I'm a career physicist, and I honestly have no idea what a state of matter is anymore.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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Can I offer you a nice smectic B3 liquid crystal in this trying time?
You may not.
Simple, "solid state" means "no moving parts", like a vacuum tube, for example.
You'd be surprised.
Well I know the liquid phase is what happened after I ate at that filthy pizza place. Yikes.
Could there be a spherical object inside that tube? Just for familiarities sake
Only if it's a cow
Are gas atoms spherical?
Interacting fields of non-causality?
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If certain people could almost understand they would be very upset
Do the two tails left of M and right of F mean there are males more male than cis males, and similarly with females?
I don't think it's an accepted term anymore, but you reminded me that they used to call the triple X chromosome syndrome by the term Super-Female-Syndrome.
Probably not what the author intended though.
...
I am a horrible person, but the only thing I can think of reading this is a small-circuit pro wrestling event where all participants have this set of chromosomes, billed as 'The Triple X Throwdown', for the title of Supreme Female.
It means that traditionally understood cis male can still have some female characteristics (no facial hair, higher pitched voice, bad at driving) but some males will have none.
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though the meme is cool, gender isn't particularly a biology (or 'advance biology') thing. biology deals with sexes, their expressions and functionalities. gender is more of a personal and social concept but often related to sex characteristics (cis).
and yes, advanced biology tells sex determination isn't as easy as XX or XY or even looking at genitals like a creep.
and oh, for giggles consider fungi :)
plenty of animals can gender swap, be hermaphrodites, or produce asexually.
Adding to this: XX and XY works for mammals, but not for other vertebrates (fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians). Birds and reptiles have Z and W chromosomes, and unlike in mammals where females are homozygotes, males in these groups are homozygotes. Some reptiles have temperature dependent sex determination, where ambient temperature above some value will produce males or females (depends on species). Some reptiles are composed entirely of females.
Some fish will straight up change sexes depending on age and male-female ratio in a social group.
In other groups it's not even different chromosomes but simply copy number of specific genes.
Plants can do all sorts of whacky things like produce seeds and pollen in the same individual.
Fungi are an entirely different cluster fuck because they have mating types which are not simple binaries.
Eukaryotic sex determination isn't a binary and it isn't even a nicely categorizable spectrum. It's a grab-bag of whatever doesn't perma-fuck your genome.
Source: me, I'm a biologist. Though admittedly I work on animals so my understanding of fungi and plant stuff is fuzzy at best.
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I would say gender is probably centered about around psychology, ranges mostly from sociology to biology, with a just little bit going into chemistry
maybe like
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Slime mold(which is not a mold or fungi) looks around nervously in it's 13 different sexes.
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When Newton worked out the laws of motion, he figured they had to be correct because they were so simple and elegant.
He had no idea that relativity was going to come in and fuck his shit up.
He definitely miscalculused the turnstables...
And then there was quantum.
Do you have any idea how fast you were going?
No officer, but I can tell you exactly where I am!
"Noooooooooo!" -Albert Einstein
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relativity only applies at large scales and quantum at small scales.
for everything else, esp earth bound, classic mechanics is works just fine.
The point is that he just assumed there was nothing more to know. And he was wrong (tho I'm not gonna knock the dude who invented calculus too hard).
The comic is trying to point out that bigotry is generally born out of a lack of curiosity.
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He did also notice that the planets didn't move quite exactly as he predicted and said "well, God must keep them in place"
"Now excuse me I'm going to go behead some counterfeiters."
TBF the laws of motion are still correct.
it's not that they are "correct", it's that they are a close enough approximation to work well enough at the scale they're used. it's not like the universe runs on math.
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A genderino sounds more like something you'd find in particle physics than biology anyway
Right alongside gender fluid.
Considering the names of the types of quarks, I recommend renaming them genderinos.
finally, we found what genderfluid is made from
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Honestly, people would probably object more to advanced math than advanced biology if they were exposed as much to it. Or basic math. Or elementary math...
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So true and it's a great to remind them of that sort of thing.
You know, you'd think all of the people who say it's purely down to genetics would be natural allies with, you know, molecular biologists (applied genetics). They'd be all like "it's a Y chromosome or nothing" and the biologists would be all like "yeah chromosomes!" because we fucking love chromosomes but no. In fact, it's noticeably absent when you start to think about it.
I wonder why that might be?
The short answer is "because it's infinitely more complicated than that."
Just because you carry the genetic code for anything at all, it doesn't mean you'll express it. The default setting for our DNA is off. So, if something isn't telling it to transcribe, it won't do it. A whole load of reasons could cause that, even before we get to mutations and partial expression or chimeras etc.
Anyway, what i mean is yeah, this meme!
Edit: also, don't beleive the AI. Early fetuses are female, until the Y is activated. You could have an inactivated Y and the fetus could be a woman capable of having children. The default setting is female, not intersex. It could be either but unless a specific event happens, it will always be female. It's a subtle but important difference. This means that all fetuses are female and then turn into a male.