sort of like the reactionary trend of pulling your kids out of school because Common Core has changed how math is taught so critical thinking and conceptual understanding is incorporated, rather than teaching math by rote memorization?

I believe that’s what happens anytime they say that we probably shouldn’t focus on memorizing a multiplication table, or try to teach anything in a way that puts more focus on understanding how numbers work than on symbolic memorization.
And that’s like… Elementary school.

I was going to make a comment about surreal numbers not being numbers. But I did a bit of fact checking and it looks like all of the values I was objecting to are not considered surreal numbers, but rather pseudo numbers.

I find this outrageous. Why can’t ↑ be a number? What even is a number that would exclude it and leave in all of your so-called numbers?

Can confirm. I was already struggling. But I just straight up refused to math with i

Ehh not really its just to old if a concept for us to be appaled by that. Its not 15 century for imaginary numbers to cause riots.

I would wager you have more of an idea of what a state of matter is than biologists do of what a species is. Humans like to put things into neat boxes but nature is under no deal obligation to cooperate.

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Can I offer you a nice smectic B3 liquid crystal in this trying time?

Simple, “solid state” means “no moving parts”, like a vacuum tube, for example.

Interacting fields of non-causality?

And then there was quantum.

He did also notice that the planets didn’t move quite exactly as he predicted and said “well, God must keep them in place”

TBF the laws of motion are still correct.

I mean relativity is elegant enough in its own right; it’s just Newton’s laws plus the constancy of the speed of light and the equivalence principle. These two additions are enough to make everything an order of magnitude more fucked up, but that’s math’s fault, not relativity.

Adding to this: XX and XY works for mammals, but not for other vertebrates (fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians). Birds and reptiles have Z and W chromosomes, and unlike in mammals where females are homozygotes, males in these groups are homozygotes. Some reptiles have temperature dependent sex determination, where ambient temperature above some value will produce males or females (depends on species). Some reptiles are composed entirely of females.

Some fish will straight up change sexes depending on age and male-female ratio in a social group.

In other groups it’s not even different chromosomes but simply copy number of specific genes.

Plants can do all sorts of whacky things like produce seeds and pollen in the same individual.

Fungi are an entirely different cluster fuck because they have mating types which are not simple binaries.

Eukaryotic sex determination isn’t a binary and it isn’t even a nicely categorizable spectrum. It’s a grab-bag of whatever doesn’t perma-fuck your genome.

Source: me, I’m a biologist. Though admittedly I work on animals so my understanding of fungi and plant stuff is fuzzy at best.

https://xkcd.com/435/

I would say gender is probably centered about around psychology, ranges mostly from sociology to biology, with a just little bit going into chemistry

maybe like

Slime mold(which is not a mold or fungi) looks around nervously in it’s 13 different sexes.

I don’t entirely agree, because gender identity is known to be at least partially biological, e.g. there are correlations between transgender, skin elasticity, and hyper-flexibility.

What kind of fungi should I consider for the maximum giggles?

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Psychology is technically a branch of advanced biology

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy

A lot of problems in the world can be attributed to people who think “if I don’t understand something, it must be because the experts saying it are all wrong”.

Considering the names of the types of quarks, I recommend renaming them genderinos.

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finally, we found what genderfluid is made from

Physicists are freaky, like who was out there going and asking quarks what is their power dynamic in sex?

It also kinda sounds like a Pokémon!

Chatgpt is wrong here, sex is more like a series of bimodal bell curves measuring traits like gonad type, chromosomes, hormone levels, secondary sex characteristics, neurobiology, and probably some more I’m forgetting. For each trait, one bimodal peak can be labeled something like “typically male” and the other “typically female”. For instance, hormones would have “higher testosterone” for one peak and “higher estrogen” for the other. You can usually categorize male vs female by weighing where an animal falls on these bell curves across all traits, but that’s more of an art than a science, since the scientific perspective is more “sex is a composite profile” than “sex is a binary to be categorized”.

That’s why you always hear people say 'it’s a spectrum" or “it’s socially constructed”, because that’s the easiest way to explain it in simple terms (even if it is non-descriptive and annoying to hear as a shibboleth)

Dingus, you mixed biological and social gender. Biology usually talks about biological genders.

Math is extremely irrational.

I can confirm. My partner does math professionally and sometimes she tells me things about her field that are just plain unnatural. And I’m a pretty open-minded person.

The peaks do not designate “cis”, you can be cis and fall anywhere on the chart - being cis is about the sex you were arbitrarily assigned at birth (and whether that assignment aligns or conflicts with your actual gender identity).

And when doctors change assignments, it’s really unclear whether you’re cis or not if you transition - e.g. a baby assigned female at birth who is then weeks later assigned male at birth later transitions to be a girl, she was originally assigned female at birth - is she trans or cis?

Instead the peaks represent the most common combination of male and female sex traits in humans, with the slopes representing less common combinations of traits, e.g. to the left of the male peak might be men who experience excessive androgenization like lots of body hair, maybe precocious puberty, early balding, and so on (more male traits than average).

This chart as a model of sex actually doesn’t make much sense, since sex has been redefined in light of how complex sex is and the differences in sexual development that occur.

Where on the chart would we put someone with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS)? With CAIS a person is born with XY chromosomes and thus has a typical male karyotype, but their androgen receptors do not respond to androgens, so none of the masculinization is able to occur - leading the person to look, develop, and usually live as a woman.

The chart implies a spectrum, when the reality of biological sex is much more complex than a simple spectrum would allow - more like a constellation. Each sex differentiated trait is an axis / spectrum of its own, and there are thousands of ways differentiation can happen.

EDIT: oh, and to answer your question, it sounds like your question is really whether the peaks on a bimodal distribution represent a smaller number than the tails in aggregate, and the answer is that it depends on how you select your aggregates and how much of the peak you lump together. I think the entire point of the bimodal distribution, though, is to show that the majority fall on the peaks while the tails represent a minority.

That said, a MRI study found that when examining brain sex, >90% of people (mostly cis) were not able to be classed as having fully male or female brains, so realistically I think it’s fair to say most people are sexually divergent in some way.

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Well, clearly. If you define a male characteristic as something that’s more common in men than in women and vice-versa, then e.g. being tall would be a “male characteristic”.

Height isn’t a binary thing with men being exactly Xcm tall and women exactly Ycm, so there’s people who have more of said male characteristic and people who have less. And you also have women who have more of this characteristic and some men (e.g. there are some women that are taller than some men).

The same can be done for every characteristic that’s associated with a gender. Genitals are on a spectrum (large clitoris vs micropenis), fat distribution is on a spectrum (e.g. there are men with breasts and women without), body hair is on a spectrum, hormone distribution is on a spectrum and so on and so on.

If you take a lot of characteristics at once it becomes clear in most cases whether the person you are dealing with is a man or a woman (though there are some where that’s more difficult or impossible), but if you take just a single characteristic (e.g. height) it’s impossible to say whether the person you are dealing with is definitively a man or a woman.

I don’t think it’s an accepted term anymore, but you reminded me that they used to call the triple X chromosome syndrome by the term Super-Female-Syndrome.

Probably not what the author intended though.

It means that traditionally understood cis male can still have some female characteristics (no facial hair, higher pitched voice, bad at driving) but some males will have none.

yes.

Wolfram tells me sqrt(-1) = i and it hasn’t lied to me yet.

In what meaningful way is i^2 = -1 different from sqrt(-1) = i?

Wouldn’t the square root just give plus/minus i? Seems correct enough.

But (-i)^2=-1 as well. So we still need a convention to distinguish i from -i.

They’re the same thing. You just take the square root of both sides to get i = sqrt(-1).

Indeed, usually you would want to avoid a notation of sqrt(-1) or (-1)^(1/2). You would use e^(1/2 log(-1)) instead because mathematicians have already decided on a “natural” way to define the logarithm of complex numbers. The problem here lies with choosing a branch of the logarithm as e^z = x has infinitely many complex solutions z. Mathematicians have already decided on a default branch of the logarithm you would usually use. This matters because depending on the branch you choose sqrt(-1) either gives i or -i. A square-root is usually defined to only give the positive solution (if it had multiple values it wouldn’t fit the definition of a function anymore) but on the complex plane there isn’t really a “positive” direction. You would have to choose that first to make sure sqrt is defined as a function and you do that via the logarithm branch.
So, just writing sqrt(-1) leaves ambiguity as you could either define it to give i or -i but writing e^(1/2 log(-1)) then everyone would just assume you use the default logarithm branch and the solution is i.

Nah, sqrt(x) is the principal branch (the one with a positive real part) of x^½, and you can do (-1)^½ because it’s just exponentiation.

Simply define it as i = e^(iπ/2) 🤣