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What the Fark 2: That Was... Interesting.

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Re: What the Fark 2: That Was... Interesting.

joecct said:
More reason to hate Harvard (not that Kepler & LynahFan need much).

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...er-pronouns/C0EXpZHw09zwCzo4hVhjdJ/story.html
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This is one of those things that I'd have to ask The Kids about. Sure, to a 50-year old straight married white guy who spends his time here talking to other 50-year old straight married white guys, my thought is that's a lot of effort for a small sliver of the population who isn't even calling for it. But hey, this may be The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time if you're 18.

The other thing is there's a ceiling effect for adding any more hatred of Harvard. They've gotta do better than this.
 
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Kepler said:
This is one of those things that I'd have to ask The Kids about. Sure, to a 50-year old straight married white guy who spends his time here talking to other 50-year old straight married white guys, my thought is that's a lot of effort for a small sliver of the population who isn't even calling for it. But hey, this may be The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time if you're 18.

The other thing is there's a ceiling effect for adding any more hatred of Harvard. They've gotta do better than this.
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Im a 30-something that practices in the civil rights area, and I think this is a bit absurd. Then again, I will admit I don't really get the whole transgender thing anyway. Sexual orientation, I get. Being a tomboy or an effeminate male, I get that, too. But being a woman trapped in a mans body, or vice versa, I have absolutely no frame of reference for that. And that's even after one of my old grade school classmates underwent gender reassignment surgery to the surprise of absolutely no one.

I have no objections to it and will fight to ensure they can use the public bathrooms of their perceived gender and the like, but I admit I don't get it. In my head, you are genetically male or female, whether you conform to that or not.
 
Re: What the Fark 2: That Was... Interesting.

joecct said:
More reason to hate Harvard (not that Kepler & LynahFan need much).

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/20...er-pronouns/C0EXpZHw09zwCzo4hVhjdJ/story.html
Click to expand...

Congratulations to Harvard. You're as progressive as.....the University of Tennessee. Reposting from SCOTUS thread:

5mn_Major said:
Although a self designated progressive above all else...am I actually thinking this is going too far?

University of Tennessee tells staff and students to stop using 'he' and 'she' http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...nts-stop-using-switch-xe-zir-xyr-instead.html

Maybe I'm finally getting old.
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Seems like gender-neutral pronouns are the "Kardashians" of academia these days.

I remember discussing the topic at Cornell back in the early 90's. The "church" I attended at the time was all about inclusiveness and such, so they were debating whether to officially adopt them - decided not to in the end, thank goodness. I have no idea how one could keep his "hers" and "hirs" straight anyway.
 
Re: What the Fark 2: That Was... Interesting.

unofan said:
I have no objections to it and will fight to ensure they can use the public bathrooms of their perceived gender and the like, but I admit I don't get it. In my head, you are genetically male or female, whether you conform to that or not.
Click to expand...

I think of it as software and hardware. The assembly line produces a spectrum of hardware with two very tall camel humps whose mean is "male" and "female." The hardware is all the physical stuff, not just sex organs but also brain wiring, etc. The important thing is it varies because the assembly line is really complex (and because nobody designed it, but that's a different issue...). The gender "humps" aren't distinct models, but they are hardware configurations that have a high probability.

Next the release management team loads the software. Again, the software is a spectrum with a distribution very much like the hardware. Typically the configuration matches a hardware configuration that is in the locality of the "male" hump with a software configuration that is in the locality of the "male" hump. But there's variance, and sometimes the mapping is way off or even the opposite of the expectation. To make it more complicated, since the software is manifested in physical material and processes that live in the same natural medium as the hardware, the two constantly interact and modify one another, at least around the edges. (The analogy breaks down here, or perhaps the "software" is better thought of as firmware.)

Finally, the product gets released and programs start running on it. The programs perform IO with the outside world, but the software/firmware is extremely malleable and learns based on inputs. One of the most important input streams relates to perceptions of gender, so for example if the machine displays male hardware and seems to be delivering outputs characteristic of female software, this causes a lot of dissonance. Part of the hardware/firmware/software configuration is the material substrata that gives the machine consciousness and self-perception, and it has an enormous set of routines for dealing with this dissonance, including modifying its own software to adhere more to expectations associated with the hardware. The selection of these routines is also dependent on the external stimulae -- for example the subroutine that accepts inputs from the "father" unit physically battering the machine for liking flute rather than drums. (The father unit obviously was built the same way and has been dealing with its own software lifecycle).

Trans people, to me, are running x-ish software on y-ish hardware and, rather than follow the hitherto socially popular routine of forcing the software to adhere to the hardware, want to do the opposite. As gendered expectations based solely on hardware fade, more machines will probably be perfectly happy with their initial configuration, since the "mismatching" won't carry negative inputs.
 
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Re: What the Fark 2: That Was... Interesting.

Kepler said:
I think of it as software and hardware. The assembly line produces a spectrum of hardware with two very tall camel humps whose mean is "male" and "female." The hardware is all the physical stuff, not just sex organs but also brain wiring, etc. The important thing is it varies because the assembly line is really complex (and because nobody designed it, but that's a different issue...). The gender "humps" aren't distinct models, but they are hardware configurations that have a high probability.

Next the release management team loads the software. Again, the software is a spectrum with a distribution very much like the hardware. Typically the configuration matches a hardware configuration that is in the locality of the "male" hump with a software configuration that is in the locality of the "male" hump. But there's variance, and sometimes the mapping is way off or even the opposite of the expectation. To make it more complicated, since the software is manifested in physical material and processes that live in the same natural medium as the hardware, the two constantly interact and modify one another, at least around the edges. (The analogy breaks down here, or perhaps the "software" is better thought of as firmware.)

Finally, the product gets released and programs start running on it. The programs perform IO with the outside world, but the software/firmware is extremely malleable and learns based on inputs. One of the most important input streams relates to perceptions of gender, so for example if the machine displays male hardware and seems to be delivering outputs characteristic of female software, this causes a lot of dissonance. Part of the hardware/firmware/software configuration is the material substrata that gives the machine consciousness and self-perception, and it has an enormous set of routines for dealing with this dissonance, including modifying its own software to adhere more to expectations associated with the hardware. The selection of these routines is also dependent on the external stimulae -- for example the subroutine that accepts inputs from the "father" unit physically battering the machine for liking flute rather than drums. (The father unit obviously was built the same way and has been dealing with its own software lifecycle).

Trans people, to me, are running x-ish software on y-ish hardware and, rather than follow the hitherto socially popular routine of forcing the software to adhere to the hardware, want to do the opposite. As gendered expectations based solely on hardware fade, more machines will probably be perfectly happy with their initial configuration, since the "mismatching" won't carry negative inputs.
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Probably easier if we just say Cait was assembled in a Thai sweatshop. Some pretty crazy stuff can be found in that country.
 
Re: What the Fark 2: That Was... Interesting.

SJHovey said:
Probably easier if we just say Cait was assembled in a Thai sweatshop. Some pretty crazy stuff can be found in that country.
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I wouldn't lick her, then. Lead paint.

But the point is she wasn't -- she's not "shoddy," she is what she is as are we all.
 
Re: What the Fark 2: That Was... Interesting.

geezer said:
sounds biblical.
Exodus 3:14
1 Corinthians 15:10
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.ybab ,אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה

Jefferson was right. The Bible rocks if you just ignore the hocus-pocus filler.
 
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Re: What the Fark 2: That Was... Interesting.

This starts out as a pedestrian member of the Nice Planet thread. But then this happens:

But it’s mostly hard to remember that Terrence Howard is a real person when he starts doing things like explaining why 1x1 does not equal one:

“How can it equal one?” he said. “If one times one equals one that means that two is of no value because one times itself has no effect. One times one equals two because the square root of four is two, so what’s the square root of two? Should be one, but we’re told it’s two, and that cannot be.” This did not go over well, he says, and he soon left school. “I mean, you can’t conform when you know innately that something is wrong.”
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Click to expand...
 
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