@ben gender is a spectrum, they say. power spectra are continuous functions, and can only be represented in a limited way by vectors of arbitrary dimensionality.

one could say that there are two dimensions involved in gender, I suppose, but they're definitely not "male" and "female" or anything of the sort; they're amplitude and, uh, wavelength?

@ben there are a lot of context-dependent deconstructions you can perform on the Fourier transform of a genderfunction, of course.

you can do what society normally does: multiply it against three arbitrary gaussians and integrate each one for three color components, and then subjectively divide that space in half or so

you can also find out the components that various gas emission spectra might contribute to it to guess at composition, if the gender appears to be a plasma

@ben let's not forget the polynomial approximation, either, that can give you as many vector components as you like and will eventually fit most genders quite well across the visible spectrum if you really crank up the number of terms.

@ben cubic spline interpolation is popular, but probably not a good idea in this case because gender emission spectra can depend on a lot of unpredictable higher-order effects. even a superposition of delta functions gives you a more useful approximation.

and, of course, keep in mind that gender spectra can vary a lot with degree of excitation, pressure, and temperature. ensure your gender is in a thermal steady-state before taking sensitive measurements.

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@diodelass
Is it possible to reliably measure gender at room temperature?
@ben

@danishcookies @ben Well I mean, you can take a small sample and bring it up to test conditions without lighting up the entire gender...
You could just do a really low-energy ionization test, but then you'll miss anything that's solid or liquid at room temperature.
Raman spectrometry can work too, and can also identify cold molecular compositions that a hot emission spectrum will miss.
If your gender is crystalline when solid, there's always X-ray crystallography.

@danishcookies @ben sounds like you have a semiconducting gender. that's great! no further action is required.

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