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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Taking it back to RealScience™ is fine.

Elemental distribution in the universe is also extremely bimodal .. moreso even than the exceptions to the reproductive male or reproductive female buckets.

Everything in the universe is either Hydrogen or Helium .. save for a tiny tiny cluster of exceptions known (to astronomers) as "metals" and as "every other damn element including carbon and oxygen" to the aquatic apes.

Science is quite happy to endlessly study things with a frequency of ppm (parts per million) and less.

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> Everything in the universe is either Hydrogen or Helium

Not sure what point you're trying to make here but we don't live in a star.

We do all live in the same universe.

Give it some time, it may come to you eventually. Or not.

Well I guessed that you were trying to make a point about how our language is highly biased towards heavy elements even though they are a tiny proportion of the universe, and that means it also makes sense to bias our language towards intersex people even though they are a tiny proportion of the population.

But it can't be that because that is an obviously stupid point. So what was your point?

Remind me of your point, if you would:

> I think this is a massive over-correction (banning words is dumb) but they're not completely wrong.

Is it that "they're not completely wrong" to ban terms referring to events significantly more common than the occurrence of gold in the earths crust?

To quote another:

> it can't be that because that is an obviously stupid point. So what was your point?

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For general interest:

* frequency of "true" (undecidable) intersex (1 in 5,500 births): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0022449020955213...

* Mean global crustal ppm of gold: 0.004 (four thousandth of one in a million) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

* Report on Gold deposits in a high yeild region: Gold Deposits of the Pilbara Craton https://www.ga.gov.au/pdf/RR0065.pdf (74 page AGSO report, 'rich' veins have 0.4 ppm gold)

This is a fantastic analogy!

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