https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/bil...
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
This:
> "See, there are only two possibilities: XX, a girl, or XY, a boy. The chance of becoming either a boy or a girl is always 1 in 2, a 50-50 chance either way. It’s like flipping a coin: X you’re a girl, Y you’re a boy.”
is out by a few percent .. numbers wise it's more inaccurate than claiming there's no gold in the earths crust. ( see [1] )
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
I imagine Nye himself authorised the change to his own work as I assume he later corrected himself (as appears to be implied in your link).
Why does it have a "Sex specificity" column? Why does it contain the words male and female?
The semantic sparring over sex and gender has a pretty simple compromise, that people who want to say it is a spectrum and people who want to say it is binary should be able to agree on and be happy with:
it is a bimodal distribution
of course the problem is that is a nuanced idea and humans can't handle nuance. Maybe you can, and I can, but WE as a human group can't. We prefer to drive ourselves literally insane over the semantic argument. oh well.
this isn't something that most people are familiar with, especially people who tend to see things in binaries (not because they're stupid, but because they're trained to see the world in binaries, because it's the simplest classification system which makes it easy to manipulate by politicians and media).
The reason for that is the actual verifiable existance of people who were born here clearly, scientifically, medically as neither M NOR F.
They are valid exceptions to the above quote from the Nye program and there are enough people born this way to number in the thousands in a country of some ~ 23 milllion or so.
The passport system was changed as a citizen of this country fronted and objected to having enter M or F when they were born clearly neither.
As someone with a science background who measures and models reality I approve of systems that track the world and its elements as it is and as they are .. rather than models that force a world view that doesn't match reality.
As Richard Dawkins recently clarified, "As a biologist, there are 2 sexes. And that's all there is to it." It's binary and there is no exception. People that claim otherwise are confused.
If one wants to make a simple statement that encompasses the largest group of people they might say, "There are 2 sexes." If they want to make a more complex statement that encompasses all humans they might add a qualifier such that they instead say, "There are 2 typical sexes." That "typical" adds a whole lot of complexity in order to generalize the statement.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
I thought you were going to mention how there are more male embryos than female embryos created since males have a higher death rate. Why is sex the only category in which we have to constantly qualify ourselves with regard to birth defects? Someone who's talking about how the three types of cones work to create color vision doesn't have to constantly harken back to how some people are color-blind, despite that population being an order of magnitude larger than intersex individuals. Not mentioning people with phocomelia does not mean your lesson on the anatomy of the arms and legs is wrong or inadequate.
This isn't scientifically accurate either. Some people have 4 types of cones.
https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/from-sex-to-gender-mode...
Mark Twain was making a point about judging people by labels or how they look on the surface, instead of judging them by their character and actions. Of course now we're back to square one to judging people by labels and how they look on the surface, but this time it'll be different.
We as a species seem doomed to repeat history on loop, like some sort of real life Ground Hog Day.
[0]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32325/32325-h/32325-h.htm
Yet, we keep trying to build rules, societal norms, APIs (and now AIs) to try and achieve this at scale. And it always fails.
What the hell Netflix??
It's insane how freaked people STILL get over black bars! Look, we get it, some aspect ratios don't work when on other aspect ratios! Just leave the content alone!