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Lynn Conway has died

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Re: Lynn Conway has died

#371

Post by valanha »

umvi wrote: post #279
polairscience wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're using the word sex. There is a known, massively complex, relationship between sex and gender but it's not 1:1. For anyone. Or, if you think that's not true, then please describe to me how they're identical. In a group of men, in any place in the world, you'll find wildly varying accounts of what the male gender "is" all the way down to how their bodies should look. And, gender aside, the most important thing t…

> There is a known, massively complex, relationship between sex and gender but it's not 1:1 You could argue though that it's only complex because we (collectively) decided to complicate it in order to accommodate the preferences of small subsets of society. In some other country, society might collectively decide not to accommodate said wishes and instead treat sex and gender as immutable and indistinguishable. Such…

Or because the the original basis we used to determine this was overly simplistic, and based on incomplete data and assumptions at the time.

Evidence and data seems to support this as we learn and discover more.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#372

Post by sspiff »

zh3 wrote: post #354
sspiff wrote: post #190

I never heard of her before today, despite having been interested and educated, and employed in computer science for so long. What a truly impressive list of achievements, and achieving such great things before, during and after transition gender in the 60s of all things. I can't imagine what they would have done without being hampered by the social stigma and discrimination they must have faced. It saddens me that I…

A possible example of the "Conway Effect"? (mentioned in the article).

No doubt in my mind it is exactly this.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#373

Post by arjie »

arjie wrote: post #351
sltkr wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, but my point was less about this one article, and more about the general experience of a well-intentioned but novice contributor: no matter how much you try to do the right thing, there's a good chance your work is for nothing because someone more established than you doesn't see the value in it. And maybe they are right: I understand that not all new contributions are valuable to the project (though you coul…

Hey, some news. It looks like what happened is that someone moved the article into Draft space because it was a stub article. Articles in draft space have to be updated to be 'fuller' before they can be in full space, and they have to have that done within 6 months. Well, the article is a small stub. I'll try to work on it to get it fuller. The hard part for me will be finding sources since I don't speak Japanese ver…

And here's the end to the story. With another editor, it's now back in mainspace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makoto_Matsumoto_(mathematicia...

You should be able to link Mersenne Twister back to him if you'd like to now.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#374

Post by jmcgough »

fleetingmoments wrote: post #366

She was and remains a huge inspiration to many of us. I remember peering over her pages of "Transgender Success Stories" which chronicled trans people who led lives with some measure of success in the 90s and early 2000s. When I came out to my parents as a EE student and trans woman myself, her story was the one resource I made them read. To no avail, mind you, my father called me brainwashed and told me the journey…

I was a teenager in the early 2000s era of internet trans support groups. Lynn's website was one of like three online resources at the time. The goal back then was to transition, pass, and kind of blend in and live your life with minimal harassment. Conway living out and openly back then (as a very successful researcher, no less) was revolutionary. She made things a bit easier for the rest of us who came after.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#375

Post by Mordisquitos »

autumnstwilight wrote: post #359
autoexec wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if you're a cis man, try to imagine you were a trans man; born female, raised a girl, expected to conform to your local female beauty norms, be expected to bear children, less body hair and muscle mass, curves in places unfamiliar to you, flirted with by men, etc. Is it weird if I suspect that it wouldn't bother me? I'd have been raised from birth to expect those things so they wouldn't be surprising to girl-me,…

I've heard the phrase "cis by default" used to describe this experience (which I mostly share). Essentially, the intensity of feelings regarding gender can vary widely from person into person and so a lot of people are fine with the gender they were born as not because they strongly feel like a woman/man, but precisely because they don't have strong feelings about it. (And therefore being transgender is the intersect…

> And therefore being transgender is the intersection of both "having a strong internal feeling about gender" and "the feelings you have about gender not matching what society categorizes your body as"

I am another cis man who suspects I would have been just as comfortable had I been born a cis woman, and I have independently come to a similar conclusion. I feel no need to emphasise my social or physical "masculinity", but neither do I make any effort towards being non-gender-conforming — I am perfectly happy having a beard, being hairy and wearing "men's" clothes. Conversely, if I had been born a woman with my same congenital personality, I think I wouldn't have made a particular effort to present my "femininity", but I would have been perfectly comfortable being less hairy, having boobs, and dressing and behaving as do some of my female friends (who are cis and hetero, homo, and bisexual) who, without being GNC, are not necessarily super-feminine.

What I would really like to know is whether I'm right in my intuition that certain cis-male and cis-female individuals feel the opposite. I imagine that cis men who enjoy "feeling like a man" or showing manliness (within the non-toxic and healthy range) are pretty sure they would have hated being born a woman. The same goes for cis women who love displaying their femininity; they probably feel they would hate having been born a man if they were to be asked.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#376

Post by jmcgough »

docmars wrote: post #240
not_alexb wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has little to do with human society. Western society, maybe. Plenty of other societies don't assert a distinct binary for gender (which doesn't even exist in sex; intersex people exist at the same rates as people that are red-headed, and you wouldnt call red heads unnatural). Even if it was "natural" you're making the choice to treat someone like shit. You can backpedal onto what all your peers are doing all you…

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Re: Lynn Conway has died

#377

Post by colejohnson66 »

BSDobelix wrote: post #297
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the US and Canada just ratified it Canada ratified it years ago (if we're not counting optional protocols), but according to https://indicators.ohchr.org/ , the US hasn't. Do you have a source?

https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/MTDSG/Volume%20I/Cha...

According to that document, the US _signed_ it in 1995, but has yet to _ratify_ it (notice the blank space in the third column).

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#378

Post by llIllIlIl »

fleetingmoments wrote: post #368
itishappy wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior to Mendel, sex and gender were both based on primary sex characteristics. One could argue that's an even simpler model.

And trans people still existed, just had impossibly harder lives than now. Why do we want to return to that?

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Re: Lynn Conway has died

#379

Post by jefftk »

duskwuff wrote: post #355
jefftk wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a lot of highly idiosyncratic designs for gates, heavily customized for the physical and electrical context that they're used in - and I won't deny that they're often very clever and space-efficient, but they were also extraordinarily time-intensive to design, and weren't reusable. Is this optimization now something that hardware design tools do automatically?

They optimize on a different level. Instead of trying to optimize the arrangement of individual transistors, you start with a set of standard cells which contain optimized transistor-level implementations of individual gates, and have your design tools optimize the placement and routing of those cells within a grid system.

Does that mean there's an opportunity for increasing performance by bringing collections of gates into scope for optimization? Or does that not actually let you decrease transistors very much?

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#380

Post by Taniwha »

jefftk wrote: post #379
duskwuff wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They optimize on a different level. Instead of trying to optimize the arrangement of individual transistors, you start with a set of standard cells which contain optimized transistor-level implementations of individual gates, and have your design tools optimize the placement and routing of those cells within a grid system.

Does that mean there's an opportunity for increasing performance by bringing collections of gates into scope for optimization? Or does that not actually let you decrease transistors very much?

There is - but given the size of the design space that's mostly done with a library of gates - synthesis/layout pick cells from that library and place them, often putting connected gates together - you could then merge gates in some smart way to save a few percent in area but chances are you wouldn't gain much because you'd have to shuffle all the other gates in that row a bit, and that would mess with timing elsewhere.

Also routing (wires between gates) constrains how close many gates can be, and for everything but regular arrays of gates there may be little point

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