So sometimes I think about sexonomics, and how in the sexual playing field, a female is a treasure, and a male is worthless. And it often goes back to testicles: Males are generating sperm that needs to be emptied, and thus it becomes a basic bodily need — at the base of Maslow’s triangle, along with food and shelter. Women? They don’t have any sperm to hold back.
But then I wonder if it’s deeper than that. A vagina is a hole, and a penis is the opposite. They’re meant to be together. But who needs who more? Does something that can have something stuck in it need something stuck in it more than something that can be stuck in something needs to be stuck somewhere? I’m leaning towards no.
Then I think about hardware, and male vs. female jacks. All stereo receivers, TVs, iPods, etc have tons of female jacks just waiting for something to be inserted in them. Yet have you ever seen something with every jack plugged (shut up Glen)? How often is the microphone jack in a computer plugged? Or the headphone jack in your home theatre station? Do you use every available input on all your devices?
Very unlikely. And that’s okay. The female jacks don’t need to be plugged in.
Yet if you have a pair of headphones with a male jack — There is an expectation that you’re going to use the headphones. They’re going to be plugged in. They need a jack to be plugged into.
And the cord that connects your guitar to it’s amp? Male on both ends. It needs to rock out with its cock[s] out.
So there you have it. Sexonomics in the hardware jack world is analagous to sexonomics in the real world. It had not yet occurred to me.
Mood: strangely hungry
Music: Rammstein – Ich Will (Westbam Mix)
Claire's blog 
January 1, 2009 at 12:13 AM
Respectfully… I think you’re lacking in perspective, specifically the female perspective. A ‘female end’ the socket, if you will, is not complete without something plugged into it… empty… and, frankly, the male is only worthless to you, because it doesn’t suite your needs. From my point of view the male is more valuable ’cause the chickies don’t do it for me. Even with out the *need* to emtpy (as it were) I can assure you that women still feel the urge.
Women, clearly, do not generate sperm, for sure that when the egg drops there is a CLEAR and POWERFUL need to get the, erm, hole filled. Above and beyond the normal state of hormonal aspirations. Seriously, maybe you should feel more sympathy for all those jacks waiting for something to be plugged in. Who is less fulfilled? All the males are plugged in the and the females are still waiting…
January 3, 2009 at 1:21 AM
For whatever reason, reading this article made me think – for about the nine millionth time – of how superior our bodies are to any hardware we might happen to make. I defy you to find a jack combination with the bandwidth capacity of sex – let’s just call it the same as the size of the human genome, or 3 gigabytes in.. let’s be generous and say 20 minutes – that can survive being inserted every day for many years and still operate correctly..
January 3, 2009 at 1:27 AM
hahaha, good point Sheer. But I thought the human genome was only that big uncompressed, and that the sperm only had a payload of 20MB or so?
January 3, 2009 at 6:48 AM
I’m not a expert, but common sense says it takes more than 40 megabytes to make a human, even compressed. I doubt if you could even fit our instincts into 40 megs.
January 3, 2009 at 1:31 PM
Sheer,
Life has never been based on common sense. Human bodies do amazing things. (Check the Guiness Book Of World Records, which I think would be our #1 weapon in thwarting an alien invasion… “Look at these guys! they can hold their breath for 30 minutes and spit cherry pits 2 miles! Let’s go invade somewhere else instead”)
This post elucidates on it some more. I wish they cited their references, and I wish I’d stored the link in my delicious, and I wish slashdot had a better search engine ’cause I think that’s where I read it. But this guy basically wrote what I would have wrote when reading the article, if I were not so lazy:
http://forgetomori.com/2008/science/enlarge-your-penis-data-bandwidth/
Remember, the sperm is only half the genetic material.
Where you get bandwidth during ejaculation is the “truckload of cds” theory. Each sperm is only 37.5M, but you are shooting so many at once, it ends up being 31 petabytes/sec.
But wait — all those sperm are just different arrangements of your own DNA. In truth, it’s a bunch of 37.5M files selected form your 1.5TB code. It’s going to HEAVILY compress. It’s just a series of G-A-T-A — it’s going to compress better than an ASCII text file.
A single sperm, however, is closer to my 20M estimate. Because it’s something I read before, not made up.
Other interesting quotes:
“Usually only a single sperm fertilizes the egg, all those petabytes wasted. That would make only a single CD in five seconds, or 150Mb/s, something close to broadband Internet in Japan.”
January 3, 2009 at 1:32 PM
Another link:
http://www.thinkgene.com/how-much-data-is-a-human-genome/
“How much data IS a human genome?
* 2 bits per base (4 bases = 22)
* 3,080.4 Mb per human genome [1]
* 700 MB per CD-ROM
(1 human genome) *
(3,080,400,000 bases / 1 human genome) *
(2 bits / 1 base) *
(1 byte / 8 bits) *
(1 MB / 1,048,576 bytes) =
734.4 MB per uncompressed human genome. Easily enough to fit on a 700 MB with basic file compression like gzip.
…
this is the size of a haploid human genome. Humans are diploid: they two of each autosome and two sex chromosomes. So this is the size of a reference haploid human genome, not a complete human individual genome, which would be twice as much data. (2 music CDs) Thanks, neandrothal!
[1] Scherer, Stewart. 2007. A Short Guide to the Human Genome. 6.”
January 3, 2009 at 8:02 PM
#5: I think you perhaps mean 150 MB/sec? Although, from my broadband experience is Japan, 150 Mb/sec does seem more like it.
January 4, 2009 at 5:54 PM
You may be getting awesome burst throughput, but once you average it out over time, it’s not that great. It’s like a DS3 with only 3Kbps reserved bandwidth – you can burst to 45Mbps, but the rest of the time it just dribbles. :-P
January 4, 2009 at 5:54 PM
And don’t even get me started on the “handshake time” it takes to negotiate the connection….
January 12, 2009 at 8:41 PM
^^ LOL Daniel, that was funny.
Anyway, I randomly and accidentally, in an unrelated search, found the 20-meg-sperm article:
http://www.utheguru.com/fun-science-how-many-megabytes-in-the-human-body