While being a computer geek, I have never been terribly good at high-level physics or maths. This post makes me want to change my mind, where it attempts to create a unified quantum theory out of sexuality.
If there is a difference in energy of the basis states a pure |M> state can oscillate between |S> and |G> according to a time-dependent phase factor arising when the two states interfere with each other:
|M(t)>=cosθ|S>exp(-iE1t) + sinθ|G>exp(-iE2t);
(obviously we are using natural units here, so that it all looks cleverer than it actually is). This equation is the origin of the expressions “it’s just a phase he’s going through” and “he swings both ways”. In physics parlance this means that the eigenstates of the sexual interaction do not coincide with the conventional gender types, indicating that sexual behaviour is not necessarily time-invariant for a given body.
Brilliant, but I’m going to have to do way more research before my eyes don’t glaze over repeatedly. Oh well, anything to self-improve.
And while we’re talking about sex and geekery, it’s worth mentioning that XKCD had a relevant comic recently (especially the more relevant if you’ve been attempting to follow all these crazy drama threads lately).
UPDATE April 10th, 2015
Content note: rape, consent, false accusations
Seeing as how people — Slimepitters, mostly, but all manner of ne’er-do-well — keep dredging this story up to pick at the scars, which have long since healed over (I blogged this six years ago, after all), I want to clarify a few things.
First, I don’t believe in the “friend zone”. I did, at the time, before I came to understand that is a construction to make “I’m not interested in you” some sort of sin, and before the term existed I was very much in danger of becoming one of those self-entitled and whiny “nice guys”. I also don’t, after reflection, think that the fact that this ex-girlfriend
Second, I absolutely maintain that this episode was formative in my understanding of rape and sexuality, and it created in me a literal phobia of abridging someone else’s consent, to the point of causing me issues with my partners.
Third, I wrote this piece partly for catharsis, and mostly intended it to be a reflection on my lack of understanding of traditional gender roles. I don’t know how to “be a man”.
Fourth, if somehow this story makes you worried about being around me, if it makes you want to dissociate yourself from me out of fear that I actually did rape my first girlfriend twenty years ago, do so. You don’t owe me anything. Do whatever you need to do to protect yourself, I will not mind.
Many have attacked me for my stance, using this story as their ammunition — MRAs and TERFs and antifeminists determined to attack feminists over some sort of imagined overreach on the topic of rape. I take this stand knowing full well that they mostly attack me because, by rights, I should have become a Men’s Rights Activist myself. I should have, if their narrative actually holds true, become one of them, attacking feminists for daring to talk about rape as a serious crime despite myself being victim of a false rape accusation. Though exceedingly rare (especially when you consider only the ones that make it to the cops’ ears), false rape accusations do actually happen — they are not entirely a myth, but they are certainly nowhere near as prevalent as MRAs would have you believe.
Most of my life, I’ve had no idea what it means to “be a man”. I mean, I’m heterosexual, I have a penis, I can open jars, like to tinker with electronics or recently woodworking, and I exhibit a number of traits that might be stereotypically intrinsic to males (f’r instance, I suck at navigation, especially if I’ve never been someplace before). But when you hear exhortations from just about everyone from your father to kids on the playground to (of all things) girlfriends, to “be a man”, and you just can’t parse the suggestion much less actively try to change yourself for it, it makes life, and navigating gender roles in today’s society, a little difficult. Continue reading “This one’s gonna be raw. Lots of naked Jason, and not the good kind. You are warned.”→
Below the fold, I will attempt the challenge as presented by Greg Laden, to rewrite Comrade PhysioProf’s “Handy Dandy Guide for d00dly Commenters“. The guide was originally presented as a numbered list of suggestions on how to not engender the rage of basically everyone on seemingly any feminist blog, but came off as a list of rules on what would not be tolerated and what would be considered trollish behaviour on Isis’ blog specifically, no matter how earnestly posted, to all but the most sycophantic of his boosters.
Please note that I don’t personally believe in these rules, though many of them are good suggestions on civility in public discourse with people who may have pre-existing hostility to your masculinity for various, and very good, reasons. Also, any number of them should probably be stripped of their gender assignments and applied to everyone equally. The point CPP was driving at is de facto wrong-headed, in that it purports to be applicable to all feminist blogs, when it most certainly is not. This is ONLY an attempt at rewriting the message for clarity, inclusiveness and coherence (though definitely not succinctness), and to explain why each of these suggestions might have been made. Additionally, I feel that they bring out nuances of each point that are missing in CPP’s profanity-riddled tirade.
Compare with the original list, and note that because the numbered format lends itself to being interpreted as hard and fast rules that will be referenced later (e.g., “see #4”), numbers will not be used below. Two points were combined into one, in keeping with my “suggestion then explanation” format.
See, CPP? Was this so hard? I hacked this out over lunch, and revised it on a coffee break later in the day! (It helps that I’m a phenomenal typer, and wasn’t really providing much original thought.)
(EDIT: Plus I’ve made a few more edits, to both the above description and the rules themselves below, as of about 9pm AST — to fix some things that were nagging me, and to clarify my original intent in posting this to begin with.)
Since we’re talking a bit about gender norms and sexist behaviour lately, here’s a fascinating study Jodi pointed out to me yesterday regarding what people perceive as sexist.
Jodi has reservations with some of the questions asked, feeling as though if there’s not a preexisting stereotype regarding the behaviour in the question, it’s not really sexism, or it might not be perceived as sexism. The example she gave me was that if someone were to see me typing madly away at my keyboard and say “wow, he’s good with computers, too bad he probably sucks at fishing,” while it does follow logically that heavy computer users might not get as much outdoor activity as others, the fact that there’s no preexisting stereotype suggesting that computer users are bad at fishing means that the statement is not a prejudice so much as a logical deduction. If someone were to see me and say “my, what a good looking man, too bad he must be bad at fishing”, if there was a pre-existing prejudice against hot men regarding fishing ability (like the example used of intelligence), then that would be a sexist comment.
One of the more surprising results to me is the fact that more women than men find misandry to be sexist. I suppose it’s not surprising that they’d be more attuned to sexism since the women’s liberation movement is probably still fresh in most women’s minds, but it’s quite surprising that men ignore sexism against them as often as they ignore sexism against women.
Wait, is it sexist to say that men are predisposed to turning a blind eye toward sexism as a whole? Studying this stuff always feels like you’re walking into a trap.
Researchers find first common autism gene. I have a (wholly unscientific) suspicion that autism is the result of a whole bunch of genes that are expressed in a certain relatively rare configuration in relation to one another, manifesting in the whole spectrum of ‘autistic’ behaviours including a number that weren’t always classified as such, like Asperger’s. The particular configuration of genes determines where on that spectrum you fall. This news fits my suspicion, at least.
Incidentally, I have a suspicion that homosexuality is the same way — there’s no one single gene you can pinpoint, but it’s the result of a whole lot of genes interacting in a specific combination; no one single gene making you prefer partners of your gender. In combination, knowing all the genes involved could lead to, say, figuring out the odds of your kid being gay before they’re even born. Horrifyingly, if that’s the case, homophobic parents might choose to abort or give up for adoption children that have above a specific percentile chance of being gay. Likewise with parents abandoning autistic kids, but there’s no in-grained social stigma about being on the autistic spectrum.
Anyway, back on topic — I wonder whether Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey will claim that vaccines somehow change your genetics. Or if they’ll miss the point and suggest that genetics accounts for only 15% of autistic cases, not realizing that this only means we’ve figured out what one specific gene looks like, not that we’ve “isolated the autism gene”.
Update: Well I was wrong about there being no social stigma about being autistic. Catching up reading Orac, I saw this article. It’s unbelievable the pain people are willing to cause over ridiculous, unfounded, unscientific, irrational fear of the unknown.
There are awesome people and idiots in every social group or subculture in the world. This includes ninjas, and it also includes ones where there’s a correlation between education and likelihood of joining the subculture, e.g. atheism. Just like those poser kids and trend whores in high school, or confused college students trying out bisexuality based solely on getting laid more often and/or because it’s popular, and not out of any real attraction to both genders, atheism, and specifically the “New Atheist movement” is being invaded by people who come to the decision to be atheist not because it’s the most rational one — they join up to be “counterculture”, to piss their parents off, or to build an identity for themselves during their formative years. Let’s call these douchebags “trend-atheists“.
This is very annoying to people like me, who came to atheism after being indoctrinated into Catholicism and who was “confirmed” before he even realized what was going on, finally learning that the universe is a vast and mysterious place, but that it could be comprehended through rational study and scientific endeavour. In all seriousness, I had no idea what was going on with the whole confirmation thing. I remember being incredibly anxious to get home and play Megaman, and honestly didn’t know why everyone was making such a big deal out of me going to church and standing in front of everyone, then eating a cracker handed to me by the old guy in a funny costume who smelled like liniment and maybe a hint of Vaseline and was sooooo boring when he read from that book he always had on his podium, that I thought maybe I could replace with my latest Hardy Boys book one day so we could find out what evildoers Joe and Frank discovered when they entered Pirates’ Cave!
Another thing that bothers me is the lack of understanding of the terms being bandied about. There’s a huge difference between a gnostic atheist and an agnostic atheist. Again, as with trend-atheism vs rational-atheism, reality favours the latter. First, definitions. Theist obviously means, “believes in God”. Prefix “a-” in Latin means “not”, so atheist therefore means “does not believe in God”. Likewise for gnostic — to be gnostic means you think the existence of God is knowable, e.g. that it’s possible to discover with 100% certainty that God exists. To be agnostic thus means you believe it’s NOT possible to know with 100% certainty that God exists.
This is shamelessly ripped off from this site, which is great. You should read it. No, finish my blog first. Yes, the whole thing. Then finish your peas.
As you probably have figured out from my previous rants introspections, I consider the concept of God to be inherently, by its very nature, by necessity, outside of our universe. Since we cannot know with any certainty what’s going on outside of our universe, since our existence is an abstraction of only three dimensions of it, then God is inherently unknowable. Even Richard Dawkins, one of the most vocal atheists out there, says he cannot know with 100% certainty that God doesn’t exist, but that he believes that God does not exist, and that the burden of proof is on those making the extraordinary claim that they can know that God exists with any degree of certainty whatsoever. Anyway, the only way to prove God exists is for God to do something that tells us he does. For instance, appear to us humans by making the moon into his head, and talking to all of us in all our languages simultaneously and telling us that he exists. And do it once a generation, to prove to every generation that he exists, lest we start thinking all our parents and grandparents were just delusional or were making unverifiable stuff up (you know, like with the Bible and the fish thing, or the walking on water thing, or the wine thing…). And also explain why it is that he must be worshipped or else he’ll damn you to an eternity of torture. And explain why what might seem like self-serving vanity in any other creature is perfectly acceptable and Supreme Good in him, because torture for eternity just for not believing in a magical universe-creating invisible guy is a pretty douchy thing to do.
So, the only sane, justifiable position to hold in the face of the deafening silence regarding direct evidence of God is simply to act like there isn’t one. Go ahead and enjoy life, better your fellow human’s lot, and do whatever you can to be a good, moral, and happy person, without worrying about what comes after you shuffle off this mortal coil, because there is no reward or punishment after death, no floating on a cloud, no eternal hellfire, no seventy-two virgins, and no cosmic High Score list on which you get to write your initials in as “FUK”.
tl;dr: I was atheist when atheism was underground, and people who use words wrong should be cock-punched. Or uterus-punched. (Don’t wanna be sexist.)
Sometime mid-December I read a blog with a brilliant little piece of genetic programming, wherein a set of pseudo-DNA is used to generate an image out of a set of, at maximum, fifty semitransparent, overlapping polygons, in an effort to “evolve” this pseudo-DNA toward looking as much as possible like the Mona Lisa. The idea is, can something specific evolve through only a series of randomly generated mutations?
As genetic programming goes, this is a great example, however I have to take issue with the approach as being an example of “evolution” — by my understanding, at least, not that I’m a geneticist, biologist, or even a decent programmer. The original program has a population of two, the original and the slightly-mutated “offspring”. The offspring is compared to the target image, and if it is more like the target image than the original, then it replaces the original for the next iteration. After almost a million iterations, as shown on his blog, the image looks significantly like the original.
More on my attempt at this same concept below the fold…
