firehose

This month, e-commerce firm Snapdeal released a new TV commercial to announce its weeklong sale in August. The ad shows a man breaking into rapturous dance moves while yelling, “party, party.”

The reason: His wife is away for a week.

While he is still celebrating, a stern voiceover informs telling him to not misuse his “azadi,” or freedom.

The implications are clear. Marriage is a prison for young men, and the wife an implacable jailer. While the Snapdeal ad is a new one, the hackneyed stereotypes of the warden-wife used in the storyline have been the subject of countless Whatsapp jokes, movies, and TV serials.

The assumption that wedlock suffocates men and forces them to live under the thumbs of their dominating wives has become commonplace among a certain class of educated, urban Indians.

But how much truth is there in these clichés—especially in a country where marital rape, dowry deaths, and domestic abuse are shockingly common in both rich and poor households?

The premise of these jokes—that women gleefully marry while men grudgingly go in to be lassoed—also needs to be deflated today when more and more women are delaying marriage, even while many men are happily willing. These women often prefer to defer initiation into the institution until they can ensure that they would not be getting into the unequal situations their mothers and grandmothers did.

 Why is it that popular culture does not ridicule men who dominate their partners in ways that invade their privacy and destroy their individuality? I have spent most of my adult life in Delhi and most women I know seem to reasonably respect their partner’s privacy and friendships. On the other hand, I know many men who dictate what their girlfriends/wives should wear, whom they should meet, and where they should work.

Why is it that popular culture does not ridicule men who dominate their partners in ways that invade their privacy, inhibit their social lives, and destroy their individuality?

I am not denying the existence of women who keep a close watch on their spouse’s social lives. But even a cursory examination of gender roles in India would explain why they are forced to become such killjoys.

To begin with, a lot of these “guys’ nights out” actually end up taking place at home. After an evening of drinking, eating, TV-watching, and other merriments, how many men actually clean up their own mess? Well, if data is anything to go by, not too many. An average Indian man spends 19 minutes per day on unpaid housework. This is much less than their counterparts in other male-dominated societies such as China (48 minutes) and Japan (24 minutes).

So, later in the evening or the next morning, it is usually the poor grouch of a wife who has to take care of the dirty dishes and the cigarette stubs—likely without getting a thank-you in return.

I often hear a lot of young men complaining about having to completely change their social life soon after the beginning of conjugal life. But I wonder if any of them ever pause to think about the fact that, in India, a woman is almost always expected to leave her childhood home, her neighborhood, and friends, and accept her husband’s home and family as her own. Centuries of marital disputes might have been avoided had this had been a fairer arrangement where both partners were expected to take care of both their natal and marital families. Meanwhile, in an alien environment, it is understandable why most women would want their soul mates of seven lives to be by their side during the initial months.

The Snapdeal ad isn’t the first subtly misogynist ad from an e-commerce firm. A sulking, demanding wife and a helpless, clueless, busy husband struggling to please her have become common tropes in commercials by several other online retailers.

The founders of these startups are role models for almost every tech graduate in India. Perhaps they could use their immense power to combat everyday sexism and help build an equal country. And if that seems too idealistic a reason, then perhaps they should tweak their marketing strategy simply because urban women outspend men by nearly two times when shopping online.

We welcome your comments at ideas.india@qz.com.

by @uaiHebert

Officials investigating a huge explosion at a warehouse in Tianjin in China have discovered a store of 700 tonnes of sodium cyanide—more than 70 times the legal limit allowed. Cyanide has a particularly unpleasant reputation and finding it at a major disaster site is far from welcome. However, if officials act fast they should be able to limit its damaging effects.

What is sodium cyanide?

The term cyanide is clearly understood in the public consciousness to be almost synonymous with poison itself. This is largely because of its use as lethal suicide pill (L-pill) in World War 2, most notably with the suicide of Nazi army officer Erwin Rommel. The cyanide used in the L-pill was potassium cyanide but the properties of sodium cyanide are nearly identical.

An inorganic and very innocent looking white solid with deadly properties, sodium cyanide (NaCN) can be fatal at amounts as little as 5% of a teaspoon. It is produced from the equally dangerous gas hydrogen cyanide (HCN) in a simple process with sodium hydroxide.

Why would a company want so much of it?

Sodium cyanide is used industrially across the globe, most frequently in the mining of gold. Although most of us have the traditional imagery of a 19th-century gold miner panning for nuggets, this isn’t the industrial method used today.

Most of the world’s gold is not found in nugget form but as very fine gold powders in rocks. In fact, our cultural demand for gold forces us to mine in rocks that can be as low as 0.005% gold. This means we need industrial extraction to separate and purify gold from all the other materials.

After mining and milling, the crude rock mixture is turned into a fine powder and added to a solution of sodium cyanide. The gold forms strong bonds with cyanide molecules and can then be separated from the rest of the minerals because it is then soluble in water. It then reacts with zinc and turns back into a solid. Finally is smelted to isolate the gold and cast into bars.

How dangerous is it?

As with the very similar potassium cyanide used in the L-pill, sodium cyanide is extremely toxic to humans. Although there are risks with skin absorption, the biggest risk is ingestion. Inhaling or swallowing sodium cyanide blocks oxygen transport causing serious medical problems and ultimately death.

However, the safety of sodium cyanide changes if it is present during an explosion. Avoiding oral ingestion should usually be relatively simple but an explosion can cause it to be inhaled as a fine powder (this danger should have passed quickly—and face masks will also prevent fine powder inhalation). The biggest fear is the formation of hydrogen cyanide upon exposure to water or high temperatures. Hydrogen cyanide, as a gas, is very dangerous if inhaled.

What if the remaining store leaks?

Contamination of water supplies could be a concern but is easily tested for. The Chinese authorities seem to be treating the spill with hydrogen peroxide, which forms significantly less dangerous fulminates. Waste water and other areas could be simply treated with sodium hypochlorate (bleach) to remove cyanide ions.

The spill is (but more significantly was) very dangerous, especially at these levels. But the nature of cyanides means we can detect them easily and monitor the process of cleaning up. The clean-up should proceed as quickly as possible. The other heartening factor is that after the short-term—albeit very seriously deadly—effects, there should be no slow-onset ramifications, as you would get with a carcinogen or something harder to deal with.

All previous spills have been dealt with easily with no long-term effects and the procedures are well known, so all the hydrogen cyanide in Tianjin should now be gone. The solid sodium cyanide is not so dangerous in passing: you can open a bottle with 3,000 times the lethal dose without any problems (without letting it react with moisture and convert to hydrogen cyanide). The advice for anyone nearby would be to avoid drinking the contaminated water and stay out of the area while the hydrogen cyanide is processed by natural biochemical pathways and climate dilution to safe levels.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Follow @ConversationUK on Twitter. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Warner Bros. is developing a Carl Sagan biopic. They’ll have the help of Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow, who is going to be a producer on the film. [The Tracking Board]

Read more...

How do so many drug-loaded semi-submersibles go by undetected?

The impressive technology that lets the paralyzed British physicist communicate has been open-sourced, meaning that anyone can use and change it as they see fit.

Billy McDonald rose to political power in a little Mississippi beach town on the strength of his resilience and colorful personality. But when Hurricane Katrina hit Pass Christian, it took everything from him and his city.

Intelligence officials know that, increasingly, autocracies are deploying "trolls" — robotic feeds or paid commentators — to sway social media trends.

GoTTY:

GoTTY is a simple command line tool that turns your CLI tools into web applications.

Starbucks' Pumpkin Spice Latte to Be Made With Real Pumpkin:

Gasp.

Boston Dynamics’ Atlas: hero or menace?

Atlas performed well at DARPA’s last robotics challenge, which tests robots with various navigational and dexterity tasks, but Boston Dynamics is now testing it in the wild. Navigating a wooded hillside is important to make sure it can effectively track down fleeing humans balance over varied real-world terrain, which bipedal robots still struggle with very much.

Still, it’s a far cry from balancing and maneuvering as well as a human. “I’m not saying it can do everything you can do,” said BD founder Marc Raibert, “but you can imagine if we keep pushing we’ll get there.” Oh I sure can, and I plan on being ready when that happ—I mean, isn’t science great?

Bigfoot sightings expected to increase 500%.

(via NBC News)

—Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—

Do you follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?

Honored at the D23 Expo, the “Star Wars” filmmaker revealed Disney’s influence on the creation of Jar Jar Binks.

Russian authorities uncovered a criminal ring that produced $30 million worth of cheese, using products imported from abroad that were banned under the country’s recent sanctions against the West.

Police arrested 6 people following raids on 17 homes, offices and warehouses around Moscow. They found 470 tons of contraband foreign cheese rennet and equipment to make counterfeit labels. In a strange twist, the cheese was affixed with fake labels of known European brands, and sold as banned foreign treats to supermarket chains and distributors around Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Russia banned the import of a number of food products from EU countries last year as retaliation for the West’s sanctions against the country for Russia’s involvement in the conflict in Ukraine.

In late July, Vladimir Putin himself issued an executive order to destroy foods confiscated at the country’s border. Dramatic images of the confiscated food sparked a discussion about wasting food while ignoring the country’s poverty problem.

The Russian ban also led to a heartbreaking development on Sunday (Aug.16), when authorities euthanized and burned 50 ducklings smuggled in from Ukraine because they lacked “accompanying documents.”

WASHINGTON—Citing “nearly unlimited” opportunities for the nation’s currency, an encouraging study released Tuesday by the Brookings Institution found that it has never been easier for U.S. dollars to enter the richest segment of American society.

The study, which followed the legal tender over a 40-year period, confirmed that trillions of dollars have been able to move from the lower and middle classes into the upper class, indicating a significant rise in the upward mobility of American money.

“In comparison to earlier generations, today’s U.S. dollars are ascending the economic ladder much faster, and in far greater numbers,” said economist and lead researcher Hannah Rodrigues, emphasizing that it is much easier for money to escape the ranks of the poor now than it was just 10 years ago. “We have never seen this much money moving into the highest income brackets, and the trend is only ...

#foundphoto

A photo posted by Brian M. Cassidy (@brian_m_cassidy) on Aug 17, 2015 at 11:01am PDT

We have great news to report. The cat that was missing was found sitting next to it’s own missing cat poster!

photo by Brian M. Cassidy

via Tina Roth Eisenberg

Deep Nightmare Pajama Pants are pants with nightmarish designs created using Deep Dreamer, an app built on Google’s Deep Dream artificial neural network.

The pants are currently in the voting phase of clothing company Betabrand‘s product development project Think Tank. If the design receives enough votes it will move on to the crowdfunding phase for possible production.

images via Betabrand

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Cookbooks' key ingredient now design not recipes, says food writer

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

---

submitted by basilcilantro [link] [22 comments]

sonysportswalkman:

*town crier voice* hear ye, hear ye! let it be known the queen hath deemed the following citizens Problematic,

archatlas:

Stairs Martino Zegwaard

same

Portland officials are digging into a $20 million fund for affordable housing to launch a project they announced in Northeast Portland Monday.

Officials call the empty lot on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard the “Grant Warehouse” after the chemical storage building that was cleaned up there.

The new development would have businesses on the ground floor and up to 70 housing units that low-income families can afford. The project prioritizes families forced out by gentrification, or considered “at-risk” of displacement.  

Maxine Fitzpatrick runs the nonprofit Portland Community Reinvestment Initiatives, which focuses on keeping housing affordable in North and Northeast Portland. PCRI is also one of several partners to win the city’s bidding process to develop the Grant Warehouse property. Fitzpatrick praised the city-led project.  

burnttoastmaster:

pissmodern:

what fresh hell

Y'all’d’ve known this if you live in the south