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These are good points. Especially with regard to sports I find it laughable that folks are so hung up on some objective measure, whereas literally everything in a sport is based on the creative design of a game. Fundamentally, I have not heard any argument that addresses why performance differences cannot be used to create competition categories, whereas almost everything in sports is (e.g. different leagues, or competition levels). Taking F1, for example, from what I understand it is actually open but few women qualified. This is perhaps not terribly surprising as only few women compete in it, so there it is unclear whether gender influences performance. But here essentially again a measure (i.e. time) is used to gate who gets to compete in a Grand Prix. I was curious about jockeys and I found a recent study (https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1527002520975839) indicating that there is no difference in performance between men and women, though women rarely get to participate. I.e. it appears that women just have fewer opportunities to compete in the first place. It is still puzzling to me (and I am repeating myself here, but it does not seem to get addressed) that there is the assumption that any evaluation of transgender would be highly subjective, yet at the same time they maintain that the performance of female transgender athletes puts them categorically above a cisgender women. If they do, it should be easy enough to measure. And if you cannot measure, why would you need make a new category? And of course, with further understanding of the biology of sexes we now also know that the binary gender distinction is a categorization based on convenience, which covers the vast majority of cases. Yet clearly, the distinction ignores detailed biological realities and is therefore not inherently objective. I fail to see how this is relevant to the discussion. Feminine is a group of traits that are traditionally associated with what we consider to be women. I.e. it is a collection of cultural traits that are part of the gender constructs in a given society. Depending on society the certain traits can be either feminine or masculine. In the Mosuo society, for example, making business decisions is considered a feminine activity, whereas in most others it is more associated with men. But again, other than to complicate matters I am not sure how that helps in any way. Edit: However, if you think feminine is an objective indicator of sorts, then I think that could be the root of the issue. Perhaps read the link I provided earlier and see how that relates to your thinking on that issue.

None of my CPUs is on the CPU list released by Microsoft https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/supported/windows-11-supported-intel-processors (if somebody does not know how to check, Start > dxdiag)

I've seen a few YouTube videos discussing its release. It seems that the PC requirements for installing it are quite stringent. Only pretty recent CPUs are compatible. (Microsoft has release an "approved CPU" list). MS had also put out a "Health Checker" do you could see if your PC was up to the task, But the backlash from it telling so many people that their PC couldn't run Windows 11 caused them to pull it. Out of curiosity, I checked my CPU against the approved list, and it was on it (my PC is less than a year old), But like @StringJunky, I'll think I'll wait and see.

That will probably have more teething problems than the usual major update. I myself will wait at least six months for issues to be fixed and consolidated in the first major update for windows 11. Curiosity wins sometimes though...

Except perhaps for cold fusion and homosexuality, these are not Science-- they are applications of science coupled with engineering, management, and in some cases marketing decisions. It is the applications of science (among other things), sometimes poorly conceived, that lead to disasters. Science not applied generally does not hurt anybody. As for homosexuality, It is merely one facet of the normal range of human behaviors. Not my thing but I don't think it needs a cure.

No I mean those who cannot distinguish between the word 'Science' and the word 'scientists'. Thank you for the support from whoever does not want to derail this thread.

The restricted CPU support appears to be due to a thing called TPM 2.0, if the CPU does not support that or work with that, then I think MS want to avoid or discourage use of Windows 11. But MS are all over the place, the company keeps messing up stuff like never before, like the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing or they've started hiring more dorks.

@Kartazion If your machine has HTTP/HTTPS server, you can make simple PHP script which will make/update file by file_put_contents() somewhere, and examine date and time of the last access of the file from bash script. If access time is more than 5 minutes ago, refuse SSH connection. So procedure of logging would be: open browser on mobile or so, visit your top secret PHP script location, then login to SSH or whatever else. If somebody does not have idea that must visit website with the right URI with script first, will be rejected.

How competitive ? Do you use a male fishfinder, the less accurate female fishfinder, or do you cheat and modify your male fishfinder to look like a female one ? ( I never miss an opportunity to hammer a point home, Zap 😄😄 ) I must admit, I ( and some others ) feel somewhat like J K Rawlings. Mentioning that, some of the steps being taken to ensure 'equality' for trans women are detrimental to the equalty of cis women, is immediately shouted down with accusations of transphobia. ( we never did discuss this, but it seems to tie in )

This whole issue seems to me to be intractable so I offer no solutions. I am mindful of the recent David Attenborough Blue Planet series and the video sequences of clownfish. These are interesting because one particular sequence showed the clownfish, with the intermediate one showing a 'male' side to one fish and a 'female' side to the other. Male and female sides being quite distinctive amongst clownfish. I understand several other marine species have variations of the sex, sex change and hemaphrodite theme. Part of the problem appears to me to be that there are a number of different issues tangled up and these isuues are pulling in different directions. For example, but not an exhaustive list. 1) There is a biological input which we are now discovering is far more copmplex than was once realised. 2) There is a mechanical input since many sports rely on the quality of the equipment and staging or venue. 3) There is a question of 'what is a sport?' and more specifically does the gender/sex make a difference to the stated aims of that sport ? Are male jockeys, F1 drivers, village bowls players, orienteers, ............ any better than female or any other or does it make no difference? The most popular sport in the UK is fishing.

I like to think mine was better...

Which, as you may understand, makes dialog with you on possible paths forward rather challenging and frustrating. Some of us would like a better solution than “let them have their own separate water fountains.”

No one can answer this accurately enough to judge which transgenders should be allowed to compete in CY's suggested "Women's" category at competitive levels. The baseline is elusive enough prior to judging on a case by case basis as described. You think anything suggested here is fair to trans athletes? Do you thinks it's fair to have someone judge whether they are "women enough" to compete? How about allowing them to compete...and then telling them they are no longer eligible after realizing the maintained more "biological advantage" than previously judged? How about making sure they are handicapped so onerously they cannot win? Would that be any better? Do you think it's fair to ask a transgender athlete to alter their body chemistry if they wish to compete? I can see no path to success on this. I can see it failing and all the so called "experts" abandoning it like rats off a sinking ship...I mean they meant well...hoped it would work out...and the athletes getting pointed at are adults and did choose to subject themselves to the drug regimes required to compete ...so not their fault. Except it would be.

Negative mass poses other problems: I'm not 100 % sure that you can't still play with these things in a speculative way by carefully distinguishing: 1) Active gravitational mass (as source of the gravitational field) 2) Passive gravitational mass (as reacting to a gravitational field) 3) Inertia And complicating the picture of how they interplay by introducing assumptions that extend the Bondi-Bonnor model. But negative mass is a completely different matter. Keep in mind that the Einstein relation between energy and momentum leaves you with, \[ E^{2} = \pm \sqrt{\boldsymbol{p}^2 + m^2 c^4 } \] Time orientation is on the plus minus determination of the square root, not on the sign of the mass.

Neutrinos hardly interact at all. As MigL said, how are they supposed to interact with macroscopic skyrmions? What's the mechanism? How do you focalise a beam of electron neutrinos so as to guarantee that they keep at a distance of a fraction of a nanometer from a lattice? Why should they invert their mass? And if they do, tachyonic quantum fields do not travel faster than light, and they do not have negative mass, but imaginary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyonic_field (My emphasis.) I will also quote a sentence that I once heard Lenny Susskind: "Only crackpots think tachyons go faster than light"

What makes you think neutrinos will even interact with topological solitons ?

I think you need to read some basic texts to challenge your notions. It goes beyond chromosomal pairing, and especially advances in high-throughput genetic analyses have started to show how biology diverges from our preconceptions. Here is a decent and easy read: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/

If you had stated that there are things we may possibly never know ( as exchemist stated in the post above yours ), like the color of aunt Mabel's socks, on a world, in a universe that existed 100 billion years before ours, this discussion would have ended 9 pages ago, as everyone would have agreed with you. But let us be clear, these are 'scientific' obstacles to our knowing; the fact that you chose to term it 'supernatural' ( among many other terms ) is what got under people's skin. This is a science forum; you'll have to excuse us for thinking like scientists.

It's not a sharp dichotomy. It's not male and female, it's a continuum: maleness to femaleness and vice versa. In the world of science, 'commonsense' is what it tries to avoid and is not a defence... it's a subjective position.

That is not what I said. Not at all. I’ve already clarified this for you more than once, yet you persist in your misrepresentation. It’s as if I’d said, “This is a lovely home. It reminds me of my grandmothers house,” and you replied, “I’ve never lived with your grandmother. I don’t even know her. Why are you lying? What’s wrong with you?” Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Thanks for sharing that lovely insight. That remains irrelevant to my point and it seems clear you’re refusing to argue in good faith.

In which case the claim that my position on gender and sports is "akin to refusing to accept gay marriage and forcing same sex couples to be called civilly unioned, or suggesting blacks be treated separate but equal" is pure speculation. In fact attempting to imply I am a racist is possibly a breach of forum rules.

I did not actually suggest that we exclude those who are neither XX nor XY, I just said that such individuals are neither male or female. Perhaps, but the division men and women is based on an objective scientific facts, the chromosome pairing. To tell women that they must now compete with men who claim to be females irrespective of this chromosome criteria is inherently prejudicing women, it makes their challenge more difficult while making the challenge for these men, more easy. This is not a real disadvantage, if they no longer want to compete in the men's category then that's their choice, I do not see why women should be expected to suffer just because men who claim to be female decide to no longer participate as men. They quite obviously aren't, they have XY chromosomes whereas women have XX. Yes, I have no problem with new categories being introduced. What is my position on gay marriage and same sex unions?

! Moderator Note I've had enough of the arguments in bad faith (violating rule 2.12) and the soapboxing (violating 2.8) Scientific discussion has to be backed up by science. It's not just saying "Nuh uh" to each rebuttal. You had ample opportunity to add some rigor to your argument, and you didn't. Don't re-introduce this topic.

Unless I am mistaken, gold in its natural state is already slightly alloyed. Hence his information of its origin (for example inserted or disseminated in quartz veins with different sulphides, for example in cupro-leado-zinc veins, or in pegmatites. It can be associated with skarns near sites of contact metamorphism and hypothermal deposits, sometimes in sedimentary rocks.). - Electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver - Porpezite, a natural alloy of gold and palladium - Rhodite, a natural gold alloy, and originates from Mexico and Colombia. - The Amalgam alloy of gold and Mercury. There is no such thing as 100% pure gold. In the precious metals industry, 24-karat gold is said to be pure. If it is lower, it means that the other parts of its alloy are made up of other metals.

! Moderator Note If you present speculation, you MUST PRESENT EVIDENCE FOR IT After 200+ posts, ignorance of the rules isn’t an excuse that buys you additional chances

! Moderator Note Without the physics to describe this, such conjecture is useless, and also contains insufficient rigor for discussion.

Perhaps we should make this BBC presentation a sticky for members to point out to those not understanding how Science works. https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/why-getting-things-wrong-is-good-for-science/p09mb351

Tying all this talk back to the thread, I feel that issues like transgendered athletes are lures cast into social media by bad actors and bottom feeders to bait us all into choppy waters. They’re basically chumming and dredging with small insignificant issues so we become distracted and don’t focus on more important things or focus on their wrongdoings and the way they rig the system. Too often we oblige and get reeled in and fall for it hook, line, and sinker. I don’t think it needs to be this hard, though. Letting the trans athletes compete may feel like swimming against the current, but the tributaries are likely to be fertile and the lakes well stocked if we allow it.

This a perfect example of why I will no longer be discussing this subject with you, condescension is your preferred tool when you are on the back foot, rigor and honesty are of little value to you, is this very post an ad-hominem? yes I suppose it is but this is why such language is frowned upon by mature debaters, it always, always, always leads to a breakdown of the discussion, I will not be responding to any more of your posts in this thread, I said this already then gave you another opportunity which you did not value or learn from, so now you can post all you wish, it is beneath me to waste my time with someone who seems to have no interest in the subject other than his ego. Let me leave you with this, an example of a discussion between two opposing positions without the slightest hint of condescension, insults, ad-hominem, at no point does Russell introduce terms like "fiction" or "unicorns" or "mashed potato" or "reading comprehension", he could have done I'm sure, but he had no need, no base ego to satisfy. You do not know what you do not know and you do not know how to respectfully discuss anything with anyone, perhaps, just perhaps you can put your ego to one side and learn from this, the ball's in your court. Well your reaction stems it seems from my introduction of an analogy, the analogy that we can know there is no point in continuing to seek an example of two integers who's ratio is π . So let me ask you, do you know that we can never find such a pair of integers or do you regard it as a possibility given enough time to conduct a search? this is not so much a mathematics question as it is a logic question. Having an answer from you will help us move forward.

It's misleading speculation intended to disparage me, I fully support gay marriage, I fully support the fair and equal treatment of people irrespective of skin color.

Do you really want to pursue this line of reasoning? it leads nowhere useful. For example what if someone argued that marriage to twelve year old girls should be legalized and accepted by society, including some 12 twelve year old girls? Today - we and certainly I - would point out that this is a child but then someone could ask "define child for me?". So, how would you react if someone were to suggest this? I don't see how it is not part of "the issue", if there were not men claiming to be female (that is, demanding to be regarded as female wherever the distinction arises) then there would not be an issue surely? Furthermore if you insist on supporting this idea then logically we should eliminate the current distinction between men and women altogether since if we cannot scientifically define "woman" (as you and some others appear to argue) then why even entertain the concept at all? Why even have terms like "feminine" or "masculine" when there's no logical prospect of defining these? Can you define "feminine" for me for example in objective scientific terms?

There are two sexes male and female, as for "gender" this is a social construct.

What a pile of horse shit. What a pile of horse shit