A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
though the meme is cool, gender isn't particularly a biology (or 'advance biology') thing. biology deals with sexes, their expressions and functionalities. gender is more of a personal and social concept but often related to sex characteristics (cis).
and yes, advanced biology tells sex determination isn't as easy as XX or XY or even looking at genitals like a creep.
and oh, for giggles consider fungi :)
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.
And bee queen generate full-animal-sized flying sperm, aka drones.
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
What's the y-axis?
Reason for another XKCD comic about bad graphs (or ten).
Slime mold(which is not a mold or fungi) looks around nervously in it's 13 different sexes.
What kind of fungi should I consider for the maximum giggles?
When Newton worked out the laws of motion, he figured they had to be correct because they were so simple and elegant.
He had no idea that relativity was going to come in and fuck his shit up.
And then there was quantum.
Do you have any idea how fast you were going?
No officer, but I can tell you exactly where I am!
Which is also simple and elegant
And then string theory. Which . . .
The music of the universe is a symphony, damnit. That’s inherently complex!
It’s a genuine shame the vibrating strings of reality sound like tinnitus to me.
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee
TBF the laws of motion are still correct.
it's not that they are "correct", it's that they are a close enough approximation to work well enough at the scale they're used. it's not like the universe runs on math.
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.
now do quantum
A genderino sounds more like something you'd find in particle physics than biology anyway
finally, we found what genderfluid is made from
Considering the names of the types of quarks, I recommend renaming them genderinos.
Physicists are freaky, like who was out there going and asking quarks what is their power dynamic in sex?
"I'm a charm in the streets, and a strange in the sheets."
I'm down for a strap on, but what is a glue on??
This guy rotates
Honestly, people would probably object more to advanced math than advanced biology if they were exposed as much to it. Or basic math. Or elementary math...
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.
So true and it's a great to remind them of that sort of thing.
You know, you'd think all of the people who say it's purely down to genetics would be natural allies with, you know, molecular biologists (applied genetics). They'd be all like "it's a Y chromosome or nothing" and the biologists would be all like "yeah chromosomes!" because we fucking love chromosomes but no. In fact, it's noticeably absent when you start to think about it.
I wonder why that might be?
The short answer is "because it's infinitely more complicated than that."
Just because you carry the genetic code for anything at all, it doesn't mean you'll express it. The default setting for our DNA is off. So, if something isn't telling it to transcribe, it won't do it. A whole load of reasons could cause that, even before we get to mutations and partial expression or chimeras etc.
Anyway, what i mean is yeah, this meme!
Edit: also, don't beleive the AI. Early fetuses are female, until the Y is activated. You could have an inactivated Y and the fetus could be a woman capable of having children. The default setting is female, not intersex. It could be either but unless a specific event happens, it will always be female. It's a subtle but important difference. This means that all fetuses are female and then turn into a male.
The problem is those morons haven’t taken any of the advanced classes and probably got D’s in the basic ones.
Sqrt(-1) is still wrong tho. I'm commuting a sin by writting it. Correct expression is i^2=-1
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?
But (-i)^2=-1 as well. So we still need a convention to distinguish i from -i.
That's fairly simple: we restrict the complex phase to the range (-pi, pi] and the principal square root halves the complex phase. -1 has the phase value pi, so the principal square root has the the complex phase pi/2, so it's i, while -i has a phase of -pi/2
Wouldn't the square root just give plus/minus i? Seems correct enough.
They’re the same thing. You just take the square root of both sides to get i = sqrt(-1).
