"Spontaneous" doesn't mean what you think it means.
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2025
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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.”
Thanks. A little surprised by the current proportion of people that didn't understood that reference.
It was almost half a century ago
Thanks, I was really hoping for a gut punch right about now
No problem, old timer.
Get off my lawn
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.
♻️ Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. ♻️
To be fair, at the time, there was no ISS for the shuttle to dock to, the shuttle pretty much was all they had. It was designed for missions of about 10 days, and could be expanded to about 17 days if needed. If they needed to stretch it up to a month to go beyond that for her to have a second period, I suspect that would rather have used that cargo capacity for some extra food and such and dealt with her free-bleeding, and much beyond that they'd need to come down one way or another or just die in space.
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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To be fair, I have absolutely no idea how many tampons a woman would need either, although 10 per day seems high.
They last 4-8 hours. Most women bleed for 3-7 days. So on the outer edge, you could need 42. I've never gone through more than a box of 24 in a cycle. But the US hadn't put a menstruating person in space before, who knew if being in space would somehow unleash a geyser of mysterious lady fluids never before seen by man.
And in that moment a new kind of propulsion was discovered
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developing or occurring without apparent external influence, force, cause, or treatment
Pretty much the definition of spontaneous if you ask me.
In addition to what MotoAsh said, it also has a definite external influence and a well defined force acting upon it. It boiled because it underwent a change in pressure.
Without apparent external influence. Relative pressure is something humans have a hard time judging. As well as it just exists everyone in that zone vice something easy to perceive, like a fire under a pot boiling water.
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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."
unfounded assumption of ignorance in the other party
That's the joke. Haha, stupid astronaut, you are supposed to know.
It's obviously too early to make that joke with an astronautess.
A lot more people than that astronaut are going to see the post reply, though. A lot of them probably haven't taken a thermodynamics lesson.
Sorry, I didn't mean to mansplain that to you just now. Just wanted future readers to consider another angle.
A lot of them probably haven't taken a thermodynamics lesson.
Sure, but in that case the replier could've phrased their response as such. As it stands they're addressing the poster, not other people seeing the exchange.
Sure, but in that case the replier could've phrased their response as such.
But like if we're being super duper real for a sec, who gives a shit? It's such a waste of energy and won't change anything to pick meaningless social media posts apart. He made a fair point, I choose not to interpret it beyond that.
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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.
It's Kev M.
Is there a better term for it?
I feel like mansplaining as a word is similar to feminism as a word. It has assumption of gender rooted into it but its gone past that at this point.
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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.
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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.
The entire picture looks completely fake like somebody tried to create a twitter screenshot from scratch in paint.
You should be able to do a near perfect job in any image editor. They make kits that have all the assets already built.
Bots building histories. (Not this post, on Reddit)
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It's a pedantic take that makes sense and is fun. It relies on spontaneous having multiple meanings.
A spontaneous person randomly does weird things. A spontaneous occurring change happens without the environment promoting it.
There is no man's planning. This is willful ignorance to enable a joke.
Edit: literally Kev M
Are all image links on Lemmy.zip blocked by cloudflare?
I'm having issues with the proxied ones (451 Unavailable for legal reasons). Luckily you can use Redirector or similar to un-proxy them automatically.
I like to imagine replies are more often for future readers than for the OP.
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