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[King Zultan]

Or friend zoned?

[Frumple]

I have ascertained with certainty that Puppalupagus is the perfect name for a dog.

[methylatedspirit]

Putting "dynamic" before anything makes it automatically cooler.

I think it's difficult to say at what point a person is considered androgynous. Every person has their own idea of masculinity and femininity, and it varies quite a bit. On top of that, most people (me included) tend to classify towards one or the other. Hitting that 50:50 point is difficult.

It's like there's a ball and a hill in the center of the gender expression spectrum. Unless you place the ball just right, it rolls towards one of the ends. Then consider that the position of that hill is shifted by some random amount for any given person, and it's real hard to look androgynous to everyone.

I'm not saying it's pointless to want to look like that. I'm just wondering if it's possible for a character on a show to look and sound androgynous to a general audience without having some go "I think that looks like a boy" and some go "Nah, that's a girl". Best you can do is have 50% say they're masculine, and 50% say they're feminine. Pretty much the BBC's way of being neutral; tune the articles until 50% say there's left-wing bias and 50% say there's right-wing bias.

[HmH]

A division by sex is so engendered in the culture that it'd be really hard to create and represent a truly androgynous character.
Even if you explicitly state that they have no sex or gender, people will still subconsciously look for minor cues in the way they are written that indicate masculinity or femininity.

[scriver]

An androgynos person is not, to me, a person who is neither masculine or feminine. It is a person who exudes both femininity and masculinity.

[Rolan7]

I don't think there is one definition.  Such is the limitation of language.

*I* like scriver's definition.  But other people who are androgynous may not.  Someone who aspires to be both masculine and feminine is, hm, alien to me.  But they do exist and I support their existence, and we together fight against the traditional gender roles of modern society.

The important thing is that people be allowed to express themselves and not be hurt for challenging the status quo.  We seek to change that status quo to not label us as monsters.  That's all I want.

[methylatedspirit]

In a talk about a demoscene programmer's motivations for using limited hardware (relevant portion), I heard that the digger wasp gets a dead insect (like a grasshopper), digs a hole, goes into the hole, gets out, then grabs the grasshopper, then pulls it into the hole. Apparently, if you mess with the wasp by moving the grasshopper while it's in the hole, it thinks something has gone wrong (missing grasshopper), and it literally goes back into the hole. You move the grasshopper again while it's in the hole yet again, it still thinks something has gone wrong, and it resets back to going back into the hole. You can do this over, and over, and over, and that wasp doesn't suspect a thing.

There's a finite state machine here (to my understanding). It's an honest-to-god state machine, and it's hardcoded into the brains of all the digger wasps. I'm wondering, when we're not actively thinking about something, how much of the human brain is just a large collection of state machines, encoding the sequence of steps taken to do something? There's a lot of instances where I've been that wasp, being repeatedly tricked by having the grasshopper being moved by an outside force, and I'm just oblivious to that trickery.

Is the human brain not itself just a gigantic state machine capable (to itself; depends on whether you believe in free will) of manipulating other state machines simpler (for some arbitrary definition of "simple") than itself?

[Naturegirl1999]

This is an interesting question, also I didn’t know about digger wasps before, I’m curious why the digger wasp goes in, goes out, then puts the grasshopper in the hole, why not dig the hole, get the grasshopper inside, then go in and eat it or lay eggs in it or whatever else the grasshopper might be used for.

The brain being what you described makes sense. If I do something repeatedly and zone out, I’ll continue doing the thing until someone tells me to stop.

In other news, I managed to stay up all night without being tired...here’s hoping the lack of tiredness persists until classes are over

[MaxTheFox]

Forgot to mention my birthday here, it was on the 2nd.

[Kagus]

Re: Digger wasps
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphex
(Includes the fantastic new term, "Sphexishness")

As an aside, it's my understanding that the human brain is capable of the many mysterious and incredible things it is, precisely because it doesn't function quite like that. Our brains are far more adept at working with abstract concepts and "fudging" information into something usable. ...we're in fact so adept at this, that it's pretty much the only thing we're really good at, and we do it for a lot of inputs and functions that really shouldn't be handled quite like that. This is how we end up with scenarios like putting a spoonful of instant coffee or something into a mug, and then pouring hot water into the tin instead of the mug.

Also, the snippet in that Wikipedia article mentions that the "endless reset" of even the wasp's behavior is somewhat disputed... Generally speaking, adaptive behavior is far more beneficial from a survival viewpoint than strictly defined task management.

But you do end up with funny things occasionally, like that experiment where a researcher glued stilts onto the legs of ants that were out exploring beyond the hill, leading to them completely overshooting the hill on the return trip and ending up completely baffled in the middle of nowhere because the internal pedometer they apparently use to keep track of where they are doesn't factor in changes in gait.

Summary of the experiment

Slightly more in-depth

Forgot to mention my birthday here, it was on the 2nd.

Happy belated birthday!

[scriver]

Happy New Birthday Years Max! Is that the Russian equivalent of being born on Christmas?

[bloop_bleep]

Happy New Birthday Years Max! Is that the Russian equivalent of being born on Christmas?

Actually they were born near Christmas where they are too. Since Orthodox Christmas is on the 7th.

[MaxTheFox]

New Year is secular, and is pretty much like the shopping and parties-heavy part of American Christmas. Not much special about being born just after it. Orthodox Christmas is a quiet religious holiday.

[scriver]

The "special" thing about being born on Christmas is that you don't get birthday presents or birthday parties because it's already Christmas anyway

[methylatedspirit]

I don't think I could ever properly argue or debate with people. I'm so inclined to agree and compromise with people that I almost always respond with "No, but..." (or anything that simplifies to that), if not just "Yes". Notice how I speak like I'm trying to cover my ass: "probably", "I believe", "...but I'm no ____", all those are me trying to find common ground first, and speaking what I believe (see?) to be true second. I don't like disagreeing outright; write-off answers are like sledgehammers to me; too violent, too destructive, too much collateral damage. There are points where I bring those out, but that's rare. I want to agree.