Feeling pushed?

A national stamp of approval

Let's face it. All this Obamamania is making us Canadians envious.

But our politicians just don't have that kinda sizzle. Elevating them to hero status? Puh-leeze. A recent poll showed many people had trouble naming our first and arguably most visionary prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald.

Even our national icons get no respect. Writer and activist June Callwood once lamented, "The beaver, which has come to represent Canada as the eagle does the United States and the lion Britain, is a flat-tailed, slow-witted, toothy rodent known to bite off its own testicles or to stand under its own falling trees."

So let's pause for a moment, stop chewing our nether regions, and honour the true Canadian heroes of peace, order and good government by unveiling the first in a series of ESI postage stamps.

Moisten your tongue and get ready to lick The Deputy Ministers.

Dream Interpretation Request #2

I need help to interpret another one of my dreams.

Zoom, I was in the back of a police car with a hottie policeman, and he said that we had to make out. I thought, Well, he's a policeman, I have to listen to what he says.

Megan, when pants removal ensued, I realized he was actually a policewoman with a derriere to rival Kim Bassinger's tooshie.

What does it all mean?

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.

Blue Cats