The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered
-
ISO 5218 (https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/c036266_ISO_IEC_5218_2004(E_F).zip) has a lofty goal. It
specifies a uniform representation of human sexes for the interchange of information
in order to
improve clarity and accuracy of interchange
and
minimize the amount of human intervention required for communicating representation of sexes
To be sure, this is a challenging task! The question of how to describe a person's sex permits all sorts of nuance; while most people either have XY chromosomes and a penis or XX chromosomes and a vagina, there's also intersex people with XXY or some other chromosome combination, XX males, people who've had sex changes, and quite possibly other sorts of weirdness that I don't even know are possible. In certain medical and legal contexts, I can imagine that having a standard by which to communicate this information unambiguously, with all the nuance preserved, would be of great help when building interoperable systems.
How, then, does ISO 5218 propose we deal with all this human diversity? How can these subtleties be encoded?
Like this!
2 Representation of human sexes
Human sex is represented by a one-character numeric code.
The following data elements and codes are used:
Designation - Code
Not known - 0 (zero)
Male - 1 (one)
Female - 2 (two)
Not applicable - 9 (nine)Well, problem solved!
This is literally the entire technical content of the 24-page spec.
The spec goes on to explain that the choice to have Male before Female was out of respect for the "predominant practices of the countries involved" rather than implying male superiority, and then offers some annexes in which it translates "male" and "female" into an arbitrary subset of human languages and then does the same thing but in XML.
-
Are you sure it's a real ISO standard?
Because while it definitely looks like one (lots of pages that pretend to solve a problem, but are mostly useless), usually you can't get access to such wisdom without paying at least a few hundreds or thousands dollars.
-
Also, it's from 2004. So they'll probably release an updated version to support all the new sexes that have been invented since. I wonder how they'll make them fit into a single digit?
-
@Cabbage said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
Designation - Code
Not known - 0 (zero)
Male - 1 (one)
Female - 2 (two)
Not applicable - 9 (nine)Well, problem solved!
This is literally the entire technical content of the 24-page spec.
The spec goes on to explain that the choice to have Male before Female was out of respect for the "predominant practices of the countries involved" rather than implying male superiority, and then offers some annexes in which it translates "male" and "female" into an arbitrary subset of human languages and then does the same thing but in XML.
More usefully, the Buddhist concept of yang and yin, usually glossed as "male and female", also extends to other things, including odd and even numbers respectively, so it would be confusing not to have 1=male/2=female.
-
@Zerosquare said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
Are you sure it's a real ISO standard?
It has Wikipedia article. It must be real.
-
@Zerosquare said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
I wonder how they'll make them fit into a single digit?
There's room for 256. Though if you mandate the use of a TMS320C2x, you could have 65,536.
-
@Zerosquare said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
Also, it's from 2004.
Close. It's from 1976. It only got an update in 2004.
This corrected version of ISO/IEC 5218:2004 incorporates the following correction:
— inclusion in A.6.2 of the human interface equivalents for Korea, which were missing in the original.
-
@Zerosquare said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
fit into a single digit
-
@da-Doctah said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
Buddhist concept of yang and yin, usually glossed as "male and female", also extends to other things, including odd and even numbers
Females are definitely the odd ones.
-
@Zerosquare said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
I wonder how they'll make them fit into a single digit?
Unicode.
-
@topspin said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
Unicode.
-
@dkf +
-
I'd think in today's world you might have to express it as a bitmask.
-
@The_Quiet_One: Nah, that discriminates against non-binary people. What you need is an array of base-10 floating-point values, at least.
-
At some point, arbitrary string you don't even try to process becomes the best solution.
-
@Gąska said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
At some point, arbitrary string you don't even try to process becomes the best solution.
Having data but not processing it? Blasphemy!
-
@Tsaukpaetra it can be treated as "neither" for all statistical purposes. There won't be many of this kind of people anyway.
-
@Gąska
I'm afraid they already have a name for your transgression:
-
@sebastian-galczynski said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
transgression
-
In what situation would a computer need to transmit someone's sex without having a protocol defined for it?
This is way too bare-bones for medical information, and it makes no sense for anything that's not medical because it should be gender and there's already a standard for binary encodings of gender:
-
@Gąska said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
At some point, arbitrary string you don't even try to process becomes the best solution.
But if you don't try to process it, that's erasure!
-
@ben_lubar What if someone's gender occupies various quantum superpositions between the extremes?
-
@Gąska said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
At some point, arbitrary string you don't even try to process becomes the best solution.
You can always use an AI to guesstimate the level of crazy from imaginary gender. Could be useful for insurers, for example.
-
@kazitor said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@ben_lubar What if someone's gender occupies various quantum superpositions between the extremes?
You just need more bits to describe the multiple superpositions.
-
@sebastian-galczynski said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
trans-erasure
That’s when Vince Clarke and Andy Bell decided to make spacey music, isn’t it?
-
@sebastian-galczynski said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@Gąska
I'm afraid they already have a name for your transgression:"Minimize the existence of transsexual/transgender people" - like, with a gun?
-
@Carnage
Did you just assume my Schrödinger?
-
@Applied-Mediocrity said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@Carnage
Did you just assume my Schrödinger?you can always encode the mathematical formula to describe the superposition into binary as well.
-
@Carnage said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@Carnage
Did you just assume my Schrödinger?you can always encode the mathematical formula to describe the superposition into binary as well.
Someone in 2055:
And that's how a single digit field became a 24-bit bitmap.
-
@Gąska Why, yes. :D
Complicators gloves and all that.
-
-
@pie_flavor it's funny how one of his example of many competing standards - character encodings - has actually settled on a single definite standard (UTF-8 - plus some legacy code dealing with UTF-16/UCS-2, plus some software internally using something else for performance reasons), while the one he says in title text that's been finally solved - chargers - has again devolved into multiple competing standards (USB-C, Quick Charge, Apple doing their own thing...)
-
@Gąska I deal with Shift-JIS daily.
-
@pie_flavor in college, or at work? Because colleges are widely known for lagging 20+ years behind the industry.
-
@Gąska said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@pie_flavor in college, or at work? Because colleges are widely known for lagging 20+ years behind the industry.
Meh. The industry is also widely known for lagging 20+ years behind the industry.
-
@topspin that too. But we usually ignore bank systems written back when Fortran was cool but somehow are still maintained today when making statements like "Fortran is dead".
-
@Gąska said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@pie_flavor in college, or at work? Because colleges are widely known for lagging 20+ years behind the industry.
No, when browsing 4chan.
-
@pie_flavor you must be using college browser, because 4chan serves UTF-8 to me.
-
@Gąska said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@topspin that too. But we usually ignore bank systems written back when Fortran was cool but somehow are still maintained today when making statements like "Fortran is dead".
The software I used to do the simulations for my PhD dissertation is, was, and always will be written in Fortran. With a python analysis "package" (really just the interface portions to read the output files and do some summary calculations).
-
@Carnage said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
you can always encode the mathematical formula to describe the superposition into binary as well.
It'll undergo collapse into one of the standard states when observed, same as any quantum system.
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@Gąska said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@topspin that too. But we usually ignore bank systems written back when Fortran was cool but somehow are still maintained today when making statements like "Fortran is dead".
The software I used to do the simulations for my PhD dissertation is, was, and always will be written in Fortran.
It's hard to change a dissertation that has already been published. And if you already defended it, why would you even continue the project at all?
-
@Gąska said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@Benjamin-Hall said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@Gąska said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@topspin that too. But we usually ignore bank systems written back when Fortran was cool but somehow are still maintained today when making statements like "Fortran is dead".
The software I used to do the simulations for my PhD dissertation is, was, and always will be written in Fortran.
It's hard to change a dissertation that has already been published. And if you already defended it, why would you even continue the project at all?
I was only doing one little tiny portion, using existing software. I was basically adding an additional capability on top.
The core was simulating trajectories of atoms using coupled quantum electrons to classical nuclei. I was attempting (didn't really work all that well) to add back in quantum nuclear behavior after-the-fact on top of those trajectories.
-
@Gąska said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@pie_flavor you must be using college browser, because 4chan serves UTF-8 to me.
Oh it serves UTF-8. But tripcodes are parsed using Shift-JIS. So when I use a tripcode generator to make my post extra annoying, I always have to reopen the output file as Shift-JIS instead of UTF-8. Luckily VSC has a 'reopen with encoding' button right at the bottom.
-
@pie_flavor okay then, I'll append my statement - everyone actually settled on a single definite standard for character encoding, except 4chan.
-
@Tsaukpaetra said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@Gąska said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
At some point, arbitrary string you don't even try to process becomes the best solution.
Having data but not processing it? Blasphemy!
Is dumping to /dev/null really processing, though?
-
@kazitor said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@ben_lubar What if someone's gender occupies various quantum superpositions between the extremes?
That's the great thing about my proposal for binary gender! An explanation of what your gender is (written in any language) can be converted to binary, and then it's your binary gender!
-
@kazitor said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@ben_lubar What if someone's gender occupies various quantum superpositions between the extremes?
You mean a hermaphrodite could be either gender until they are observed, and then they manifest (or womanifest?) into one or the other?
-
@djls45 in most cases, yes. And the observation happens at birth. And the observer is the doctor overseeing the pregnancy. Exact procedure might vary by country.
-
@dkf said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
@Carnage said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
you can always encode the mathematical formula to describe the superposition into binary as well.
It'll undergo collapse into one of the standard states when observed, same as any quantum system.
I'd say they seem to collapse when not observed as well.
-
@Benjamin-Hall said in The most pointless ISO standard I've encountered:
The core was simulating trajectories of atoms using coupled quantum electrons to classical nuclei. I was attempting (didn't really work all that well) to add back in quantum nuclear behavior after-the-fact on top of those trajectories.
I understood some of those words.