Going mediaeval on our asses

As a semimythical coyote, I recognise that mythical cosmogonies, including mine, may be internally consistent, yet correspond only roughly with what most people think of as reality. One side of the (mythical) line, I'm a totemic critter of some religious import. The other, I'm just a mouthy talking doggie with a sideline in eating your cat. Having had about 6,000 years' practice at being semimythical, I've learned to deal.

So it's with a practiced and critical eye that I watch the government attempt to build its own mythical cosmogony. You know, the one where empirical science never happened, and all must defer to the Prime Minister's gut. The one that spills out over the dinner-plate belt buckle he wears once a year at the Calgary Stampede, and tells him that basing decisions on actual facts is less desirable than just making crap up and calling it the truth.

Having had his mythical dogma (heh...) called out so often by the empirical facts on stuff like safe injections sites, mandatory sentencing, rising crime rates and blahblahblah ad nauseam, he's apparently started screwing over the people who collect these facts, such as Statistics Canada. Because nothing is more inconvenient than having your irrefutable gut feelings and cherished truthinesses shot to hell by your own government agency.

Give the guy credit. He and his base are doing their best to willfully ignore the entire Renaissance. You know, that insignificant 400-odd years when empirical science, ummm, evolved. Would they prefer the ignorance and superstition that came before? For an entire modern nation? How's that for going mediaeval on our asses?

As an over-opinionated quadruped with long experience in issues that rise when one's core beliefs reject the, you know, actual world in which you must exist, I gotta say: no matter how stubbornly you cherish that mythiness, sooner or later reality whacks ya upside the head. How's that for cognitive dissonance? And how ya gonna deal with it?

Lug nuts and the census

So, even when faced with near-universal opposition, and even when the Chief Statistician quits in protest, the government has no problem trashing the mandatory census long form: "It's intrusive!!!! We're pandering to our loony fringe base, dammit!!!!"

So we coyotes will try to explain the issue in terms that make sense to the would-be defenders of this move, WHO ALWAYS SEEM TO FULL-CAP THEIR (OFTEN FURIOUSLY UNGRAMMATIC AND ANONYMOUS) FORUM COMMENTS: the lug nuts on that cherished Chevrolet half ton you use to earn your living.

Suppose your neighbourhood garage guys - call 'em Steve and Tony - say outta the blue that they want to replace all your lug nuts with Dodge lugs, because they think Chevy is arbitrary and intrusive for insisting on Chev lug nuts. Hell (they reason), Dodge lugs look pretty much the same, so no problem, right? Oh, and? Steve and Tony can pump gas, but neither's ever worked as a mechanic.

Would ya buy that, Durango? Nope. Because you, lug nut connoisseur that you are, know that Chev and Dodge lugs have different diameters, thread pitches and chamfers. Assuming they even sorta fit, those babies are gonna strip out, or leave wheel slop. Your wheels will come off, someplace inconvenient and possibly fatal.

There are a bunch of trucky things you could customize that, arguably, wouldn't wreck the ol' Silverado's utility: running boards, exhaust stacks, a big pair of them fine-looking chrome bull balls hanging off the trailer hitch. Dodge lug nuts, not so much.

Now, assume your pickup is a census. (It's a metaphor, Durango. Work with it.) See, reliable census information is Canada's business edge. Lotsa smart people rely on it to make sure the country as a whole can earn its living more efficiently. As every civilized country in the world aspires to.

A mandatory long form is intrusive, but a small price to pay for citizenship in this country you claim to love so much. Much like obeying stop signs at intersections. We work co-operatively toward common goals, unlike, say, those anarchists you hated so much at the G20. To do anything else is to court rump of skunk, and madness.

A voluntary long form is pretty much like Dodge lug nuts on your Chevy - doesn't match. Reading statistical trends properly makes tracking changes accurately over time really important. Even if you label the data you collect by the same name, changing the method you use to collect it means that you can't reasonably compare it with, well, anything that came before. The wheels come off. Just like that Chevy.

Now, I'm only a dumb coyote, so here are my questions: why would you trust an ill-fitting lug nut named Steve to change that? Why does Steve think some lug nuts are more equal than others? And why, if Steve keeps saying his opponents are unpatriotic and unCanadian, is it always him that seems hell-bent on changing this country, lug nut by lug nut, into something unrecognizable...?

Just askin'...

RNDP 27: Looking, Listening and Frequency

Here is the latest roundup of research towards the revolutionary new dating paradigm.

Rating attractiveness: Study finds consensus among men, not women

From a press release about an article in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:

Men's judgments of women's attractiveness were based primarily around physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.

As a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men other women said were not attractive at all.

The age of the participants also played a role in attractiveness ratings. Older participants were more likely to find people attractive if they were smiling.

But an abstract for the same paper says:

Participants of both genders showed substantial consensus in judgments of whom they found attractive and unattractive, although men showed higher consensus than women.

What does this mean for the RNDP: If you're a man and a male friend tells you should meet someone because they are hot, you should. If you are a woman and a female friend tells you to meet someone because they are hot, probably you should. But maybe not.

Talk to the Right Ear

In 3 different studies, researchers from the University "Gabriele d'Annunzio" in Chieti, Italy determined a marked preference to listen with the right ear by young people in noisy nightclubs. Perhaps their most significant finding:

...the researchers intentionally addressed 176 clubbers in either their right or their left ear when asking for a cigarette. They obtained significantly more cigarettes when they spoke to the clubbers' right ear compared with their left.

What does this mean for the RNDP:

1. If you want to make a pass, sit or walk to the right of your object of affection or walk. If you're following the man-on-the-street-side-of-the-sidewalk rule, this may affect the route you take home.
   
2. Since this tip will soon be widely known, pay attention to whether your object of affection is trying to keep you on the left. It might not mean they don't want to be manipulated. Maybe they want to make the first move. Do what you can to make it easier for them if the latter.

Single women gaze longer

A study by Indiana University neuroscientist Heather Rupp found that a woman's partner status influenced her interest in the opposite sex.

...women both with and without sexual partners showed little difference in their subjective ratings of photos of men when considering such measures as masculinity and attractiveness. However, the women who did not have sexual partners spent more time evaluating photos of men, demonstrating a greater interest in the photos. No such difference was found between men who had sexual partners and those who did not.

What does this mean for the RNDP: Guys: the length of time a woman spends looking at you might tell you that she is available, but not necessarily available to you. She might only be taking the time to decide what she thinks about you. Gals: you're still stuck with no useful way to tell if that guy looking at you is married or not.

Daily sex helps to reduce sperm DNA damage and improve fertility

New research suggests that in couples trying to have babies, in order to improve sperm quality, men should not hold off until ovulation day, but should ejaculate at least daily for the prior week. Dr David Greening, an obstetrician and gynaecologist in Wollongong, Australia, says:

The optimal number of days of ejaculation might be more or less than seven days, but a week appears manageable and favourable. It seems safe to conclude that couples with relatively normal semen parameters should have sex daily for up to a week before the ovulation date. In the context of assisted reproduction, this simple treatment may assist in improving sperm quality and ultimately achieving a pregnancy.

What does this mean for the RNDP: Okay, this isn't about dating. But it does illustrate that the research community has scientists conducting research and reporting findings that may not please everyone, but will make the world a better place.

RNDP 26: Still on the path to happiness

I was beginning to to think that the quest for a revolutionary new dating paradigm (RNDP) should be shelved because other pursuits, like wealth or fame, are more important. But three researchers from the University of Rochester have just confirmed that the pursuits of wealth and fame do not lead to happiness.

Edward Deci, professor of psychology and the Gowen Professor in the Social Sciences at the University says:

Even though our culture puts a strong emphasis on attaining wealth and fame, pursuing these goals does not contribute to having a satisfying life. The things that make your life happy are growing as an individual, having loving relationships, and contributing to your community. [Press Release 14-May-2009]

And so I am spurred to contribute to the community and help you folks find loving relationships. Because I got too worn out at the garage sale yesterday, I am going to give you more bulletins on recent research instead of doing the hard work of syncretising everything we've learned already in the quest for an RNDP.

Sick of the same old thing? U of Minnesota Researchers finds satiation solution

Joseph Redden, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, recently conducted a study on satiation, the process of consuming products and experiences to the point where they are less enjoyable, as it applies to music.

In one of the three studies conducted for this research, Redden and his co-authors asked participants to listen to the chorus of a favorite song 20 times in a row. Then they were asked to rate the clip. Not surprisingly, after 20 repetitions their enjoyment of the song dropped a great deal. Three weeks later, the participants came back and half were asked to recall any television shows they'd seen since the study, while the other half listed all of the musicians they'd listened to since the first session. The group that listed the TV shows was still just as satiated – they didn't like the song. However, those recalling variety in the music category almost totally recovered. "The participants' comments were the most revealing," said Redden. "Those who recalled the TV shows were actually angry to have a song they like 'ruined,' but the ones who recalled musicians enjoyed taking a study with music, etc. If something seems like 'more of the same,' people are just less interested." [Press Release: 19-May-2009]

Redden thinks this method can also work for things like beverages: "... next time you get sick of healthy smoothies and think about grabbing a burger instead, try to recall all of the other drinks you have had since your last smoothie. Our findings suggest this will make your smoothie taste just a little bit better."

If it works for songs and smoothies, maybe it'll also work for that person you've seen a bunch of times who is beginning to seem a little dull. Just think of all other people you've encountered since the last date or all the people you've been involved with before.

New contraceptive device is designed to prevent sexual transmission of HIV

Remember those free-wheeling days before AIDS?

Researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College have published results showing that a new contraceptive device may also effectively block the transmission of the HIV virus. [Press Release: 19-May-2009]

Dominance in domestic dogs – useful construct or bad habit?

Researchers at Bristol's Department of Clinical Veterinary Sciences say that using "dominance" to explain dog behaviour and to train dogs is misguided and potentially dangerous.

Dr Rachel Casey, Senior Lecturer in Companion Animal Behaviour and Welfare at Bristol University, says:

The blanket assumption that every dog is motivated by some innate desire to control people and other dogs is frankly ridiculous. It hugely underestimates the complex communicative and learning abilities of dogs. It also leads to the use of coercive training techniques, which compromise welfare, and actually cause problem behaviours. [Press Release: 21-May-2009]

I know some of you women out there are using dog training methods on your men. If you've been using "dominance" methods, you may want to rethink your strategy. Or not. After all, this research was on dogs. Not men.

Another study confirms that opposite histocompatibility attracts

Scientists at the Immunogenetics and Histocompatibility Laboratory at the University of Parana, Brazil studied major histocompatibility complex (MHC) data from 90 married couples, and compared them with 152 randomly-generated control couples and found that people with diverse MHCs were more likely to choose each other as mates than those whose MHCs were similar.

"Although it may be tempting to think that humans choose their partners because of their similarities", says Professor Bicalho, "our research has shown clearly that it is differences that make for successful reproduction, and that the subconscious drive to have healthy children is important when choosing a mate." [Press Release: 24-May-2009]

Warriors do not always get the girl

Can it be that nice guys may not finish last?

Aggressive, vengeful behavior of individuals in some South American groups has been considered the means for men to obtain more wives and more children, but an international team of anthropologists working in Ecuador among the Waorani show that sometimes the macho guy does not do better.

"In 1988, Napoleon Chagnon published evidence that among the famously warlike Yanomamo of Venezuela, men who had participated in a homicide had significantly more wives and children than their less warlike brethren," said Stephen Beckerman, associate professor of anthropology, Penn State. "Our research among the Waorani indicates that more aggressive warriors have lower indices of reproductive success than less warlike men."

...

The researchers found that more aggressive men do not acquire more wives than milder men. They do not have more children and their wives and children do not survive longer. In fact, warlike men have fewer children who survive to reproductive age. [Press Release: 11-May-2009]

RNDP 25: More Dating Developments from those Hardworking Scientists

"Intranasal Oxytocin Increases Positive Communication and Reduces Cortisol Levels During Couple Conflict"

Swiss researchers Beate Ditzen, Marcel Schaer, Barbara Gabriel, Guy Bodenmann, Ulrike Ehlert, and Markus Heinrichs report that a nasal spray of oxytocin helped couples discussing stressful topics have more positive communication. "Oxytocin increased positive communication behavior in relation to negative behavior and reduced salivary cortisol, i.e., their stress levels, compared to placebo." [EurekAlert]

The researchers say they're a long way from using oxytocin spray in a treatment context, so I doubt they've turned their mind to its use in the dating context. Still, if you've been dating a while and you hear the words "we need to talk" a quick sniff on an oxytoxin nozzle might be a great idea.

Can Evolutionary Theory bring us a new Paradigm?

A survey of more than 10,000 individuals in 18 "human populations" has concluded that the stereotype of men being more promiscuous than women may be wrong. Dr Gillian Brown, of the University of St Andrews, said: "The study shows that women are just as likely to seek out just as many partners as men." [EurekAlert; Telegraph; PhysOrg]

This is interesting news for anyone involved in the dating game, but Dr Brown and her team are ready to take their research much further than these initial findings and apply evolutionary theory to understanding human mating strategies.

Recent advances in evolutionary theory suggest that factors such as sex-biased mortality, sex-ratio, population density and variation in mate quality, are likely to impact mating behaviour in humans...

Taking a new perspective on what evolutionary theory predicts about mating strategies will have important implications for how we think about male and female sex roles. We're entering an exciting new era in which evolutionary theory can help us to understand the diversity of human mating strategies.

It could be that further analysis of this data will let us build a data model where we plug in Ottawa's figures for sex-biased mortality, sex-ratio, population density and variation in mate quality and as output we'll get an optimal mating strategy - a critical component of a Revolutionary New Dating Paradigm!

What Next?

Suppose one day I finish the revolutionary new dating paradigm.

What would you like me to study next?

Galling Galileo Gamesmanship

Poor Galileo Galilei. First his works were banned by the church. Then the father of modern science was subject to house arrest. In his final years he was completely blind, having suffered vision problems throughout his life.

Of course, it didn't stop him from making earthshaking breakthroughs in astronomy and physics, including discovery of Jupiter's largest satellites and early analysis of sunspots. Not to mention design of the first automatic tomato picker.

Now some overly zealous British and Italian scientists want to exhume Galileo's body to determine whether his irregular sight affected his findings.

Is this any way to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo's initial use of a refracting telescope? Methinks not. Memo to scientists: my astronomical mentor is not a shovel-ready experiment.

RNDP 21: This Week's Developments

Game theorists at University College London, University of Warwick and the London School of Economics and Political Science have found an explanation for why dating can take so long. Their conclusion? "Courtship enables a male to signal his suitability to a female and enables the female to screen out the male if he is unsuitable as a mate."

These researchers raise an interesting question. Why do humans spend as long as they do choosing mates?

One partner - often the male - may pay the greater part of the financial cost, but to both sexes there is a significant cost of time which could be spent on other productive activities. Why don't people and other animals speed things up to reduce these costs?

- Mathematician Robert Seymour

How did they answer this question? They built a mathematical model based on a number of assumptions that include:

• Women are trying to avoid mating with "bad" mates, but can't tell who is "good" from surface characteristics;
• Men whether good or bad, will mate with any women; and
  
• A "good" man will not give up on a courtship as early as a "bad" man will.

From a female's point of view, males are not all equal. A female would like to mate with a good male, but cannot tell a male's type from his appearance alone. The strategic problem the female faces is how to screen out bad males, and this is where long courtship comes into play. A male is assumed to always want to mate with a female, but a good male is more willing to pay the cost of a long courtship in order to claim the prize of mating. This leads to an outcome in which the female is not willing to mate immediately, but instead requires the male to wait for an indeterminate time before she agrees to mate with him. During this time, the male may give up on courting the female.

- Dr Peter Sozou

This is one of those studies that makes me want to play with the software and modify the assumptions. For example, if "bad" men knew that giving up signaled they were bad, and "good" men knew they were hot properties and could get action elsewhere, and maybe also cared whether they were with a "good" or "bad" partner, could we still wind up with long courtships? Even though it meant that the women were likely to wind up with bad partners?

In other news, social neurobiologist Dr Larry Young at the Yerkes National Primate Center reports that there is still no workable love potion.

RNDP 18: More Developments

Let's take a poll: Who wants the Revolutionary New Dating Paradigm (RNDP) to be over? Everybody. Me too. There are many other things I would like to blog about. For example did you know that there are people out there who think "selfless" means something bad? Click on this google search link if you do not believe me.

But I cannot wrap up the RNDP quite yet because new developments and research keep coming out.

Detecting Infidelity: A study by Paul Andrews and colleagues at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond reported in New Scientist, concluded that men are better at detecting their partner's infidelities than women. In a study of 203 young heterosexual couples, while 29 per cent of men said they had cheated, compared with 18.5 per cent of women, 80 per cent of women's inferences about fidelity or infidelity were correct, while men were accurate 94 per cent of the time.

But then the authors mention these other points:

• "... men were also more likely to suspect infidelity when there was none... "
• "Complex statistical analysis of the data hinted that a further 10 per cent of the women in the study had cheated on top of the 18.5 per cent who admitted to it in the questionnaires, whereas the men had been honest about their philandering." [10%+18.5%=28.5%]

The authors do not remark on how astonishing it is that all these men who had lied to their partners chose to be honest with a group of psychology researchers.

What do we learn from this? We learn that there is still grant money to be gained in looking for differences between men and women.

HookupMaps
HookupMaps is a new website that combines the personal ads in Craiglist with Google Maps. So far it is only available in San Francisco Bay Area, New York, LA, DC, San Diego, Virginia, and Maryland.
If they do not add Ottawa soon, perhaps we could prevail upon the people who created the Ottawa Crime Map to do this for us.

The Locasex Movement
Perhaps when you read about HookupMaps, you were thinking, I don't need no stinking Google Maps Mashup! I can get sex the old-fashioned way by flying across the country to spend a dirty weekend with my sure thing.
However, over at Lifehacker, Mark Ontkush reports that there are those within the ecology movement who are pointing out there is a huge environmental cost to long-distance booty calls.

The Guys like those Red Dresses
From the Globe and Mail:

A series of studies by researchers at the University of Rochester has revealed that men are far more attracted to women in red clothing or surrounded by red accessories than females who sport other colours. What's more, men seem to be especially generous to the lady in red - and are more willing to open up their wallets to wine and dine her.

Warm Drink, Warm Heart
From the LA Times:

Looking to improve your romantic odds? Get your date a steaming cup of coffee.
That's the implication of a new study by researchers who wanted to see if there was any connection between physical and emotional heat.
To their surprise, people who held a cup of hot coffee for 10 to 25 seconds warmed to a perfect stranger. Holding a cup of iced coffee had the opposite effect

Maybe Nice Guys Don't Finish Last?
From Medical News Today:

Displays of altruism or selflessness towards others can be sexually attractive in a mate. This is one of the findings of a study carried out by biologists and a psychologist at The University of Nottingham.

Advice Gleaned From All This:

1. Give money to street people while on a date.
2. If you're at a bar and attracted to your date order Irish Coffees. Unless you've already decided you're not interested. In that case, ask for vodka that's been kept in the freezer and order extra ice cubes.
3. Once again, the Liberal party girls have the advantage over the NDP, Conservative and Green party girls.
4. You'll be easier on the environment if you date local.
5. If you're a young American, you've got about a 1 in 3 chance of finding a partner who won't cheat on you. If you get such a partner, you'll most likely figure it out, but to be sure, you should hire a social scientist to include your partner in a study and then carry out complex statistical analysis.
   

RNDP 13: Avatars

This week's adventure in the quest for an RNDP takes us to Omnidate.com, where an enterprising Toronto couple have created a virtual world where people looking for love can send their avatars on virtual dates. Vidya Rao of Columbia News Service explains how it works:

Through OmniDate, users choose avatars, or animated images, that will represent them on their dates. They are given the option to choose from six male or six female avatars, with each wearing a different outfit and hairstyle. For both genders, the avatars have one option each that clearly represents a person of color.

Virtual dates can include touring a museum gallery, going to a bar, listening to the user's choice of music in a lounge or even going to the beach. The avatars can interact with each other to express emotion. Type in “LOL,” for example, and users can make their avatars giggle. They can also direct them to blow kisses, hold hands, yawn and even roll their eyes to let the person on the other side of the screen know exactly how much they are or aren’t enjoying the date. [Full Article]

Omnidate's blogger tells us "an average virtual date lasts over half an hour" and predicts that in a couple of years, "dating sites without a virtual dating component will be considered lame and will experience a major decline."

4D Analysis: In Omnidate's world, you can "blow kisses", but you can't try out your moves. Major drawback. On the other hand, you'll be able to tell how fast the other person can type and that may tell you something about their manual dexterity. Possibly important to you.

Although new, and maybe even paradigmatic, I'm not going to think about endorsing it as a new dating paradigm until they incorporate smell effects technology.

We've yet to have any of our fieldworkers report back on an Omnidate virtual date, but you can click on the image below to watch to see how a date that lasts less than half an hour might go.

RNDP 11: Dating Design Patterns

Our next stop in the quest for an RNDP takes us to City Flirting: the Flirt Blog and a post from December 2005, about a year and a half before the blog went dormant. In You Had Me At: "Encapsulated Big Fat Opening", flirting scholar Dan, is told that his tendency to share his knowledge of astronomy is why he doesn't get dates. (Dan's mistake was trying to explain why Venus is both the morning star and the evening star but never the midnight star by explaining "...it's always within 45 degrees of the sun." I can attest that explaining the position of Venus in the sky and other astronomical phenomena by instead using salt and pepper shakers and beer coasters has a disarming effect on certain females even if they still don't understand.)

Dan tries to explain that he is not a true geek because if he was he would invent a robot companion to date or he would invent a new dating paradigm. (I believe this means that I am still in good standing to be considered a true geek because as you know, by the end of this series, we will have not only a new dating paradigm but a revolutionary new dating paradigm. I don't believe robots will have anything to do with the new paradigm.)

In the next sentence he says he doesn't have to invent a new dating paradigm because Solveig Haugland has and she has written a book about it.

Dating Design Patterns is modelled on Design Patterns, a manual for developers of object-oriented software. It is essentially a set of techniques for males to be more effective at courting females using the traditional North American dating paradigms of the late 20th and early 21st Century. It offers a number of possible schema for socially-awkward males to adopt. Dan identifies his favourites as:

Half Bad Boy Plus Protocol: Structuring one's appeal based on equal parts considerate gentlemanly attributes and "bad boy" behavior or facade.

Trojan Proxy: An extremely effective, low-risk, high-planning pattern for connecting through a third-party safe proxy. Strategies include children, pets, female friends and married male friends.

Unexpected Resource God: Maintain a large pool of resources women typically need, and create a connection through replying to requests or by broadcasting a list of resources. A large rucksack is recommended.

Although Solveig's patterns are not a new paradigm, there are fellows who can use this advice. I have two specific tips for implementing the "Unexpected Resource God" pattern:

1. A wealthy man I know drove a Volvo station wagon. "Why don't you get a flashy car to attract the women," I asked him. "Are you kidding?" he replied. "With this station wagon they are always asking me to take them to Ikea!"
2. If you go to Spins'n'Needles, sit near an electric outlet, and plug in a $2.45 hot glue gun, you will have hotties coming over all night. (Next Ottawa event is July 25 at the Legion on Kent Street)
   

RNDP 10: Recycling and Rules

Moving away from Histocompatibility for now, the next Google hit to explore in the world of new dating paradigms shows up in a comment to a livejournal posting. 30-year-old featherynscale asked her readers:

If you are friends with someone, and they break it off with a person they are dating/sleeping with/married to/whatever, is it okay for you to pursue their ex?

She broke her question into sub-questions and created several polls that 32 of her readers responded to. She also invited her readers to leave comments expanding on their answers and to describe circumstances that would make it okay or not okay.

Her first commenter, saffronhare, replied:

This is one of those areas where it always depends on some other shading of relationships. If both people of the deceased relationship (dating or married) still travel in the same social circles, then one would perhaps want to maintain some amicability in any new dating paradigm. You know, and *talking* to the people involved. But I bet you already knew that. :)

4D Analysis: Saffronhare is using the phrase "new dating paradigm" to refer to a new dating situation that a person might be in, in this case, with a person who used to be involved with a friend, not to a whole new model for dating. You might assume that, because Saffronhare and Featherynscale are not endorsing this model as a new paradigm, I also wouldn't endorse it. But let's not sail away from this port before seeing all the sights.

2 out of a non-random sample of 32 people say it's not okay to date a friend's ex even if the friend is dead. I hope these two are in happy relationships that last until they die and if after their death their widows or widowers get involved with a friend, there really is no afterlife so they won't ever know about it.

A majority (20/32) say it can be okay in certain circumstances, but this also means they think it is not okay in other circumstances. I assume that they are all referring to it being morally not okay. Not to it being practically not okay.

Because let's face it, while dating a friend's ex may have pitfalls like possible fistfights, slashed tires, and late night hangup phone calls, it also has benefits like already knowing the person you're dating and knowing what you can do to compare favourably to the last paramour. And you can date a stranger and get the pitfalls anyway.

If you've got a screening list like Kirshenbaum, Coyote and Milan do, you might be tempted to add not a friend's ex to it, or if you're not a hardliner, not the ex of a friend who says it's not okay.

What I ask if you have a screening list is, do you actually want to date? Or are you trying to come up with reasons to justify not dating? Sure we don't want you getting involved with an ax-murderer or somebody you'll come to despise, but at the pre-dating stage, where you are trying to find somebody to go out with, a list of criteria that removes people from consideration may just keep you from getting involved with somebody wonderful.

RNDP 9: Inhale

Another reason to postpone a shower?While others are off on solo projects and secret projects with artists from other labels, it looks like I am once again carrying this blog. Fortunately, there is a mountain of material in the quest for an RNDP.

We learn of another new dating paradigm in Welcome to Do Land:

Gifted1: dumb! :-/ you've never heard of IWannaGetChemicalChemical.com? it's a pretty incredible new dating paradigm, they can match you up based on chemistry. they use science.

Karlito: i hear that it's a rip off. my cousin used it and he went on three dates with guys before he realized that he's not gay. n-e-wayz, that's not an issue for me anymore, i am pure mind. i am free of the entanglements of the corrupt fleshy matrix of the world.

4D Analysis: It looks like the folks behind IWannaGetChemicalChemical.com didn't get their venture capital funding. However, there is an outfit called ScientificMatch.com that seem to offer the same service and it seems there is real science behind it. Several studies on pheromones (the most famous of these being the smelly sweatshirt study) have led researchers to conclude that women (who are not taking the birth control pill) are more attracted to the scent of men who share low histocompatibility with them. Histocompatibility is highest when two people have exactly the same immune system genes in the major histocompatibility complex.

In other words, women are more attracted to men who are immune to a different set of diseases than they are. This makes evolutionary sense to the researchers because:

1. A child resulting from the match would have a broader protection to diseases; and
2. The more different the genes in the histocompatibility complex, the more likely that other genes are different, therefore the lower the chance of harmful recessives combining.
   

But what about women taking oral contraceptives? It seems they are more attracted to the scent of men with similar histocompatibility, and not attracted or even repulsed by the scent of men with different histocompatibility.

Maybe it is because the pill tricks the woman's body into believing she is pregnant. Perhaps women have evolved to prefer when they are pregnant having male relatives nearby who will protect the offspring because of their common genetic heritage.

Some eyebrow raising questions:

• Is this what is up with women who don't want sex when they go on the pill? Their men just don't smell right any more?
  
• Should women on the pill stay away from their cousins if they don't want to get into a family scandal?
  
• What about women who are on the pill when they meet a guy they like? Say they decide to have a child together and she goes off the pill. Is she going to find his smell no longer pleasant and attractive?

Next: We'll spend some more time on this smell issue. There is a lot of research to delve into. Some of it done here in Canada and even on our friend Megan.

RNDP 8: Google Love

Our next stop on the quest for an RNDP is Google Love. Reece Dano advocates that Google create a new online matchmaking service leveraging their knowledge of us. While other online dating services suffer from limited pools of available people and self-misrepresentation by the people that are there, everybody uses Google and Google knows "your interests, your true friends, your pet peeves, your neurotic preoccupations" and "probably knows about your ‘private’ sexual proclivities".

4D Analysis: Google would indeed have better data and as much computing power as anyone to throw at this issue. You wouldn't even have to sign up for it as Google already knows if you need help finding a date.

But is Google able to tell what constellation of interests will match with another constellation? For example, a man who loves golf can also love a woman who abhors the game, but a woman who likes camping and mountain climbing should never try to be with a man who doesn't even like sitting in a suburban backyard.

More fundamentally, is a high degree of common interests, opinions and preoccupations a good indication that two people should be together? Or that they will want to stay together?

In my next instalment of the RNDP series, we'll see that there is a growing body of scientific research, and we're talking real science with control groups and test tubes, suggesting we should be looking in a different direction entirely.

RNDP 6: MySpace

Two years ago, a blogger named Nurble in a posting titled myspace told us about what he'd initially thought was a new dating paradigm, but turned out to be shameless self-promotion:

...some girl started chatting me up at a bar last night. She didn't actually seem interested, she seemed to just be killing time, so we talked for two or three minutes, then she asked if I was on myspace.

"Interesting," I thought, "is this the new paradigm for the 21st century? No more phone numbers and Swingers-esque waiting x number of days to call and sweating it out?" Maybe we can start giving out our names and email addresses and account names instead of just shooting in the dark.

We can admit what everybody already knows, that the first thing most of us with computers do when we get enough information is run straight to google and try and dig up some juicy info. How fascinating it would be if the new thing was "give me your name, assume I'm going to go home and read everything you've got scattered around the internet, and after that, we'll see."

Interesting indeed. Unfortunately this girl was not on the avant-garde of a new dating paradigm, she was just some actress who had 1100 friends and a poorly designed page full of headshots and pictures of her with celebrities. Booooo.

Unfortunately, this posting in which Nurble revealed himself to be that rare combination of fieldworker and theoretician did not live up to its promise. Nurble rarely commented on dating following this post. We know he was concerned about finding a date for the 2006 Emmy Awards and he found one. In July, 2006 he posted a bit of dialogue that may have been a transcription of an actual exchange from a date:

INTERIOR, NIGHT Guy: Are you going to take your contacts out? Girl: I was thinking about it, why? Guy: Well, if you're going to, then I probably shouldn't. Otherwise we might find ourselves in the worlds sexiest game of Marco Polo. ...and, scene.

In September of 2006 he revealed that he sent a copy of What's Your Number by Ian Pooley to a woman and it "didn't really work out..." but this could have been at anytime before this. We know that he later had a beautiful girlfriend lying in his bed while he was blogging about songs. And now he is moving to New York with his beautiful girlfriend. The same beautiful girlfriend? Perhaps.

4d Analysis: This fieldwork gives us more questions:

• Was Nurble too hasty to dismiss this as a new dating paradigm?
• What if her Myspace pages had revealed them to be more compatible? Say if he also had 1100 friends (instead of 12) and some of them were famous? Or if her page revealed her to be a shy but thoughtful artist?
• Or was his sense that she was just killing time all that he needed in order to know that she had no future in his life?

Bonus: Here is a Nurble Posting that Aggie will like.

On Questions:

"...questions are more important than answers in shaping the future of science."
- Donald Kennedy, Editor-in-Chief, Science Magazine

To be able to ask a question clearly is two-thirds of the way to getting it answered
- John Ruskin

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers
- Voltaire

The important thing is not to stop questioning.
- Albert Einstein