Science: Why do gays talk that way?

It has been said that transsexuality is not really a homosexual issue because homosexuality is about who you sleep with, whereas trans is about who you come as when you sleep with someone. But the T has sucked all the air out of the LGBTQIA+ Room, and not all gays are happy about that.

Why do gay people sound like that!?

Gay? Come on, quit it!! His PR agency got him a beard. What more do you want!?

Gay face? Will this boy grow up gay?

(AsapSCIENCE) June 20, 2024: Gaydar: Is GAY FACE real? • Can you tell somebody is gay from the... There is a lot of new research on the "gay accent" or "gay voice" [a lot of inflections and high-pitched modulations], which is technically not a "lisp" since it is not a mispronunciation but rather an over-pronunciation or over-articulation. Why might it be that gay men and gay women speak differently than hetero people?

References and further reading

That's RuPaul on the right, but on the left?

• ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
• jstor.org/stable/455948
• web.archive.org/web/200711010...
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_mal...
• rowdymagazine.com/post/wh...
• Man refuses to give up meat or alcohol for houseguest: Am I the A**hole??

Written by Gregory Brown and Mitchell Moffit. Edited by Luka Sarlija. Drawn by Gregory Brown.

• CC Liu, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

How to build easy, inexpensive house

We'll move to the high desert and brave the heat, winds, sun, floods, drought, and rodents.

Having secured the land for cheap, trekking into the wilderness to find a rural spot, it is time to build a structure on the real estate. Of course, what could be better than a yurt if living in the cold Stans? A vegan yurt, no wool, could really be something if it remained dry and kept snakes and rodents out. But someone or something might cut a hole to get in. Something better than cob and haybales is needed. What could be better than modular building blocks? It's a Lego house that's easy to expand, sturdy, solid, permanent, earthquake proof. What if all the blocks come tumbling down in a 9.0 apocalyptic tremor? There's a solution for that:

A kuti [\coo-tee\] is a "meditation hut," and that's what's needed more than a place to stretch or sleep. A quiet place, a place apart, a room with a view...a hearth with a chimney stack and solar panels for a fan. This structure is actually portable if one breaks it down and sets it up somewhere else. But it will stay in place, even in the wind, and be a forever home, a meditation lodge with many happy visitors.

• TikTok solves everything; Team Tiny House (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Brain's potential explained by big new idea

(LiveScience.com) Different species and individuals have limits as to what they can learn. For instance, you can't teach your dog to read. But what sets these boundaries? According to a new hypothesis, components of an organism's brain cortex may help determine how well that organism, be it dog, monkey or human, learns and improves its cognitive skills.

The cortex is your brain's outer layer, the exterior part you can see if you look at a picture of the whole organ. The new idea posits that small sets of neuronal cells in the cortex, called cortical modules, determine our "cognitive plasticity," that is, our capacity to learn new ways of thinking, or improve upon old ones.

"What [constrains] an individual organisms' ability to learn cognitive skills is essentially the diversity and number of [cortical] modules they have," said Eduardo Mercado III, a psychologist at the University at Buffalo in New York. "So, if you think about it like a set of Legos, if you have more Legos, you can build a wider variety of things."

Quality, not size, matters: These cortical modules are very spatially distinct, like circles in a honeycomb-pattern layered over a brain, Mercado said. More>>

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