I think it’s designed that way on purpose to not obscure what the objects are.

Back in the day your identifier was whatever name you typed in. On IRC you could put a password on a name to claim it so long as you didn’t go inactive for too long (and then it would be free for anyone to take), but you didn’t have to, and on many web chats you didn’t even have the option. It was very common for people to change names frequently for jokes, RP, or setting a status. You didn’t have a profile picture or friends list or any of that.

Okay, thank you for confirming. I can’t agree or disagree because I’m not Canadian, but I’m glad to understand how strongly you feel about it. I knew relations were bad, I just didn’t realize they were that bad.

It’s my impression as an outsider that the unspoken position of the Canadian government is that the blind should seek euthanasia rather than costing the public valuable pennies. Is this a correct impression to have? If not, please correct me. This is an information-seeking post and not an insult or attempt to spread misinformation.

I don’t think I understand the Canada/US situation well enough to understand what you mean. It sounds like you’re saying Canadians who visit family in the States or need to visit the States for professional reasons should be tried with treason.

That’s not a problem. The idea is to define practical categories along the spectrum of consciousness so that they can be discussed without having to re-define terms prior to every discussion. There’s no reason any given organism should or shouldn’t fall into a particular category except for its properties directly regarding that category.

I think the big dividing line between what many animals do and what cells or plants do is the ability to react in different ways by considering stimuli in conjunction with memory, and then the next big divide is metacognition. I feel like there should be concrete words for these categories. “Sentient” and “conscious” have pretty much lost meaning at this point, as demonstrated by this discussion’s existence.

I will call them reactive awareness, decisive awareness, and reflective awareness in the absence of a better idea.

Conscious: aware of the delineation between self and not self

I don’t know whether this applies to plants and fungi, but it applies to just about every animal. There’s a minimum basic sense of self required in distinguishing one’s own movements from the approach of an attacker. Even earthworms react differently when they touch something vs when something touches them.

They’re the same. The “pika” is from “hika”, which refers to light.

Is she a professional liveseamer on Stitch.tv?

Everyone eats baby birds. They’re full of delicious little bones, which plants are famous for lacking.

e: Wanted to see if this is a thing in English.

But there is logic behind them.

1+2+3=6 and 2+3+1=6 also.

But 1+2*3 and 2*3+1 won’t come out the same if you do the calculations in just any order. It’s not always possible to order them left to right like in the second version, and if we use parentheses for everything we can end up with an illegible mess. I actually tried to type an example of how silly it could look and lost track of my own parentheses nesting before I got very far.

Do you have any other suggestion for how to notate an equation which would make memorization of PEMDAS unnecessary?

I sometimes like to add unnecessary parentheses or brackets to section things off and improve legibility, but I don’t do any math stuff collaboratively, so I have no idea whether others would find that disruptive or helpful.

I interpreted it as profit.

I’m pretty sure they have an agenda, yeah. I just wanted to think about the premise on its own terms, like how one might think about the definition of a fish? I feel like it’s both personally enriching and better equips me to respond to such arguments. Even though I don’t think they’ll listen to anyone, I don’t think anyone’s responses to them were a waste of time because I really feel like I’ve learned a lot from reading them, and I’m sure plenty of other people did too, so thank you for your labor.

You are misunderstanding, but I don’t blame you in the slightest. I don’t seem to have communicated very clearly. Someone else in this post has a comment making the argument that there are two sexes and that all humans either produce one of two gametes or have the potential to based on their body’s design, and at the time I thought it would be very obvious what I was referring to and why I would make a separate post instead of replying in that chain. I’m sorry for the confusion and any offense.

What I’m thinking about with my question is whether any humans can truly be considered as capable of producing eggs if they must be present at birth, if even people who already have eggs can’t make more.

Okay, thank you.

When you say other methods, do you mean like in a lab somewhere? I was restricting my idea of egg production to what’s naturally capable by a human body (which I feel is in the spirit of powerstruggle’s definition of a sexual binary), but I figure probably anyone can produce any gametes they like through the magic of science.

There’s a comment chain in this thread focused on the definition of sex as producing one of two gametes, which leads to pointing out that some people produce no gametes, which is countered by saying they could potentially produce them in the future or if they didn’t have a particular condition, etc. Normally I would post this kind of question directly to someone, but the same stuff is being said so many times that I’m not sure which one to reply to, hence creating a new comment chain.

Basically I’m thinking that defining the female sex by ability (or potential ability) to produce eggs might be faulty on the grounds that no one produces eggs. Or that only a person pregnant with a child who will be born with eggs can be said to have achieved femaleness by this definition. Or maybe the baby is the one making the eggs, so the only way to be female is to have produced eggs prior to birth. I’m not really sure of the details regarding when the eggs develop or who’s really responsible for them, I’m just pretty sure they’re there at birth and it’s interesting to think about.

I have a question for kind of the whole thread in general, regarding the gametes discussion. Isn’t it the case that a human is born with all the eggs they’ll ever have? So like if you aren’t born with any, you’ll never make any later? And if so, isn’t the only way to produce eggs to become pregnant with a child and make their eggs for them?

e: I’m getting the impression that this comment is interpreted as a transphobic argument. To be clear, I don’t think sex is binary, and that even if it were, it would have no bearing on gender.

I’ve added a link to the discussion which inspired the question.

Update: It’s possible for an intersex person to have both eggs and sperm, so I think that definition of sex as a binary collapses on itself, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovotesticular_syndrome (I’m not sure I agree with characterizing any kind of intersex as disordered, but I also don’t know enough about it to make a strong argument and also I didn’t write the page.)