h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I wasn't talking about your girlfriend's goals, mind you. I was talking about the psychiatrists' goals. Personally, I think my psychiatrist was lazy and overpaid, and he kept adding medication to counteract the side-effects and he wouldn't answer my questions about the interactions of all the drugs I was taking, and he just generally pissed me off. But I hate doctors too.

I'm interested in gender differences... I think it's mostly because I used to try to have "male" characteristics out of some kind of feminist idealism which I later turned on because I realized that the elimination of gender differences is counterproductive to ending discrimination, as is the opposite view, "difference feminism." The point is that people shouldn't be discriminated against based on the average characteristics of the groups they belong to, but at the same time, those average characteristics can be useful to know about.

There are some things I would talk about differently based on the gender of the other person, like sex or periods or birth control or something... Is that wrong?

My girlfriend had a very similar experience. There is a saying that when you talk to a psychiatrist he listens to what you say and then uses it to set the doseadge. It was certainly true for her and it sounds like it was for you as well.

I depends on whether your talking from an ideological stance or a personal persepctive. If you told me what you thought about becoming pregnant (Assuming for a minute you had and were overcome with the sudden desire to tell a stranger about it) and asked me if I ever intended to become pregnant I admit I would think you quite odd. If on the other hand you were describing your ideals on the subject or some issue relating to it I would not change my ideals because I was speaking to a woman instead of a man.

"listens to what you say"? ha!

Oh I'm firmly against pregnancy.

I think you're thinking only of intellectual arguments, whereas when you start becoming closer to a person, I think it helps to know gender. Unless you're close to males and females in the same way.... Not that that's bad.

As I said it matters if your talking from an ideological or personal perspectice. I suppose I should have said intellectual or personal. Anyway I have a girlfriend and one's enough for me so I've no intention of having another relationship, given that I'll treat my male and female friends the same subject to their individual preferences.

If nobody got pregnant I guarantee that in 150 years we will have 0% unemployment 0% crime rate and will stop polluting the earth. So now I think about it pregnancy is responsible for unemployment, crime and pollution. I'm against it too

You're thinking only in terms of how you treat people, and you're only thinking of that in terms of better or worse. There can be "different" without being better or worse, and I just think that female-male and female-female friendships are qualitatively different. Maybe male-male and male-female ones aren't as much, or something (but that seems unlikely). And it's not something you can point to like the way you treat people, it's just more of a feeling. Again, one doesn't feel better than the other, just "different."

I just got my community artist badge

Cool, what art did you do? Or are going to do?

Maybe it's just me. I don't drink or like any sports or like any music or have any common interests at all. There seem to be unwritten rules about what you can talk about and do with strangers and I don't have any of the right interests or do any of the right things so all of the relationships I form turn out odd. Theres also the fact that I can count the number of male friends I've had in my life on one hand. Maybe it was different when I was single, maybe I was thinking I could potentially go out with this person when I was talking to women, dunno, can't remeber last week let alone last year. It could also be my mother and sister, both are not very femanine (When me and my dad play in wargames doubles it has often been commented that I get my competative streak from him - but only by opponenets who've never met mom). It could be that I went to an all boys school and never learned how to treat women properly so I eneded up treating them the same way I treat men. It could be Jennas right and I'm asphergic and can't handle social situations properly. It could be all of the above. It could be the phases of the moon for all I know, the relationships just don't feel any different.

Can you describe what the difference is between your relationship with men and women? I'm curious to know what the difference is.

My art doesn't seem to be up yet, but I did one for "Duffel Coat" and one for "Yoga Nidra" as my entrance "test."

That is all very odd. Ok... With my girl friends, I feel like I have more "productive" conversations about my relationships (not sure why that is). They're generally more understanding about depression and mood disorders, but that may just be because most of them have mood disorders. We tend to identify with each other. We can complain about our screwed up body-image mentalities. And this may sound retarded, but we can talk about clothes or makeup or whatever... However, I've always had more male friends. They are more likely to amuse themselves by making me laugh. When we talk about my relationships (I guess I do this a lot), they offer more advice rather than a sense that they understand my feelings. Our conversations are possibly more theoretical. I feel like I don't have to worry about intimidating them (being opinionated and such). And maybe this is shallow, but I generally want them to think I'm attractive, regardless of whether I'm seeing someone or am attracted to them.

You really can't remember anything? I have an unusually sharp memory, I think.

Cool, though you may be waiting a while, an artist did the art for the Forum last year and it still isn't up.

Hmm, it's hard to say. I don't spend too long talking about relationships but I think your right that women generally prefer to empathise while men prefer to advise. Thing is if I have a problem that I feel I need understanding or advice on I generally know who I want to talk to about it so general information on genders doesn't really serve. I don't see why you can't talk about clothes with men, I know a fashion designer who can go on about clothes all day - which is unfortunate because I can't Point is once you know a person you know their interests so you treat them as the individual you know not by their gender - more men than women study physics but, and you might not belive this, I know of a women who studies physics In fact I know four. And I think they wouldn't be best pleased if I assumed that they all studied music every time I spoke to them. I think everyone wants to feel attractive, but then I try not to let things cloud my thinking, I'm just about past the emotion serves no purpose line of thinking but I still tend to suppress it in favor of rationality. It has been commented that I should have been the program not the programmer.

I have just eaten breakfast at 11:30pm I got up at 9:30am. This is because I forgot to eat. I had to take an IQ test to prove that I was dyspraxic in order to use a laptop in the exams (Which is ridiculous - can you think of a situation where you might need to know how to program something that doesn't involve there being a computer around. I scored 100% on the math section in just under 1/2 the time allocated. I scored 0% (and this was multiple choice) on the memory section. It's offical I have the largest possible varience between sections in an IQ test, the therapist was amazed. It also shows I have a negative memory - I score less than the statistical average. I also have a negative skill with the German language for that matter, but I didn't let that stop me getting full marks on my oral. When my girlfriend asked me when my birthday was we had to ring my mother to check because I wasn't sure. I don't know the order of the months, I can never remember it. I occasioanlly get headaches, an inability to focus etc. and I can't narrow it down until someone points out I haven't had anything to drink all day. I exist only because of a system of post-it notes which remind me of important facts - there is one up there which jokingly states that "The girl you woke up with is called Jenna. If this information is wrong and she gets upset serves you right" Theres another one in different handwriting to all of the others that says I owe Kris a tenner. I am skeptical. Yes I can't remember my memory is atrocious. I am fairly sure you are not meant to identify with the main character from memento.

Still it's not so bad - I seem to manage ok - I just use a lot of people I know as external memory packs and make sure anyone who expects to meet me txts me on the same day to comfirm.

I've never met a guy who would talk about clothes unless he was gay (in which case, we talked about clothes ). I was never advocating using gender to make decisions about who to talk to or what to assume about them. I said that relationships with males and females feel systematically different, and I'm not making this up, people like to know. They're uncomfortable not knowing. It's one of the reasons that transexual/transgender/transvestite/hermaphrodite type stuff bothers people. Maybe we can move beyond it. It's also why they tend to give robots genders (Carnegie Mellon does a lot of robotics), it's to help people interact with them. Carnegie Mellon made this female "receptionist" robot which is totally sexist, but whatever. Anyway, I'd say that what applies to most people probably has little bearing on you most of the time.

I've never heard of "dyspraxic" and it's not in the dictionary I use, but.... sounds interesting. My ex-boyfriend has trouble remembering things (ADD) and he relies on having a PDA, have you tried that?

<< I've never met a guy who would talk about clothes unless he was gay (in which case, we talked about clothes ).>>

Next time I meet him I'll ask if he's gay. Maybe he'd get upset but at least I'd have something to talk about other than clothes.

<< I was never advocating using gender to make decisions about who to talk to or what to assume about them. I said that relationships with males and females feel systematically different, and I'm not making this up, people like to know. >>

I don't doubt it, but these are other people and I don't know what they experience beyond what they tell me. Which is why I keep prodding.

<< They're uncomfortable not knowing. It's one of the reasons that transexual/transgender/transvestite/hermaphrodite type stuff bothers people. >>

It does? Well I know it does but what I mean is it bothers people other than religious fanatics and right wing extremists?

<< Maybe we can move beyond it. It's also why they tend to give robots genders (Carnegie Mellon does a lot of robotics), it's to help people interact with them. Carnegie Mellon made this female "receptionist" robot which is totally sexist, but whatever. >>

Actually that is true. Most of the artificial intelligences I've read about had genders. I've only worked on one with a gender myself and as it was trying to pass the Turing test (or at least not fail as absymally as it could) it had to have a gender.

<< Anyway, I'd say that what applies to most people probably has little bearing on you most of the time. >>

Thanks.

<< I've never heard of "dyspraxic" and it's not in the dictionary I use >>

It would be under dyspraxia, but then that would have been next to it. Maybe it's only in medical dictionaries or in it's origional langauge. Buy a latin dictionary

<< but.... sounds interesting. >>

I haven't described it. Dyspraxia is problems with motor functions (praxia from practical as opposed to dyslexia which is more mentally based, lexia might come from lexicon because of the writing issues but I don't know) I can't hold a pen properly or run properly etc. Fortunately I only have a mild case. I only mentioned it because it was the reason I took the IQ test that showed my memory to be so low. I don't have any diagnosed problem with my memory (that I can remember being diagnosed with :P) but I would be suprised if there isn't something there.

<< My ex-boyfriend has trouble remembering things (ADD) and he relies on having a PDA, have you tried that? >>

Can't say I have but it sounds like a dangerous idea, one well placed drop and everything I need to know about life is gone. Or a crash - I have never come across a post-it note reading "File not found"

I am a bit paranoid about these things. When I work on computer I make lots of backups. I blame my A-lvl computing project. 4 disk backups, 1 internet serve backup, 2 hard disk backups and a magnetic strip backup all failed with 1 hour of each other. As well as the origional of course. Fortunately my computing teacher was as paranoid as I am am was making 2 magnetic strip backups despite the fact that those things only fail once in a blue moon.

Of course since the disability act means the uni has to pay for anything I can justify as helping me overcome dyspraxia I could claim I need it to help take notes in lectures and get one for free

It bothers people other than religious fanatics and right wing extremists. It's just more subtle, maybe some discomfort, overcompensation, undue curiosity (i.e. Jerry Springer), etc. Or that's my understanding. I don't know anyone with truly ambiguous gender, but if I did I'd ask them.

I did look under "dyspraxia." Why would you take an IQ test because of dyspraxia if it's a motor disability?

PDA's let you set timers, which is a helpful thing post-it notes don't do.

I bet it would really mess you up if someone secretly started replacing your post-it notes with ones that said "file not found." Hehehehe...

It is a mental disorder which manifests mostly in physical form. Extreme shock can make a person go blind where there is nothing physiologically wrong with them. The university treats all mental disorders the same, including the necessity for an IQ test. Maybe it was used to demonstrate that I do worse on written tasks than an average person of my IQ, I don't know. The uni does have a problem with taking individual needs into account, anyone with a disability gets 15 minutes extra time per hour in the exams. Now my problem is I can't write so I get a computer and can type instead - my type speed is faster than my write speed so if anything I should get less time but I get extra time because everyone gets extra time.

Maybe I'll try a PDA, it could work. It just seems more trouble than it's worth - the damn things were causing no end of havoc while I was working at the medical practice.

People have tried. I think I mentioned the note saying I owed Kris money. When you rely on notes in a shared house you get good at recognising your own handwriting!

I don't think Jerry Springer can be considered to be excersising undue curiousity. I'm sure being curious doesn't require quite so many fights.

I don't think it would be necessary to mimic your handwriting -- why would you write "file not found" on your own post-it note?

You're obviously able to learn a lot of stuff in spite of whatever undiagnosed memory problem you have. Does it affect only episodic memory? (i.e. when and where and how things happen, I forget what the other type is called, "implicit" memory?)

Theres a scary thought. I better back up my post it notes. If only I had some sort of electronic assistant, that I could carry on my person and it would store all of my data for me. Oh well.

I don't know. I've only studied memory at A-level (being joint honours I can pick and choose and I tried not to cover old ground) but the most usefull thing I've come across is depth of processing theory. The idea that something is easier to remeber when it's more important or relevant.

I can remember relevant information a lot more easily than seemingly irrelevant information. For example I often find in psychology exams that I can remeber what was done in a study, why and any criticisms of it. What I can never remeber is the names and dates of the studies. Unless two studies were done by the same person and it matters (If for example one is supporting the other you can say that the psychologist may have been aiming for these results and given subconcious queues, unless a double-blind format was used) then I can remember that the two studies were sone by the same person but I still can't remeber their name because name is an arbitary thing. It's probably also why I can't rememeber the order of the months. Theres no good reason June should come before December, they're just names so why not December then June? (I know Decembers the last one because we always go on a family holiday at new years and it's always incredibly cold and December has a reputation for being cold) Actually thats a good example, a lot of the time deduction is a fine replacement for memory - I forgot a mathematical theorum in my a-lvl exam so I derived it from first principles instead.

I think February is actually the coldest month, though. Do you never learn things from sheer repetition? Like can you say the alphabet?

What's A-level?

What if you think names are important to help other people identify quickly who or what you're talking about?

<< I think February is actually the coldest month, though. >>

Great now I won't be able to remeber where December is :P

<< Do you never learn things from sheer repetition? Like can you say the alphabet? >>

Yes, but it takes me a lot longer to learn than most people. I was really bad in primary school (Ages 6-12) until one of my teachers stopped trying to get me to remeber the 9 times table as 9, 18, 27, 36... and instead taught me that 9 * X means that the first digit is 10-X and the second is 9-the first. I found that learning a method and applying it to multiple situations is a lot easier for me than rote learning. I started picking up other things that way too and life became a lot easier. When I studied German I could handle complicated grammatical structures before I had the vocabulary to book a hotel room.

What's A-level?

Exams you can take at age 18. Unis generally base their decision on who gets in on them, I'm not sure what the American equivant is

(I said can take because you take GCSEs at 16 and have the option to leave the education system after them, there are a few other options such as trying for other types of qualifycations that unis accept but they're not really relevant)

< What if you think names are important to help other people identify quickly who or what you're talking about? >

Relevant is more useful than important. For example if someone calls their experiment into how to perform action X and call it "An experiment into how to perform action X" rather than "Daves experiment" I tend to remeber it. Wheras the second name is arbitary and not related to the experiment in any way. Similaly I am terrible with names and faces because they are in no way relevant to the personality and ideas of the person - they're just something chosen seemingly randomly by parents at birth.

Conversation I had at a friends engagement party last year:
Me "Hi, my names **** I don't belive we've met"
Her "We met at..."
"Oh yeah."
"and at..."
"Of course"
"and when..."
etc.
It turns out we'd met 9 times and talked at length on 4 of those occasions.

But grammar is just as arbitrary as vocabulary. I mean, it does have rules, ones that have no innate meaning, but in German there are so many exceptions to the rules there might as well be no rules.

In Chinese (mandarin) you have to learn a tone as well as a character for every word you learn.

Americans take the SAT (standard aptitude test) to get into college. It's an "aptitude" test, meaning it's not about anything. It's supposed to be about reasoning, and you're not supposed to be able to considerably improve your score by preparing. We also can take SAT subject tests (I believe I took "writing" and "math II" or something) and AP (advanced placement) tests which can give you college credit. AP tests usually follow an AP course, although I think you can take the exams without them, so they're more like the IB exams. I took AP english, physics, chemistry, calculus, and US history.

Faces may not be relevant to personality, but facial expressions are, and everyone does them kind of differently. Does that help you at all? When I do drawings of people I can make them "look like" people by using facial expressions rather than making everything exactly right, which is near impossible.

<< But grammar is just as arbitrary as vocabulary. I mean, it does have rules, ones that have no innate meaning, but in German there are so many exceptions to the rules there might as well be no rules. >>

Not really, if you think about it. Firstly there are less grammatical rules in a language than there are words. (Useless fact of the day English has more different words in it than French, German and Italian combined) Secondly grammar is about communicating information. In German if you are using a past tense then you move the verb to the end of the sentence. (In fact you move the verb to the end of the sentence a lot of the time but this is just a example) This means you communicate the tense before the action, there is probably a reason for this, at some point some German linguist would have decided that tense was more important than the action. So to remeber it all I had to do was think of an example of something that I have done wrong as a result of doing the right action at the wrong time. This wasn't hard because I could find something relevant to me and this helped me remeber the move the verb to the end rule. This doesn't help with vocab unless it's (rats whats that word for sounds like what it means) or is a morpholoical manipulation on a word or words that you already know. There is no reason I can deduce for calling a spade a spade and not a osquip so I can't make it relevant.

<< In Chinese (mandarin) you have to learn a tone as well as a character for every word you learn. >>

I'm glad I have no intention to learn chinese.

<< Americans take the SAT (standard aptitude test) to get into college. It's an "aptitude" test, meaning it's not about anything. It's supposed to be about reasoning, and you're not supposed to be able to considerably improve your score by preparing. >>

Yes we took SATs too, though they don't seem to affect anything other than govornment statistics and we generally take them a lot younger. Getting into some secondary schools requires an 11+ exam which is supposed to measure aptitude rather than anything else. My fave question was a true/false "some lucky people can ride downhill to school and downhill home again" I couldn't find the 'my parents live seperately' option so I went for false.

<< We also can take SAT subject tests (I believe I took "writing" and "math II" or something) and AP (advanced placement) tests which can give you college credit. AP tests usually follow an AP course, although I think you can take the exams without them, so they're more like the IB exams. >> IB? << I took AP english, physics, chemistry, calculus, and US history. >>

*Wonders what the odds that US history covers what you did before settling that land your using now is* Do some courses require AP tests? It's only that most uni courses have specific requirements - I can get straight A's in my exams but if I didn't take Math or Computer Science I wouldn't be allowed on a programming based course.

<< Faces may not be relevant to personality, but facial expressions are, and everyone does them kind of differently. >>

You've hit the nail on the head there. People never look like they do in RL in photos. My shiny new digital camera lets me record 15 seconds of film in the place of a picture if I want, which is a blessing when it comes to capturing peoples mood at whatever event you want to take pictures of.

<< Does that help you at all? >>

Absolutely. The problem is I remember how they reacted to me (because thats when I was looking at their face) so I can't tell if I know them until after they look at me - which is normally before I've said if I know them or not - but my foot has an addiction to my mouth so it doesn't always work out ok.

<< When I do drawings of people I can make them "look like" people by using facial expressions rather than making everything exactly right, which is near impossible. >>

Cool. Although I feel the need to hide in the face of another artist - my sister was over yeasterday and I'm quite jealous of her artistic talent where I have none. Still I apprichiate anyone who can do something I can't (That is to say everyone) because without them I wouldn't have these things in my world