[beerandt]

One of the first "public" descriptions of this process was phrased something like:

"shooting a mass of uranium down a barrel into another mass of uranium to form a supercritical mass."

My guess is that the person who first said that didn't intend for the metaphor/description to be taken quite as literally as everyone ended up taking it. (Or they meant to mislead.)

Hypothetically, if you read "into" as crash/collision and not "in to"/inside of, you start to see how a generic description could be ambiguous. Run this (or a similar story) through a few iterations of the telephone game and draft revisions by journalists/editors (that somehow all seem to graduate without ever taking a single sophomore level technical writing course), and a description becomes a misunderstood metaphor becomes a fact. Somewhere along the way, the word "bullet" gets thrown in, and then no one "un-see" the visual.

That's my take. That and the author of tfa is trying way too hard to make a big a deal out of it being a "gendered" thing, when it's not.

[fermienrico]

> My guess is that the person who first said that didn't intend for the metaphor/description to be taken quite as literally as everyone ended up taking it. (Or they meant to mislead.)

This is the problem. Why are they trying to shoehorn male or female dominance here? The whole thing is not only unpleasant to read, but also confusing.

[coolgeek]

They are not "trying to shoehorn male or female dominance here"

They are describing the shapes, and the orientations of the projectiles in terms of coital positions - with which, um, some percentage of the adult population has some familiarity.

Here, "female-superior arrangement" means that the male is supine, and the female straddles atop him