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

Are we Cool Over 40?

Our friend XUP is all over the blogosphere these days and is even back to blogging. Last week, she posted two excellent pieces, one on how to be cool over the age of 40 and another on how to live to be much older than 40.

Today I am taking a break from the smoking and drinking XUP recommended, from my quest for an RNDP and from wooing Ms Twain, to bring you:

A handy table that shows how the ESIs stack up on XUP's coolness indicators

Quality 4D Aggie Chair Coyote CS IO Woodsy Cool Job -1 1 -1 1 1 1 1 Hair -1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Shoes -1 1 1 -1 1 1 1 Clothes -1 1 1 -1 1 0 1 Teeth -1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Gadgets 0 01 1 0 1 22 0 In a Band 1 1 1 1 0.53 0 1 Avoid malls 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 Talk Cool -14 1 1 -15 1 1 1 Walk Cool -16 1 1 1 1 1 1 Hangs with the Cool 1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 Activist 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 Total -3 8 7 2 9.5 8 8

Notes

1. Aggie has a laptop and a cell phone, but doesn't know how to use either very well.
2. The IO has a Blackberry.
3. CS says she's in a band. Her bandmates are not so sure.
4. 4D actually says "in my day" on a regular basis.
5. Coyote: "***BLAMMO*** I'm on my butt with my tail smokin' and my ears ringing. You figure out which side I take".
6. Unless you think 4D's limp-hop-stride is cool.
   

Obvious conclusion: If I am negatively cool, that means I am hot.

AndrewZRX: the Placenta, the Motorcycle and the Baby

This is a guest posting from AndrewZRX:

I need to do something about the placenta in the freezer. My wife refuses to put anything into the same compartment. She says she won’t eat anything that’s been near it. My plan was to dry it and crush it up, then bring the powder to my father’s cottage in Wakefield, Quebec. I was going to plant a maple tree with it. But apparently it takes about 12 hours to dry a placenta properly, and it smells up the house. She’s having none of it. So. Seems I have to get rid of it.

Speaking of motorcycles: I like the roundabouts here, but I sure miss driving on the right. It’s the biker wave. You can’t really do it properly over here. The controls are on the same side, but because the roads are backwards, the wave looks like you’re waving to someone on the sidewalk (pavement) to your left, rather than someone across the road on your right. (Most of us have learned that the wave must be executed with the left hand, to keep the right on the throttle and covering the brake). So if you want to wave, instead of just coolly letting your left hand off and giving a wee flick, you have to raise your hand high enough so the other guy will see it. It’s too awkward. I won’t do it.

Bruce is 11 and ½ weeks old now. (Why can’t he just be three months old? When do we stop counting in weeks?) He turned out to be more than I thought. He’s just so beautiful. I get to see him change every day, developing, figuring stuff out. He looks at me this certain way sometimes, this look that says: I am alive, and I find it quite good indeed. But the thing is, he doesn’t look like a baby. He looks like his own witty wee soul. He’s already here. He’s sentient, self-aware, and already has a sense of humour. And I’m his Dad.

At first I tried the head nod. But what if you were just bouncing over a bump? It wasn’t clear. Then an Irish biker friend told me that Europeans wave with their feet. Good idea – that right foot isn’t usually doing anything special anyways. So I tried it. I felt stupid. Like, really stupid. So I tried something else – using my right knee, foot on the peg, but opening my leg a little. It didn’t feel stupid. It felt wrong, like I was sending a signal. And I never got a response. I wonder what would have happened if I tried that in Germany. In black leather.

Back on the Bike That Blew, I settled for the head tilt, a popular option in Scotland. A nod with a rightward spazz of the neck. But it was so unsatisfying.

The new Kawasaki Versys I’m riding has a high slam trigger switch, like pulling the turn signal stalk on a car. This is how I now acknowledge my motorcycling brethren. No contortions of the head, no left arm raised in the air like some fucked up salute, and no encouraging the Germans. Just a flick of the high beams.

The wave is an important part of the biking experience. It means more than just hey, look at us, we’re bikers! It means we recognize the awesomeness of it. It means we respect each other for keeping the rubber side down. It means we’ll help each other when we’re in trouble.

I can’t wait to get Bruce on the back of the bike. My wife says, “No. No way in hell”. But I know just what she means. She means: “I know there’s no way of stopping you. Just promise me you’ll be safe”. And I will.

All the firsts are all the time. Just like that, he’s now telling us stories. I don’t understand every nuance, but I think I’m getting his drift. It’s a hell of a thing! He’s going to blow my mind when he first speaks.

The placenta? I can’t just throw it out, not after all this. So I’ve been meaning to bury that placenta in the backyard. I just haven’t got around to it. And it’s sure to come up again, in the middle of an argument about something else entirely. I need to head that off. But I just can’t seem to find the shovel.

AndrewZRX lives in Scotland. Everybody has to be somewhere.

FLASHFLASHFLASH!!!!!

Uh oh. Suddenly, Shania Twain is single again... and 4th Dwarf is a die-hard country music fan. When in his cups, he's been known to publicly bemoan the fact that Canada's Country Music Cutie In Incredibly Abbreviated Outfits ever got married. He always said it should've been her bed his moonboots were under. Fourteen years ago, and the shock still feels just like yesterday to him. She broke Dwarfie's heart. Oh, sure, he says he burned all of her CDs, but on certain dark nights, the sound of her digitally-enhanced voice could still be heard seeping beneath the door of his grotto, singing harmony to loud tormented wails. It was all very embarrassing.

What effect this earth shattering news will have on his revolutionary new dating paradigm research is anybody's guess. Will Dwarf's hope rise, phoenix--like? I dunno. But I bet this'll probably be interestin'...

RNDP 5: Smiling at Strangers

In 2006, 29-year-old Alice Brome found the nerve to ask out a man that smiled at her in a restaurant and in doing so, she discovered a new dating paradigm: "I don’t have to wait to be asked I can go after the man I want directly."

On their date, she found that "he was insipidly narcissistic and just plain boring". Showing that she is a true pioneer of science, she continued with her new paradigm and asked out two more strangers. In one case, the man was married and declined. With the other, she reported having two fun dates, a third date planned and being at "that point of either becoming friends or moving on to something a little more serious."

Sadly, I can find no further reports from Ms Brome. Those of you who are pessimists may conclude that something terrible occurred on the third date. I prefer to think that our intrepid researcher found herself in love and chose to protect the privacy of her new partner by not writing about the relationship.

4d Analysis: Brome's new paradigm has one element that explicitly differentiates it from her old paradigm: She is asking out men rather than waiting for a man to ask her out. What is not so clear is whether her old paradigm included going on dates with complete strangers. Whether it did or not, her new paradigm clearly allows it. In this paradigm:

1. She is explicitly choosing the men because she likes the way they look^[1] and they smile in a way that implies they like the way she looks too; and
   
2. She may be unconsciously or implicitly relying on the location where she encounters these men for an assurance that they are in an appropriate socio-economic group for her and will have personality and character traits that appeal to her.^[2]
   
   

   Strangers In The Night - Sinatra (Final Fantasy 8 video)
   Uploaded by MimicheLaCrapule
   
   

Her anecdotal report suffers from the main problem with research in this field: the small non-random sample makes it impossible for us to draw general conclusions. However, it does demonstrate that while her paradigm can result in a boring date, it can also result in a fun date.

This leads to a formula I have developed for assessing the Expected Value of a Date (EVD) for someone using this paradigm:

EVD= P_b × A_b + P_f × A_f

_Where:

• P_b = the probability of winding up on a boring date
• P_f = the probability of the date being fun = (1 - P_b)
• A_b = the subjective measurement of how awful the boring date would be
• A_f = the subjective measurement of how fun a fun date would be (in units that are inverse and proportional to the units of A_b)

These variables will change depending on the individuals involved, but I think you'll see that we can use some general norms to arrive at a basic assessment for the paradigm.

Let's assume that the date will be boring if the man has narcissist personality disorder, Asperger's syndrome, or is an accountant.

Narcissists: 1% of the population have NPD, but perhaps 75% of those with NPD are men. So lets say 1.25% of men have NPD. [Wikipedia]

Asperger's: It's hard to get a handle on the prevalence of Asperger's, let's go with a high estimate of 0.4%. [Wikipedia again]

Accountants: It's danged hard to find out how many accountants there are in Canada. At least I couldn't find out in the five minutes I spent looking. But I found out how many Canadians were employed in "Finance, insurance, real estate and leasing" and in "Professional, scientific and technical services" in 2007: 1,060,400 + 1,136,900 out of 16,866,400 employed = 13%. [Statscan]

Making the unlikely assumption that there is no overlap in these groups, we arrive at a total of 14.7% for P_b and a corresponding 85.3% for P_f or that it will be a fun date.

Now, how bad is a boring date? Let's set an evening at home watching CSI and Law and Order as 1 fun unit (Fu) while an evening at home with nothing on but reruns is 0 Fu. Can we say that a boring date is -1 Fu? And the average fun date is 2 Fu?

If so we get:

EVD = 14.7% × -1 Fu + 85.3% × 2 = 1.56 Fu

This means that a woman who uses Brome's paradigm regularly can expect over the long run to have evenings that are noticeably better than watching new episodes of CSI and Law and Order.

This is an important finding, but the quest must continue because we have not yet settled whether fun should be a focus of dating and we don't know the likelihood that dates with smiling attractive strangers will lead to deeper relationships.

____________________________

^[1] We should not assume that Ms Brome is shallow. Liking someone's looks can go well beyond appreciating their high cheekbones and low waist-to-hip ratio. It is also about noticing whether they have kind smiles for their friends and the serving staff, how often they laugh instead of frown, whether they have an artful sense of style or a lack of vanity, and much, much more.

^[2] This is why Aggie avoids Big Crab's Daddy Shack.