable.

No thank you to the hundreds of years of chemist men taking credit for women's discoveries.

No thank you to the old white Persian man gate keeping chemistry from Ukranians and older women in my class.

No thank you to the sexist math book author who used shoeless women in a kitchen as a word problem example.

No thank you to Amazon for banning my 15 year account for calling the sexist math book author out in reviews.

[–] fckreddit@lemmy.ml 34 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

This just makes me sad. How can science advance, if we gatekeep one half of human population? In my academic career I have consistently found women to be smarter and better than men. Yet, these misogynistic ideas seem to persist. We deserve better than old farts with even older bias heading the institutions that make up our society.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 15 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

It's exactly that is why they're kept down. Tiny men are afraid that they won't seem as smart as the woman in the room.

As a man, I try to be different. I mentor the women around me and encourage them to do more, be better. I successfully got one of my mentee to negotiate her salary just yesterday even though she felt uncomfortable doing so. Try to be the change we need

[–] sepi@piefed.social 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I don't mentor anybody. I am not smarter than anybody and frankly I am always learning from everybody, at all levels of experience.

Never claimed to be smarter than anyone, but if you're experienced then people look up to you. A little bit of encouragement can go a long way. Like my story, all I did was nudge her to negotiate, and she felt the confidence to do so.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 29 points 7 hours ago

I read the first sentence in that big paragraph and thought "wow, going straight to the biggest problem right out of the gate instead of building up to it, huh?" Then I kept reading and realized the entire paragraph was about that same thing. Holy shit, that's a lot of sexism!

[–] Echolynx@lemmy.zip 18 points 3 hours ago

I appreciate her telling it like it is and not bowing to a pressure to please.

[–] Blazingtransfem98@discuss.online 14 points 2 hours ago

Fuck these misogynistic pigs, idiots like these need to be called out more often. It's too bad she couldn't give names out and completely humiliate and ruin them.

[–] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 12 points 5 hours ago

Acknowledgmen't

[–] NotLemming@lemm.ee 10 points 2 hours ago

Normalise this. In the past women would have been accused of being unprofessional to have called men out like this. That's the only reason why every woman doesn't do it.

[–] drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

I don't understand the "computer girl" one, did the technician think that her being a woman meant she was doing computer science instead of physics?

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 7 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

I'm not sure of the timeframe of this, but it could be referring to the time when calculations were done by women by hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers

[–] pineapplelover@lemm.ee 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

That's still big brain though

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 3 points 3 hours ago

They were paid basically minimum wage, so they weren't treated the best. They were doing important work, and I personally have a lot of respect for it, but it was (and still is) an uphill battle against sexism.

[–] nonfuinoncuro@lemm.ee 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

could be referring to "mad men" era secretaries as ibm era computers were just better fancier word processors/typewriters

edit: or maybe like IT helpdesk staff who are like janitors (i.e. they don't see a difference between calling environmental services for a clogged toilet vs IT for a bricked computer)

[–] Nikophos@lemmy.ca 1 points 47 minutes ago* (last edited 47 minutes ago)

If a man told you he worked with computers, it'd be odd to raise an eyebrow and respond "Are you some kind of computer boy?". The technician treated this woman's work as something special because she was a woman. In other words: A man that works with a computer is still just a man. A woman that works with a computer must be something special, a computer girl.

And bonus points for calling her a girl, which is just a little bit more infantilizing.