this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] affiliate@lemmy.world 104 points 6 days ago (10 children)

i think that if more people were exposed to advanced math there would be a reactionary trend of people going around and asking mathematicians “what is a number?”

[–] Siethron@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago

Advanced mathematicians see a numeric digit and ask "what's that?"

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 35 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (4 children)

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?

[–] Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago (2 children)

I'm shocked that the US only adopted this in 2009. I'm pretty sure my mum, who went to primary school in the 70s, recognized number lines when I was taught to use them on 2005ish. I'm having a hard time imagining how else you'd explain it.

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

look, we work very hard on being reactionary here in the U.S., we're a world leader in reactionary politics, and not teaching math well is crucial to keeping a vibrant ~~slave~~ worker population, otherwise they might start, you know, thinking for themselves

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 5 points 5 days ago

First you make them memorize single digit subtraction X - Y where X >= Y. Then you extend that to small double digit numbers.
Then you teach "borrowing". 351-213. Subtract the 1s column. Can't take 3 from 1, so borrow 10 from the 5 in the 10s column, making 11 in the 1s column and 4 in the 10s.

Definitely more clear, right?

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[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 12 points 5 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] GorGor@startrek.website 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

The whole new math everyone was complaining about is trying to do this. Granted teachers are human and flawed so sometimes it has not been implemented well, but it is aimed in the right direction.

I am absolutely going to start responding to questions / statements about gender with this concept though.

"There are only two genders"

"Yeah, and there are only 3 states of matter! These woke scientists with their DEI alphabet soup of mattet B-E Condensates, and QSL, and DEGERATE MATTER! Its sick I tell you"

[–] homura1650@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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?

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[–] ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 104 points 6 days ago (6 children)

I'm a career physicist, and I honestly have no idea what a state of matter is anymore.

[–] la508@lemmy.world 40 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] MycelialMass@lemmy.world 25 points 6 days ago

You may not.

[–] nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 20 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

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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An abstraction used for grouping kinds of things together for the purposes of making thinking about them a lot faster.

[–] axont@hexbear.net 26 points 6 days ago (2 children)

yeah i have a bachelor's in chemistry and I remember a professor earnestly saying the phrase "metallic phase nitrogen" and I think I went home and stared at the ceiling for an hour

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[–] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 12 points 6 days ago (4 children)

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

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)
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[–] SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 20 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Bigot: "trans people aren't natrual according to science!!"

Scientist: "we've learned that trans people are natrual and this has helped us broaden our understanding of gender and human psychology"

Bigot: "stfu!! >:c

[–] Hellsfire29@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago

Moving the goal posts sure does make sense!!!!

[–] Rozz@lemmy.sdf.org 38 points 6 days ago

If certain people could almost understand they would be very upset

[–] k4gie@lemmy.world 14 points 6 days ago (14 children)

Do the two tails left of M and right of F mean there are males more male than cis males, and similarly with females?

[–] outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 42 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Yes, hyperreal genders do exist, but are not stable outside lab conditions.

[–] Mastema@infosec.pub 8 points 6 days ago (5 children)

I would submit David Bowie as a counter example.

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[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 22 points 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (8 children)

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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[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 18 points 6 days ago

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.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

...

I am a horrible person, but the only thing I can think of reading this is a small-circuit pro wrestling event where all participants have this set of chromosomes, billed as 'The Triple X Throwdown', for the title of Supreme Female.

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