TheVat

I appreciated the MSN article's observation that "correlation is not causation." My testosterone is likely to be considerably higher than that of the two Sub-Saharan women, yet I'm entirely sure they would complete any footrace with me laps behind them. (unless the starting gun contained live rounds and was fired directly at them) The multitude of physical factors is so large -- skeletal proportions, ratio of fast-twitch fibers, hormonal balance, variations in mitochondrial DNA (yes, some folks do have better mitochondria for certain sports where endurance matters -- we're not sled dogs, but there's a variable range in the human species), allergic responses, erythrocyte count (do you live above 2000 m.?), innate joint flexibility (woman do better than men, on this one), and so on. In some competitions, like running, specific physical factors are strongly linked with cis-gender and are understood to relate to the mechanics of running. Narrow hips allow for more efficient bipedal running. Paired with a deep chest, you get the classic physique of the long-distance runner. All the training and fierce spirit in the world is not going to make a cis-female competitive in that particular sort of competition, because race outcomes are so dependent on anatomical factors. It's not like basketball, where a short man can get onto a team with speed, lightning=fast moves, and amazing outside shots (Nate Archibald is the classic exemplar). So, you would be left with two choices for aspiring female long-distance runners. One, you can compete, but you will probably lose all the time. Two, you can compete only with people whose bipedal mechanics is somewhat similar to yours, which would be the traditional women's event. So, where do the biomechanically-different trans-females go, then? With larger chest cavities and vital capacity, and narrower hips, they would seem to be competitive in the men's event. Does the problem then become one of nomenclature? (forgive my longwindedness, and my likely rehashing aspects of this discussion that probably were already covered somewhere back in the 17 prior pages of this thread.)

In terms of climatic tipping points, it seems to me the media have not brought the importance of albedo change sufficiently to the public's attention. Both temp rise and particulate deposition on ice fields (diesel soot, dust, and so on) seem to be major players in ice shrinkage. Those are scary numbers (but these days what numbers, in climatological data, aren't scary?). The potential effect on the AMOC, of dumping lots of cold glacial melt in to the North Atlantic, is also something that Europe needs to be crisis planning for. Especially UK, which dips its feet right in the middle of the AMOC. Thanks for posting this.

Thanks, iNow. I like the "meta" joke in having such a thread. And I suppose the topic can help more reticent members come out of their shell. Some topics, however, are only of interest in (m)academia. I will recommend Christopher Guest's nuts monologue, in the film "Best in Show. "

What a silly thread. Let me completely embrace that spirit.... I've been aware of the almonds-drain-aquifer problem for a while, but never felt any deep sense of loss when I quit eating them. I ate them raw (the most nutritive form) and always had the feeling I was only one step removed from gnawing on wood chips. That first chomp on the nut always sent reverberations through my skull that reminded why they are, technically, known as stone fruits. More importantly, why bother with almonds when you live on a planet that grows pecans, walnuts, and pistachios? (the first two require no sculpting whatever to resemble little brains...)

I think the point made about basketball (it tends to discriminate towards very tall people) is a fair one, as it underscores that all sports at the higher levels are going to be somewhat exclusionary and attract people with a certain anatomical blueprint. No one has proposed "professional short people's basketball," or "football (American usage) for the small-boned." In this sense, all sports (except those based purely on grace and finesse, like diving) tend to filter out those whose body type does not adapt well to its contact situations or need for inertial mass. The problem seems to be mainly with limited cases where someone can be overqualified with respect to a woman's league due to having been a biological male in the past and thus attained a bone structure and mass that might lead to rather brutal outcomes for other league players. If gender leagues were eliminated, then the tendency would be to recruit, in contact sports, those with more formidable musculoskeletal systems and we would have a sports world composed almost entirely of cis-males and trans-females, and very few cis-females who were not extreme outliers. Which would bring us back to the question of having some other criteria for leagues that somehow permitted the smaller and more gracile a venue for play. It's possible we would need to redefine sport, and what societies want from it. Do we want sports to be a professional business in which we can marvel at superb physical specimens far beyond the average human? This is somewhat akin to advertizing wherein we see stunningly gorgeous and idealized representations of ourselves using or wearing a product. We are invited to project ourselves into some realm of perfection well removed from our own. Now I'm rambling a bit. A sure sign I have no good answer to this whole conundrum.

A priest, a minister, and a rabbit walk into a bar... The rabbit says, “I think I might be a typo.”

Hello. Background in life sciences, but have ranged widely into other areas including AI, cognitive science, astronomy, and cosmology. Also some interest in bioethics and philosophy of science. I was, until a month ago, the Admin of sciencechatforum.com, a website that crashed after it was bought up by a "web development" company that turned out to be running a Ponzi Scheme on its investors and was seized by the U.S. SEC. The receivership handling the liquidation of its assets could not, for reasons obscure to me, keep the website up and running. One day, we all woke up and the site was gone. ScienceForums seems to be a website with a rather similar structure and a pretty good signal/noise ratio, which suggests good moderation and tossing of trolls. Well done. This refugee from late-stage capitalism is happy to be here!

Hello. Some speculate that a quantum mechanical system which somehow uses an infinite superposition of states could compute a noncomputable function. This is not possible using the standard QUBIT machine, because it is proven that a regular quantum computer is PSPACE-reducible (a quantum computer running in polynomial time can be simulated by a classical computer running in polynomial space). What is potentially non-deterministic is extracting the output of a computation in classical terms. The same final quantum state may be measured as different classical states with varying probabilities. However, if you choose your computation such that the final state is an eigenstate of whatever value you intend to measure, such that the probability of one particular classical output is 1 and all others are 0, then it is effectively deterministic. This is not always possible or practical to do, in which case you may need to to run the quantum algorithm many times to extract the effective classical probability distribution, but effective quantum computation depends on structuring your algorithm to boost the amplitude of the intended output as much as possible, while getting all of the wrong answers to destructively interfere, such that you don’t have to re-run your quantum computation an impractically large number of times. I guess there are nondeterministic models (as noted above), which are just that, models of a hypothetical device sometimes called a hypercomputer. But in the RW, computations are deterministic.