It’s a sad irony that programmers, predominantly young people who fancy themselves socially tolerant, have built an internet that puts people into discrete categories rather than properly recognizing diversity.

We’ve made forms that “validate” out valid last names like Ng; people without last names simply being screwed. We make address forms that toss out valid addresses. We demand to know your gender but often don’t even give “decline to state” and “other” as answers. We often make games where you must choose between a small set of avatars, all of which look nothing like you if you’re not one of the small handful of ethnic groups the designers had in mind.

There may be a societal tendency to put people into rigid categories behind this but there are also simply technical considerations too. A rigid SQL table makes for easy queries. It takes more processing power to run a regex on the values or even simple wildcard matching (it’s trivial for each record but it can really grow quickly).

We live in a text-box world, not a radio button world. Here’s hoping that faster computers and better design can right a wrong and let our computers reflect that.

Seventy-two percent of Americans say big government is a greater threat to the U.S. in the future than is big business or big labor, a record high in the nearly 50-year history of this question. –Gallup Organization, Dec. 13, 2013 You are hulking and awkward, humorless and impatient. You are patholo…

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In the early morning hours of June 27, 2013, a team of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies pulled up to the home of Eugene Mallory, an 80-year-old

Happy news! Facebook now has much more inclusive gender designators available! For now I’ve changed my gender listing on here to “gender questioning.” Other options I’m strongly considering include “gender non-conforming,” “genderqueer,” “gender fluid,” “non-binary,” and “gender variant.” However, because I don’t have a strong pronoun preference in any direction and don’t usually have a problem with people characterizing me as male, I’ve lately been questioning whether strictly non-binary identity labels accurately describe me or whether I’m basically a cis male who prefers femme gender expression when I can get away with it. So for now I’m “gender questioning.” Anyway, really glad to see Facebook becoming more inclusive of a wide range of gender identities! Smash the gender binary!

People who appreciate the beauty of mathematics activate the same part of their brain when they look at aesthetically pleasing formula as others do when appreciating art or music, suggesting that there is a neurobiological basis to beauty.

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