Check out the actress Tula, from the James Bond movie, "For Your Eyes Only". She is a typical XY woman who suffers from complete androgen insensitivity.
Unless its a Chimera, then it can have any combination of X and Y, and can still have get pregnant, if the right parts are female. ALSO don't forget androgen insensitivity. Some of the most beautiful women ever born were androgen insensitive males... and they were absolutely not guys...
Don't make assumptions about things which you do not understand... when you have a thought, validate it first, before showing people you don't know what you're talking about... its the wise thing to do.
Sorry to hear you suffering. I used to think like you... then I just got to the point where it was more important to be happy in this skin than to make others happy in theirs (and by the way you can't make them happy anyway, because their happiness is none of your business.) I have no idea what kind of "GUY" you are, and what resources you may have... but whatever they are, you should find a support group, and get yourself speaking to others who suffer the way you do, so you can at least purge some of that poison. It's true what they say, a joy shared is twice a joy, and a pain shared is half a pain.
Thank you for being truly Christian. The Bible also said "Judge ye not...". That doesn't stop a lot of folks who call themselves Christian from judging others and preaching a lot things that don't sound a wit like love or forgiving. Of course if every person that had ever had a double standard, or committed and act of hypocrisy was instantly cast into the pit... the world would be a pretty lonely place. Being Christian means forgiving everyone, even the ones... especially the ones, you don't wanna.
Actually, these two conditions are vastly different. Addiction is a function of brain chemistry... literally, a part of the pleasure chemistry of the brain. Addiction impact behavior surrounding mood altering or deferring stress.
Issues of gender are PROFOUNDLY deeper, transcending issues of chemistry, and involving entire regions of the brain, from the corpus collosum and the cross hemisphere brain wiring to numerous sites tied to sexual identity and behavior. This is prenatal brain wiring, and is orders of magnitude more compelling than issues of addiction. A significant number of people with addictions have been cured and lead normal lives. Nobody has ever been cured of Gender Dysphoria. The brains of men and women are markedly different, and transsexuals show significant brain morphology from the opposite somatic sex. There is no amount of behavioral modification, no drug, no therapy, that will in any significant way ease the problem, nor is there any means to "learn to live with the problem" that doesn't come with it's own pressing issues. The suicide rate among transgendered people is simply staggering.
Imagine waking up tomorrow in a body that is the opposite sex. You know who you are. You know what you like. You have a certain feeling about the kind of person you are, but now your body is all wrong. You like dressing as the sex you remember, talking, and walking, and acting as a member of the sex you remember. However, society finds your behavior completely inappropriate, and is only too happy to instantly let you know you're wrong. So you are left with two choices. Trying to fit in, and hating every moment of it. Or bucking social convention, and pursuing some sense of relief from the relentless suffering and frustration that your life becomes. That's pretty much being transgendered in a nutshell. It comes at a terrible price, either way, but you get to choose the piper you pay.
Carlin was a genius... and a huge advocate for human rights, and treating people with dignity. Real dignity, not just lip service. His jokes were jokes, and taking them as anything else would be both a disservice to one's own sense of humor, and the dignity of the man who told the jokes.
In a related story, there was an odd medical condition where men would go to the Caribbean, eat lot's of hormone injected jerk chicken, and drink huge amounts of rum (alcohol being a known chemical that inhibits the production of testosterone.) The result was men coming back from extended stays on the islands with a couple more protuberances on their chest than when they'd arrived.
The condition was known as the "Eat, Drink, and be Mary Syndrome".
There are a couple sides to this, and actually you're square on the money about ultimately doing what makes you happy and developing a little hide when it comes to other people's opinions. The problem is that a lot of trans-people are so bent up over what others think about them, and so messed up about what they think of themselves, that they tend to get a little crazed in public forums.
That said, a couple dozen trans-people are murdered each year, and hundreds or even thousands are beaten, threatened, socially or professionally marginalized, assaulted, robbed, or demonized by bigots and fanatics. This is a tiny community. These people are rare... like 1 in 50,000. To have this much abuse heaped on them (100s of times more than the equivalent normalized population), it makes a person wonder if their very existence isn't some kind of social offense, and that perhaps some twisted deity somehow stuck them with a bulls-eye shaped birthmark.
It can be a daunting experience to find your own personal identity in a world that honestly seems to want to kill you every now and then. Look at kids who grow up in really bad neighborhoods. A few rise to the occasion, but most don't do so well. Being a trans-person is kind of like that.
So the technology isn't good enough yet to give transpeople the ability to reproduce in the sex of choice, granted. Interestingly enough, that technology, is probably only 10 to 15 years off, but for now you're right they can't make babies.
However, having surgery does allow them, to live as the gender of choice. Marry as the gender of choice in most states. Work as the gender of choice. Function in every way (save one) as the sex of their choice. Sadly simply donning a dress won't provide you with the ability to walk into a Woman's Restroom, without being arrested for lewd behavior. As for trying to fix things... folks have been trying to fix the brain part for about the last 60 years, to no avail. It appears that gender is one of the earliest things hardwired in the brain, in fact it may be set significantly before birth, and once set can't be unset without destroying the brain. So, it's just easier to get the body to match the gender.
Not a perfect solution... perhaps. Nobody's got a better idea yet.
Wow... I'm stunned. What a completely uninformed, ignorant, and completely ungracious post. You missed the boat on so many points, nobody even reasonable versed on the topic could even begin to respond in a sane amount of time or conversation space. However, let me point out a few of your truly impressively errors;
Trans-people don't "Wanna" anything. They are compelled by an overwhelming emotional state.
ALL human being start off female in the womb, and it isn't until testosterone switches the morphology causing sexual divergence that male and female genitalia appears, and the two sets of organs are virtually identical in underlying structure, the only difference is morphology. When a male-to-female transsexual receives gender reassignment surgery, the neo-vagina created, is virtually indistinguishable from the vagina of any other woman (this is not an opinion made lightly, but the reported observation of gynecologists), because it's made from the same tissue, consisting of mucosa, even so far as having a cervix (in fact the new woman has to have regular gynecological exams including PAP Smears to prevent cervical cancer, just like any other woman.) The "Mangina" you speak of, I believe is locate a little closer to rectum, not unlike your opinions.
The fake tits you refer to are the results of estrogen, just like any other woman's breasts, depending on the age at onset of hormone therapy, cellular sensitivity to estrogen, and genetic predisposition, breast development among trans-women is similar or slightly less than other women. Some trans-women choose breast augmentation, most do not, just like women everywhere.
Most trans-women, lead perfectly normal lives, working, playing, raising children, and grand children. You wouldn't recognize most trans-women, and the few you do, are those who have been marginalized by the fact that they are poor, and cannot afford the incredibly expensive surgery needed to reverse the effects of testosterone on their faces and bodies. Many trans-women are intersexed to a greater or lesser degree, which is why many never need special surgery to look perfectly normal in their gender of choice. In fact, these people often looked oddly feminine as men, and had to deal with gross discrimination long before they ever took a step to have a change of gender.
As I said before, many trans-people are intersexed. In fact transsexuality has been strongly linked to the sexing of the brain, and may in fact be a profound form of intersexing, where the primary organ afflicted is the brain. Though not necessarily the only organ. There are endless combinations and pernutations of X, XX, XY, and Y, resulting in everything from Klinefelters Syndrome to conditions without names. There are Chimera, the blending of two or more fertilized eggs, literally, a person with genetic contributions coming from multiple people, not all necessarily of the same sex. This doesn't even begin to touch the countless ways sexual development may be impacts during prenatal development, and indeed most transsexual research suggests that this is the time in which critical changes in the embryo may in fact cause transsexualism. Your ignorance of human sexuality, genetics, epigenetics, prenatal human development and gender are utterly appalling. It simply sad when someone is both a bigot, and ignorant, it's truly pitiful, when that same person make a public display of their gross inadequacies.
Personally I have great compassion for people who are uncomfortable with gender issues. Gender like the ground we stand on, seems like it should be permanent, and unchanging, and when it moves, leaves many shocked and strangely unsettled. That said, as primal as gender and sex is (and I choose not to address phobic and hateful behavior), human beings are more than their genitalia. What anyone going through this odyssey discovers on the other side, is that in the end, like everyone else, the thing they are most in search of, is the full and complete expression and affirmation of their humanity. In this way they exactly the same as anyone else.
Most historians agree that the real problems that beset our current space exploration are the sad result of the short-sighted pissing contest between Russia and the US resulted in our getting to the moon by 1968, by virtually gutting any long term plan for space exploration and habitation. Instead, we've spent our time and energy on on planet advancing technology (at about 50% of the rate technologically possible, and about 95% of the rate sociologically sustainable) and multinational corporate monopoly. In fact, our society has been hijacked by ideologues who have been dedicated to taking and making Profit, Fundamental Christian Beliefs, and Plutocracy. In this current state of social disorder, aspirations for advancing society, humanity, or even simply honoring the dignity of being human are neither profitable in the short term, nor likely to play well with people who are far more intent on causing an epic catastrophe of geopolitical or environmental nature to hasten the coming of their messiah. The funds that were once available to design and build a human diaspora to the stars, now grace the bank accounts of the billionaires who've bled this nation nearly dry. Trust me, the feasibility studies can be made to last 20 years, with 40-70 lobbyist for ever member of Congress, it's pretty fair to say, that vision and dignity, will almost always take a back seat to giving Halliburton one more multi-billion dollar non-compete contract.
Clearly you don't know what you're talking about... the infectious agent of Malaria is the Plasmodia protozoan (not a virus like Yellow Fever), and there is already a precedent for a two part vaccine program that shows great promise (part 1 is a long term vaccine that provides significant resistance, but not immunity, reinforced by part 2 a short term vaccine that imparts full immunity.) The real issue here is one of economics. The 40% of the human beings on the planet at serious and immediate risk are also the poorest 40% of the human population, and therefore are not in position to inspire immediate and significant response from those companies that make vaccines.
The only real hope for a permanent and lasting solution, is to align first and second world nations in governments in a global effort to eradicate malaria. As long as such a huge reservoir of disease exists, new and vicious mutations will certainly arise, putting global populations at risk of pandemic (exacerbated by global climate change and the growing spread of insect vectors.) Besides the huge humanitarian benefits, there is a more immediate benefit, and it's one of self interest for every citizen of the first and second world. A pandemic, would be a modern plague, resistant to modern drugs, and treatments, and able to kill many millions even billions of people. This should be among our government's top priorities in the new century
Just change the name to "Strong Force"... which should in one simple stroke protect them from litigation by picking a name generic enough to pass any reasonable muster, and at the same time tell Lucas films (and their legal dept.) to kiss their pink fuzzy butts.
Apple went through a similar problem. After adding a new synthesizer to the machine, they placed a bunch of new sounds, and one, a chime sound ran afoul to the legal dept. because they had just resolved a standing lawsuit regarding the use of musical sound (named chime) on the computer (a use Apple Records deemed was in conflict with their business trademark) and the sound and it's name were deemed too musical. So a senior VP suggest changing the name to "Let it Beep" a clear Beetles parody that would certainly provoke Apple Records to litigate. So finally the VP said name it "Sosumi", it's Japanese and has nothing to do with music (the new name is pronounced "So Sue Me") and people tell the tale of the bad pun to this day.
I can't help but be reminded of the smiling face of Chuck Yeager in the "Chuck Yeager Flight Simulator", after planting an SR-71 into the ground in a power dive from 100,000 feet... and his words "Nice auger job!"
In fact creating a baseline in space with telescopes millions of miles apart is perfectly doable. Even more interesting is placing an optical assembly on a distant planet like Pluto, and using the gravitational distortion around the sun as a primary lens. It should be possible to create an optical telescope of such design, whose primary lens is nearly half a million miles in diameter. Of course you'll have to eclipse the star in the middle, but that should be relatively easy.
So the answer to the first question is, infrared and near infrared are the wavelengths most useful for meaningful astronomy, because they allow astronomers and cosmologists to see through clouds of interstellar dust and gas to the interesting stuff in the clouds, and the interesting stuff hidden behind those clouds. That's why Hubble has both visual and infrared technology on-board. As well, infrared spectroscopy will tell us which nearby planets have the kind of chemistry that indicates the possibility of life. Due to water vapor, the atmosphere is virtually opaque to these frequencies so they must be viewed either from extreme altitude (balloon or very high flying jets), or space.
The color images that Hubble produces from visual light are in fact heavily altered and do not reflect what the human eye would perceive. Typically the colors being recorded are from the light emitted by Hydrogen, Sulfur, and Oxygen. Hydrogen and Sulfur both emit light in the Red optical spectrum, and if they were presented as the color the human eye perceives would blur together. Instead, the Hubble images view Hydrogen as Red, and Sulfur as Green with Oxygen providing the blue. This gives rich full color images rich in detail and visually stunning color. Images from infrared telescopes are used in exactly the same way, you just can't see those colors. So the representation in either case is not "real".
This is simply one more instance of a larger problem. I once heard a brilliant observation; "If uncertain, you can always discover the game you're actually playing (vs. the one you think you're play) by whichever game you happen to be winning." Our society is predicated on a game called "PROFIT". Period, end of discussion. There are a lot of other games... satisfaction, fulfillment, sustainability, quality of life, or even personal freedom. All of these other games we say we're playing. All these other games fall short and are being lost, because the game we're actually playing is the game called "PROFIT". You really want to get, the human enterprise of this culture measures only one thing. If for example you had a company that saved the world, and lost the "PROFIT" game, it would be out of business tomorrow by 9:00 AM.
Said another way... We measure Gross National Product. Disasters are great for the GNP, it skyrockets when cities are destroyed, families broken, houses burn down and children are killed in car crashes. If you think I'm mistaken, look at what Katrina's impact on New Orleans did for the economy, house value shot up like a rocket. This is the game we are winning. If instead, we were to get interested in a different game, for instance the Gross Domestic Satisfaction, or perhaps the Gross National Quality of Life, then perhaps dumping toxic waste into other people's drinking water would instantly become a problem, instead of a solution. When Halliburton fracs shale to get at natural gas, and oh by the way, just happens to poison an entire town by releasing toxic horrors into their ground water, then proceeds to cover it up, hide the facts, tie the town up in litigation, and it can do this in the first place because it got laws passed that exempted it from the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and virtually any other national law preventing environmental destruction and abuse to human safety, you can be very certain its doing great business. In fact, its making making a mountain of profit. Its happy, because its winning the game its playing.
Mr. Cheney is truly an honest man, he wins the games he plays, and he's very good at it. It just happens that the game he's playing is: "Rape the planet in the name of PROFIT". When our current Vice President is a hit man for the RIAA, or the entire Republican party can barely restrain itself from collectively smooching the behind of British Petroleum, or when we put judges into the Supreme Court, who's only reason for being, is to rubber stamp laws designed to give the Profit Makers what they want, no matter how obscene, or what the cost to the future, or how egregious the assault to the dignity and humanity of the other 6.8 billion people on the planet might be, it must be clear to everyone. We are gleefully winning the "PROFIT" game. You could get mad, or self righteous, or even subversive, but until we as a society demand that we begin to play other games instead, it would be silly to expect a different outcome. You simply can't hit a home run if you're shooting hoops (unless you're playing Base-ket Ball)
Things come and go for reasons other than natural selection... which is why such theories as punctuated equilibrium have such importance. Most human beings have an amazingly similar genetic makeup. We also have an unusually high number of genetic diseases. Both of these facts are due to the very high probability that our species almost went extinct about 27,000 years ago, and that there may have been fewer than 1,000 individuals left on the planet. This would have resulted in a tremendous loss of genetic diversity, and many interesting human traits may well have disappeared... and the only determining factor was those who were furthest from the cataclysm and had enough resources to survive the aftermath... in short... LUCK.
There are all kinds of things that can cause a black hole to emit light. Hawking's Radiation for one. The powerful jets at either pole of a black hole result when it is feeding, and large amounts of matter build up in an accretion disk. Incredibly powerful magnetic fields are created by ionized plasma moving at relativistic speeds, and these field create powerful polarized beams of energetic particles, we see as jets and gamma ray bursts.
The accretion disk itself can emit a tremendous amount of energy.
There are a few divergent issues here that have nothing to do with Scientists Per Se'.
One is the breakdown of public education, excessive consumption of television (particularly by the young), and the growing acceptance of our citizenry to do and think as they're told. We have become a society wall street programmed, Pavlovian, consumers and spectators, dumbed and numbed to the appropriate level for our Government handlers (read Corporate Handlers) to move us and use us at their discretion. This John Q Public, is a totally interchangeable, barely thinking, hardly feeling hominid automaton, whose only purpose is to stoke the fires of industry and breed the next generation of workers. This society has made it socially unacceptable to have a brain, and made using one an act of terrorism or at least a social faux pas of unacceptable magnitude.
The Second is, the specialization of scientific endeavor and growing acceleration of human discovery. The researcher now is drilling down into such tiny areas of expertise, with such a specific and unique sets of informational tools and language, that communicating the insights and discoveries to the general populace is difficult at best, and is getting more difficult every year as the rate of discovery and specialization grows exponentially. What's needed is a new breed of generalists who have a conceptual grasp of the science being performed, a level A layperson of many fields who can actually see the big picture and describe it in terms that the average man on the street can deal with and grasp. As has been said these people are rare, and in serious need.
Finally we have a growing mass of Luddites, Magical Thinkers, Religious Fanatics, Fundamentalists and Anti-Intellectuals, who think by cultivating stupid, we can avert the threats of accelerating technology. This is tantamount to rolling yourself in wax and gunpowder, wrapping yourself in gasoline soaked rag then finally throwing yourself into a raging inferno, hoping that the explosion will put out the flames. We can just leave it at ill advised. Sadly, one can't argue logic with these people. Because there wasn't a hint of logic in their emotional reaction to begin with. The way you address the press of technology is work on perfecting the human being. Teaching people to love instead of hate, accept instead of fear, to be gracious and embracing instead of self righteous and justified. We carry tons of old barbaric primate behavior around, and until we can begin to redesign ourselves, growing technology poses a growing threat. In the process we need to enlighten the masses. We need to use the television, to stop selling people one more piece of useless crap, and spend a little more air time (read money) showing people what a beautiful and miraculous universe we live in, and how we are each us responsible for the future of being human. We are failing the future to do less.
Sadly, I think you miss the point of Math... All Language is math. Math is the fundamental language of the universe and all possible and impossible universes. Math is the foundation upon which the possibility of meaning rests. Programming is the organized domain of data and process, the process is mathematical, the data is mathematical, the thought space in which it all exists is mathematical, and the entire conversation of it lives in language which as I asserted earlier is fundamentally mathematical. Have I perhaps missed something? Are you maybe alluding to some artistic, spiritual, human essence that transcends the physical reality of mathematics and that might impinge on the more ephemeral aspects of invention and artistry??? I'm open to being shown the errors of my way... show me something about programming that has no grounding in mathematics... I love a good magic show!
On the contrary. Anyone who got the biology degree needed to work for a major corporation would have had to study the courses that show them how we now can;
Determine the relative timing of lifeforms and the date of their divergence by the rate of acquired random mutation.
Discover the mechanisms of micro and macro evolution and inherited traits through both genetic and epigenetic processes
Observe micro-evolution in action in short lived species; bacterial resistance to antibiotics, insect resistance to pesticides, etc.
Actually visit the evolution of specific genes from different species to see how for instance segmented worms, grew legs, and then reduced the segment count to 2 or 3 and became arthropods
And even find the 5 fold symmetry that originated in our echinoderm ancestors (and the genes that determined it) and how we can thank them for our heads, hands, and feet.
It would be very odd and short sighted to take the entire universe of a given scientific field and artificially amputate huge sections of said science science to protect some magical Jebus fantasy. Clearly if there is a "GOD", he had no problem using the resources at his disposal for creating life, it would seem silly in the extreme to hold fast to an ideology requiring one ignore the very designs of such a creator. On the other hand, if there is no deity, then it's simply loopy to desperately keep trying to shove the round world into the square hole that is your mind.
That's like being a geologist and thinking the world is only 6,000 years old... he must have had his corpus collosum cut... if the hemispheres of his brain ever talk, his head will explode!!!
I wonder which hemisphere he keeps the stupid in???
Because the 600 x 600 pixel chips are large and fantastic light buckets... each pixel is capable of collecting many photons because it's relatively large. Light gathering is the name of the game in astronomy.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out the actress Tula, from the James Bond movie, "For Your Eyes Only". She is a typical XY woman who suffers from complete androgen insensitivity.
Unless its a Chimera, then it can have any combination of X and Y, and can still have get pregnant, if the right parts are female. ALSO don't forget androgen insensitivity. Some of the most beautiful women ever born were androgen insensitive males... and they were absolutely not guys...
Don't make assumptions about things which you do not understand... when you have a thought, validate it first, before showing people you don't know what you're talking about... its the wise thing to do.
Sorry to hear you suffering. I used to think like you... then I just got to the point where it was more important to be happy in this skin than to make others happy in theirs (and by the way you can't make them happy anyway, because their happiness is none of your business.) I have no idea what kind of "GUY" you are, and what resources you may have... but whatever they are, you should find a support group, and get yourself speaking to others who suffer the way you do, so you can at least purge some of that poison. It's true what they say, a joy shared is twice a joy, and a pain shared is half a pain.
Thank you for being truly Christian. The Bible also said "Judge ye not...". That doesn't stop a lot of folks who call themselves Christian from judging others and preaching a lot things that don't sound a wit like love or forgiving. Of course if every person that had ever had a double standard, or committed and act of hypocrisy was instantly cast into the pit... the world would be a pretty lonely place. Being Christian means forgiving everyone, even the ones... especially the ones, you don't wanna.
Actually, these two conditions are vastly different. Addiction is a function of brain chemistry... literally, a part of the pleasure chemistry of the brain. Addiction impact behavior surrounding mood altering or deferring stress.
Issues of gender are PROFOUNDLY deeper, transcending issues of chemistry, and involving entire regions of the brain, from the corpus collosum and the cross hemisphere brain wiring to numerous sites tied to sexual identity and behavior. This is prenatal brain wiring, and is orders of magnitude more compelling than issues of addiction. A significant number of people with addictions have been cured and lead normal lives. Nobody has ever been cured of Gender Dysphoria. The brains of men and women are markedly different, and transsexuals show significant brain morphology from the opposite somatic sex. There is no amount of behavioral modification, no drug, no therapy, that will in any significant way ease the problem, nor is there any means to "learn to live with the problem" that doesn't come with it's own pressing issues. The suicide rate among transgendered people is simply staggering.
Imagine waking up tomorrow in a body that is the opposite sex. You know who you are. You know what you like. You have a certain feeling about the kind of person you are, but now your body is all wrong. You like dressing as the sex you remember, talking, and walking, and acting as a member of the sex you remember. However, society finds your behavior completely inappropriate, and is only too happy to instantly let you know you're wrong. So you are left with two choices. Trying to fit in, and hating every moment of it. Or bucking social convention, and pursuing some sense of relief from the relentless suffering and frustration that your life becomes. That's pretty much being transgendered in a nutshell. It comes at a terrible price, either way, but you get to choose the piper you pay.
Carlin was a genius... and a huge advocate for human rights, and treating people with dignity. Real dignity, not just lip service. His jokes were jokes, and taking them as anything else would be both a disservice to one's own sense of humor, and the dignity of the man who told the jokes.
In a related story, there was an odd medical condition where men would go to the Caribbean, eat lot's of hormone injected jerk chicken, and drink huge amounts of rum (alcohol being a known chemical that inhibits the production of testosterone.) The result was men coming back from extended stays on the islands with a couple more protuberances on their chest than when they'd arrived.
The condition was known as the "Eat, Drink, and be Mary Syndrome".
There are a couple sides to this, and actually you're square on the money about ultimately doing what makes you happy and developing a little hide when it comes to other people's opinions. The problem is that a lot of trans-people are so bent up over what others think about them, and so messed up about what they think of themselves, that they tend to get a little crazed in public forums.
That said, a couple dozen trans-people are murdered each year, and hundreds or even thousands are beaten, threatened, socially or professionally marginalized, assaulted, robbed, or demonized by bigots and fanatics. This is a tiny community. These people are rare... like 1 in 50,000. To have this much abuse heaped on them (100s of times more than the equivalent normalized population), it makes a person wonder if their very existence isn't some kind of social offense, and that perhaps some twisted deity somehow stuck them with a bulls-eye shaped birthmark.
It can be a daunting experience to find your own personal identity in a world that honestly seems to want to kill you every now and then. Look at kids who grow up in really bad neighborhoods. A few rise to the occasion, but most don't do so well. Being a trans-person is kind of like that.
Sir, I beg your pardon, but how dare you malign a perfectly decent pit viper!!! lol
So the technology isn't good enough yet to give transpeople the ability to reproduce in the sex of choice, granted. Interestingly enough, that technology, is probably only 10 to 15 years off, but for now you're right they can't make babies.
However, having surgery does allow them, to live as the gender of choice. Marry as the gender of choice in most states. Work as the gender of choice. Function in every way (save one) as the sex of their choice. Sadly simply donning a dress won't provide you with the ability to walk into a Woman's Restroom, without being arrested for lewd behavior. As for trying to fix things... folks have been trying to fix the brain part for about the last 60 years, to no avail. It appears that gender is one of the earliest things hardwired in the brain, in fact it may be set significantly before birth, and once set can't be unset without destroying the brain. So, it's just easier to get the body to match the gender.
Not a perfect solution... perhaps. Nobody's got a better idea yet.
Wow... I'm stunned. What a completely uninformed, ignorant, and completely ungracious post. You missed the boat on so many points, nobody even reasonable versed on the topic could even begin to respond in a sane amount of time or conversation space. However, let me point out a few of your truly impressively errors;
Trans-people don't "Wanna" anything. They are compelled by an overwhelming emotional state.
ALL human being start off female in the womb, and it isn't until testosterone switches the morphology causing sexual divergence that male and female genitalia appears, and the two sets of organs are virtually identical in underlying structure, the only difference is morphology. When a male-to-female transsexual receives gender reassignment surgery, the neo-vagina created, is virtually indistinguishable from the vagina of any other woman (this is not an opinion made lightly, but the reported observation of gynecologists), because it's made from the same tissue, consisting of mucosa, even so far as having a cervix (in fact the new woman has to have regular gynecological exams including PAP Smears to prevent cervical cancer, just like any other woman.) The "Mangina" you speak of, I believe is locate a little closer to rectum, not unlike your opinions.
The fake tits you refer to are the results of estrogen, just like any other woman's breasts, depending on the age at onset of hormone therapy, cellular sensitivity to estrogen, and genetic predisposition, breast development among trans-women is similar or slightly less than other women. Some trans-women choose breast augmentation, most do not, just like women everywhere.
Most trans-women, lead perfectly normal lives, working, playing, raising children, and grand children. You wouldn't recognize most trans-women, and the few you do, are those who have been marginalized by the fact that they are poor, and cannot afford the incredibly expensive surgery needed to reverse the effects of testosterone on their faces and bodies. Many trans-women are intersexed to a greater or lesser degree, which is why many never need special surgery to look perfectly normal in their gender of choice. In fact, these people often looked oddly feminine as men, and had to deal with gross discrimination long before they ever took a step to have a change of gender.
As I said before, many trans-people are intersexed. In fact transsexuality has been strongly linked to the sexing of the brain, and may in fact be a profound form of intersexing, where the primary organ afflicted is the brain. Though not necessarily the only organ. There are endless combinations and pernutations of X, XX, XY, and Y, resulting in everything from Klinefelters Syndrome to conditions without names. There are Chimera, the blending of two or more fertilized eggs, literally, a person with genetic contributions coming from multiple people, not all necessarily of the same sex. This doesn't even begin to touch the countless ways sexual development may be impacts during prenatal development, and indeed most transsexual research suggests that this is the time in which critical changes in the embryo may in fact cause transsexualism. Your ignorance of human sexuality, genetics, epigenetics, prenatal human development and gender are utterly appalling. It simply sad when someone is both a bigot, and ignorant, it's truly pitiful, when that same person make a public display of their gross inadequacies.
Personally I have great compassion for people who are uncomfortable with gender issues. Gender like the ground we stand on, seems like it should be permanent, and unchanging, and when it moves, leaves many shocked and strangely unsettled. That said, as primal as gender and sex is (and I choose not to address phobic and hateful behavior), human beings are more than their genitalia. What anyone going through this odyssey discovers on the other side, is that in the end, like everyone else, the thing they are most in search of, is the full and complete expression and affirmation of their humanity. In this way they exactly the same as anyone else.
Most historians agree that the real problems that beset our current space exploration are the sad result of the short-sighted pissing contest between Russia and the US resulted in our getting to the moon by 1968, by virtually gutting any long term plan for space exploration and habitation. Instead, we've spent our time and energy on on planet advancing technology (at about 50% of the rate technologically possible, and about 95% of the rate sociologically sustainable) and multinational corporate monopoly. In fact, our society has been hijacked by ideologues who have been dedicated to taking and making Profit, Fundamental Christian Beliefs, and Plutocracy. In this current state of social disorder, aspirations for advancing society, humanity, or even simply honoring the dignity of being human are neither profitable in the short term, nor likely to play well with people who are far more intent on causing an epic catastrophe of geopolitical or environmental nature to hasten the coming of their messiah. The funds that were once available to design and build a human diaspora to the stars, now grace the bank accounts of the billionaires who've bled this nation nearly dry. Trust me, the feasibility studies can be made to last 20 years, with 40-70 lobbyist for ever member of Congress, it's pretty fair to say, that vision and dignity, will almost always take a back seat to giving Halliburton one more multi-billion dollar non-compete contract.
Clearly you don't know what you're talking about... the infectious agent of Malaria is the Plasmodia protozoan (not a virus like Yellow Fever), and there is already a precedent for a two part vaccine program that shows great promise (part 1 is a long term vaccine that provides significant resistance, but not immunity, reinforced by part 2 a short term vaccine that imparts full immunity.) The real issue here is one of economics. The 40% of the human beings on the planet at serious and immediate risk are also the poorest 40% of the human population, and therefore are not in position to inspire immediate and significant response from those companies that make vaccines.
The only real hope for a permanent and lasting solution, is to align first and second world nations in governments in a global effort to eradicate malaria. As long as such a huge reservoir of disease exists, new and vicious mutations will certainly arise, putting global populations at risk of pandemic (exacerbated by global climate change and the growing spread of insect vectors.) Besides the huge humanitarian benefits, there is a more immediate benefit, and it's one of self interest for every citizen of the first and second world. A pandemic, would be a modern plague, resistant to modern drugs, and treatments, and able to kill many millions even billions of people. This should be among our government's top priorities in the new century
Just change the name to "Strong Force"... which should in one simple stroke protect them from litigation by picking a name generic enough to pass any reasonable muster, and at the same time tell Lucas films (and their legal dept.) to kiss their pink fuzzy butts.
Apple went through a similar problem. After adding a new synthesizer to the machine, they placed a bunch of new sounds, and one, a chime sound ran afoul to the legal dept. because they had just resolved a standing lawsuit regarding the use of musical sound (named chime) on the computer (a use Apple Records deemed was in conflict with their business trademark) and the sound and it's name were deemed too musical. So a senior VP suggest changing the name to "Let it Beep" a clear Beetles parody that would certainly provoke Apple Records to litigate. So finally the VP said name it "Sosumi", it's Japanese and has nothing to do with music (the new name is pronounced "So Sue Me") and people tell the tale of the bad pun to this day.
I can't help but be reminded of the smiling face of Chuck Yeager in the "Chuck Yeager Flight Simulator", after planting an SR-71 into the ground in a power dive from 100,000 feet... and his words "Nice auger job!"
In fact creating a baseline in space with telescopes millions of miles apart is perfectly doable. Even more interesting is placing an optical assembly on a distant planet like Pluto, and using the gravitational distortion around the sun as a primary lens. It should be possible to create an optical telescope of such design, whose primary lens is nearly half a million miles in diameter. Of course you'll have to eclipse the star in the middle, but that should be relatively easy.
So the answer to the first question is, infrared and near infrared are the wavelengths most useful for meaningful astronomy, because they allow astronomers and cosmologists to see through clouds of interstellar dust and gas to the interesting stuff in the clouds, and the interesting stuff hidden behind those clouds. That's why Hubble has both visual and infrared technology on-board. As well, infrared spectroscopy will tell us which nearby planets have the kind of chemistry that indicates the possibility of life. Due to water vapor, the atmosphere is virtually opaque to these frequencies so they must be viewed either from extreme altitude (balloon or very high flying jets), or space.
The color images that Hubble produces from visual light are in fact heavily altered and do not reflect what the human eye would perceive. Typically the colors being recorded are from the light emitted by Hydrogen, Sulfur, and Oxygen. Hydrogen and Sulfur both emit light in the Red optical spectrum, and if they were presented as the color the human eye perceives would blur together. Instead, the Hubble images view Hydrogen as Red, and Sulfur as Green with Oxygen providing the blue. This gives rich full color images rich in detail and visually stunning color. Images from infrared telescopes are used in exactly the same way, you just can't see those colors. So the representation in either case is not "real".
I'm sorry... we prefer to call them "Little Person Planets" you insensitive clod!!!
This is simply one more instance of a larger problem. I once heard a brilliant observation; "If uncertain, you can always discover the game you're actually playing (vs. the one you think you're play) by whichever game you happen to be winning." Our society is predicated on a game called "PROFIT". Period, end of discussion. There are a lot of other games... satisfaction, fulfillment, sustainability, quality of life, or even personal freedom. All of these other games we say we're playing. All these other games fall short and are being lost, because the game we're actually playing is the game called "PROFIT". You really want to get, the human enterprise of this culture measures only one thing. If for example you had a company that saved the world, and lost the "PROFIT" game, it would be out of business tomorrow by 9:00 AM.
Said another way... We measure Gross National Product. Disasters are great for the GNP, it skyrockets when cities are destroyed, families broken, houses burn down and children are killed in car crashes. If you think I'm mistaken, look at what Katrina's impact on New Orleans did for the economy, house value shot up like a rocket. This is the game we are winning. If instead, we were to get interested in a different game, for instance the Gross Domestic Satisfaction, or perhaps the Gross National Quality of Life, then perhaps dumping toxic waste into other people's drinking water would instantly become a problem, instead of a solution. When Halliburton fracs shale to get at natural gas, and oh by the way, just happens to poison an entire town by releasing toxic horrors into their ground water, then proceeds to cover it up, hide the facts, tie the town up in litigation, and it can do this in the first place because it got laws passed that exempted it from the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and virtually any other national law preventing environmental destruction and abuse to human safety, you can be very certain its doing great business. In fact, its making making a mountain of profit. Its happy, because its winning the game its playing.
Mr. Cheney is truly an honest man, he wins the games he plays, and he's very good at it. It just happens that the game he's playing is: "Rape the planet in the name of PROFIT". When our current Vice President is a hit man for the RIAA, or the entire Republican party can barely restrain itself from collectively smooching the behind of British Petroleum, or when we put judges into the Supreme Court, who's only reason for being, is to rubber stamp laws designed to give the Profit Makers what they want, no matter how obscene, or what the cost to the future, or how egregious the assault to the dignity and humanity of the other 6.8 billion people on the planet might be, it must be clear to everyone. We are gleefully winning the "PROFIT" game. You could get mad, or self righteous, or even subversive, but until we as a society demand that we begin to play other games instead, it would be silly to expect a different outcome. You simply can't hit a home run if you're shooting hoops (unless you're playing Base-ket Ball)
Things come and go for reasons other than natural selection... which is why such theories as punctuated equilibrium have such importance. Most human beings have an amazingly similar genetic makeup. We also have an unusually high number of genetic diseases. Both of these facts are due to the very high probability that our species almost went extinct about 27,000 years ago, and that there may have been fewer than 1,000 individuals left on the planet. This would have resulted in a tremendous loss of genetic diversity, and many interesting human traits may well have disappeared... and the only determining factor was those who were furthest from the cataclysm and had enough resources to survive the aftermath... in short... LUCK.
There are all kinds of things that can cause a black hole to emit light. Hawking's Radiation for one. The powerful jets at either pole of a black hole result when it is feeding, and large amounts of matter build up in an accretion disk. Incredibly powerful magnetic fields are created by ionized plasma moving at relativistic speeds, and these field create powerful polarized beams of energetic particles, we see as jets and gamma ray bursts.
The accretion disk itself can emit a tremendous amount of energy.
There are a few divergent issues here that have nothing to do with Scientists Per Se'.
One is the breakdown of public education, excessive consumption of television (particularly by the young), and the growing acceptance of our citizenry to do and think as they're told. We have become a society wall street programmed, Pavlovian, consumers and spectators, dumbed and numbed to the appropriate level for our Government handlers (read Corporate Handlers) to move us and use us at their discretion. This John Q Public, is a totally interchangeable, barely thinking, hardly feeling hominid automaton, whose only purpose is to stoke the fires of industry and breed the next generation of workers. This society has made it socially unacceptable to have a brain, and made using one an act of terrorism or at least a social faux pas of unacceptable magnitude.
The Second is, the specialization of scientific endeavor and growing acceleration of human discovery. The researcher now is drilling down into such tiny areas of expertise, with such a specific and unique sets of informational tools and language, that communicating the insights and discoveries to the general populace is difficult at best, and is getting more difficult every year as the rate of discovery and specialization grows exponentially. What's needed is a new breed of generalists who have a conceptual grasp of the science being performed, a level A layperson of many fields who can actually see the big picture and describe it in terms that the average man on the street can deal with and grasp. As has been said these people are rare, and in serious need.
Finally we have a growing mass of Luddites, Magical Thinkers, Religious Fanatics, Fundamentalists and Anti-Intellectuals, who think by cultivating stupid, we can avert the threats of accelerating technology. This is tantamount to rolling yourself in wax and gunpowder, wrapping yourself in gasoline soaked rag then finally throwing yourself into a raging inferno, hoping that the explosion will put out the flames. We can just leave it at ill advised. Sadly, one can't argue logic with these people. Because there wasn't a hint of logic in their emotional reaction to begin with. The way you address the press of technology is work on perfecting the human being. Teaching people to love instead of hate, accept instead of fear, to be gracious and embracing instead of self righteous and justified. We carry tons of old barbaric primate behavior around, and until we can begin to redesign ourselves, growing technology poses a growing threat. In the process we need to enlighten the masses. We need to use the television, to stop selling people one more piece of useless crap, and spend a little more air time (read money) showing people what a beautiful and miraculous universe we live in, and how we are each us responsible for the future of being human. We are failing the future to do less.
Sadly, I think you miss the point of Math... All Language is math. Math is the fundamental language of the universe and all possible and impossible universes. Math is the foundation upon which the possibility of meaning rests. Programming is the organized domain of data and process, the process is mathematical, the data is mathematical, the thought space in which it all exists is mathematical, and the entire conversation of it lives in language which as I asserted earlier is fundamentally mathematical. Have I perhaps missed something? Are you maybe alluding to some artistic, spiritual, human essence that transcends the physical reality of mathematics and that might impinge on the more ephemeral aspects of invention and artistry??? I'm open to being shown the errors of my way... show me something about programming that has no grounding in mathematics... I love a good magic show!
On the contrary. Anyone who got the biology degree needed to work for a major corporation would have had to study the courses that show them how we now can;
It would be very odd and short sighted to take the entire universe of a given scientific field and artificially amputate huge sections of said science science to protect some magical Jebus fantasy. Clearly if there is a "GOD", he had no problem using the resources at his disposal for creating life, it would seem silly in the extreme to hold fast to an ideology requiring one ignore the very designs of such a creator. On the other hand, if there is no deity, then it's simply loopy to desperately keep trying to shove the round world into the square hole that is your mind.
That's like being a geologist and thinking the world is only 6,000 years old... he must have had his corpus collosum cut... if the hemispheres of his brain ever talk, his head will explode!!!
I wonder which hemisphere he keeps the stupid in???
Because the 600 x 600 pixel chips are large and fantastic light buckets... each pixel is capable of collecting many photons because it's relatively large. Light gathering is the name of the game in astronomy.