Indeed. It's hard to believe that until relatively recently people thought that sexual attraction was fundamentally based in biology rather than identity.
The longer I've been involved with the queer community the fuzzier things get. I very much looked and acted like a guy when I was younger but was drawn to lesbians and always seemed to get along with them and they were the only people I felt comfortable talking about women's bodies with. My first 2 hookups after I started transitioning were with cis lesbians. This was before I started hormone therapy. The relationship I was in when I came out was with someone who still identifies as a cishet woman but 3 of her exes have come out as trans women in their 30s. There are so many ways to be attracted to people and strange ways we are drawn to each other. I've noticed that the kinds of people that are casually interested in me has changed with my body but my own conception of what desire is has become so nebulous.
Not implicating anything in particular, other than that biology is ridiculously complex. I can only speak from personal experience.
Before I transitioned, I noticed there was a pattern in my life where cis lesbians were interested in me, I've even dated a lesbian cis girl _as a boy_ when I was about 15 or something like that.
Biology is very strange.
I personally use the word "soul" for this kind of stuff. But that's nonsensical in the end.
I was a visiting professor there in 1989, and sat in on the course, which was on math proofs. We had weekly homework, which I did. In one class, I told Dijkstra that his proof was wrong. He couldn’t see my point, and we argued briefly and agreed to disagree. It was the only time anyone spoke up in class without being asked to by Dijkstra. At the start of the next class, Dijkstra announced that his attempted proof was indeed wrong, and proceeded to give a revised proof. Everyone was impressed by his intellectual honesty. He wrote up the episode as EWD 1044 https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...
Dijkstra asked me to sit in on one final oral exam which he was expecting to be tricky. It was a very intimidating atmosphere for the student.
Dennett models the mind on the idea of the computer. But computers are the products of human designers. Hence it makes no sense to try to explain the mind in terms of computers, since the existence of a computer itself presupposes the existence of a designing mind.
It wasn't worth pushing through. The other arguments are equally as incoherent until it gets to the hard problem of consciousness, which seems to a problem for the author to explain concisely.
Very nice indeed to see a simple algorithm in an area recently dominated by complex beasts. Gives me those great 70s vibes. Seems like a major result. Would love to hear from an expert in the area.
In section III B (p.8) the paper states that “in 1982…Gries[24] devised another linear algorithm” for the maximum subarray problem. I remember that. Jon Bentley visited Cornell, and posed the problem to me and Gries together. We thought on it independently overnight and presented a linear solution to Bentley the next day. Gries had a simpler invariant, and I had simpler code (using min). I never knew he wrote the paper until now, and am not one of the several people he mentions in the Acknowledgement, although he does say “Bentley…challenged US with this problem”.
