"Our social and sexual patterns have changed more in the last fifty years than in the last ten thousand."

This quote from Helen Fischer, head scientist behind Chemistry.com, is in this New Yorker article about internet dating.  It’s a really, very amazingly stupid sentence.  If you were thinking about joining Chemistry.com, it’s important for you to know that the person behind it is this big of an idiot.

You know what was just getting going 10,000 years?  Agriculture.  The beginning of the Bronze Age was only about 5,000 years ago.

But even beyond how stupid the idea behind it is, what Fischer is actually ends up saying is even stupider: The last fifty years are part of the last ten thousand.  I believe the only way what Fischer actually said could be true is if our social and sexual patterns today were more similar to those of ten thousand years ago than they were to those of fifty years.

What a dum-dum.

(This is the meanest I’ve ever been on the Internet.  I feel a little dirty about it.)

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Dispatches from my education:

1. FrameNet (where the above part of a chart comes from) is pretty fun to play around with and probably not very useful.
2. I read a paper today in which the authors said the “learning curve” for a task was “steep”.  What they meant was that people learned the task quickly.  I’m not sure I’ve made reference to steep learning curves before, but if I have, I’ve done so incorrectly.  Now I know words and phrases can have more than one meaning (I probably wouldn’t be in school if that weren’t true), but I think it’s fair to say that using “steep learning curve” to mean “difficult to learn” is—if not outright wrong—definitely really stupid once you think about it.  Of course the x-axis on a learning curve is time.  What the hell else could it be?
3. I share an office with 11 other grad students.  There is a bell-like apparatus attached to the door.  It’s a hollow metal cylinder suspended from a string that fits into a metal loop and rings when someone comes in or out.  Or I should say that there was a bell-like apparatus attached to the door.  A lot of people come in and out of a twelve person office and I don’t really give a fuck about their presence (plus I can fucking hear them coming in anyways, even without a bell; it’s not like anyone is trying to sneak up on us).  So I took the bell down on Monday when nobody else was in the room.  I hope I’m not wading into some years old debate on the bell-like apparatus.  I mean, the bell-like apparatus couldn’t have always been there.  Someone once decided that that door needed to make a truckload of noise when people use it, and I just can’t envision a scenario in which the bell-like apparatus is helpful.  I decided against hiding it, so If someone puts it back up, I might need to ask to change offices to avoid confrontation.

So, my future advisor just friended me on Facebook.  I decided this was a good time to scrub the last vestiges of my personality from my Facebook profile.

Back in college, my “About Me” said “it’s a shame facebook doesn’t let me list things I don’t like.”  So when they rolled out applications (this would have been Spring 2007), I came across “extended information” and the above list began.

The original list stopped at “shopping” but probably included a few other things, most notably “people who like Crash”, which I removed after the girl I was dating admitted she liked Crash.  “Orientations” was added shortly after, when the first three days of my summer internship were spent in a single conference room.  I can place a few others: “Piecewise linear topology” was probably April of senior year, when I ran into some thorny problems with my thesis.  “Steelers special teams” was fall 2008, with that whole Mitch Berger fiasco.

It seemed like it was time to come down.  Moving to a new city, starting school again, maybe it’s best I don’t project myself as a whiny grumpypants (at least not at first).  Furthermore, several entries have moved from dislike to disinterest.  If I edited the list for today, it would look like:

• long movies
• cucumbers
• weightlifting
• baseball
• biking
• the music I listened to in middle school
• skits on rap albums
• most social situations
• shopping
• the radio
• orientations
• the part of Jeopardy when the contestants talk about themselves
• bread and butter pickles
• toilets with motion sensors
• “my” cards in Apples to Apples
• Steelers special teams

In leaving my job and (temporarily) moving across the country, by far the largest life adjustment has been living with a Wii instead of an Xbox.  A big change, obviously, but not a bad one.

Ben recently purchased Super Mario Galaxy 2.  It (and presumably the first one, which I’ve yet to play) is a remarkable game, featuring the most inventive level design I’ve ever come across.  If you own a Wii, you should own this game.  It’s most impressive.

Yet, the game is not without its problems:

• Each stage is referred to as a “galaxy” and consists of a cluster of small planets—Little Prince style.  The problem: a cluster of galaxies is referred to as a “world”.  Now I understand that “world” has more than one definition and needn’t merely mean planet.  Yet, in the context of planets and galaxies, using “world” seems sinisterly misleading.  It bothers me a great deal.
• Princess Peach, who has been kidnapped somehow as access to an intergalactic (or really inter-“world”) postal system via which she sends Mario letters with extra lives attached.  The letters acknowledge the 1-ups are specifically so that Mario can rescue her.  It just seems incomprehensible to me that a kidnapper would allow the kidnappee to communicate with would-be rescuers and supply them with items that would make the rescue easier.
• Bowser is willing to concede that Mario is his archnemesis and a formidable foe.  He knows Mario is capable of stopping him and seems worried about it.  In the few glimpses of dialog we get, Bowser definitely is taking the Mario situation seriously.  But if this is the case, I really can’t figure out why—when Mario and Bowser are locked in combat—he waits until he takes two hits of damage before going into the next gear and really starts trying.
• Not enough levels with slides.

Much like the term “think tank”…

…the “war games” simulation they made me stay after work to practice was a good deal less exciting than you would think from the name.

The closest analogy I have for it was when me and my friends decided we were going to start playing dungeons and dragons senior year of college.  We were all quite excited, me most of all.  I even borrowed several books from a classmate.  We came up with names and classes and races for our characters and then realized that  shit was just take forever before there would be any fun to have.  The whole thing was a disaster that left me amazed that ten year boys could figure out what the hell you were supposed to do.

Anyways, this was exactly like that.

Playing make-believe should never involve that much planning.  So much planning.  Bah.

Phebe, this is also why I’m still irked by that Philly trip 15 months ago.

Unlike some people, I’m not particularly satisfied merely because things work out.  There is always some uncertainty to the future, and because of that, sometimes one gets rewarded when they did something that deserves to be punished.  Sometime a bad idea leads to a good result.  Sometimes the shitty hand you were dealt is a winner, even though you really should have folded and it was stupid not to.

I notice this most often when playing cards, where the right and wrong thing to do is pretty transparent, but it happens in real life too.  Not all the time (I mean, it needs to happen less than half of the time, otherwise it wouldn’t be a bad decision).  And sometimes there’s not a great deal of agency involved where a seemingly shitty thing turns into something good.  What I’m saying is that the seemingly shitty thing is still very much a shitty thing.  The fact that the future is inherently uncertain doesn’t change that.  “All’s well that ends well” is bullshit.

This is all a prelude to tell you that I had a fried pickle on Saturday night.  Man was it wonderful.  It’s pretty comparable to an onion ring, the difference being how much better pickles are than onions.  There was also garlic mayonnaise for dipping.  It really was a bit of a revelation, and I’m sure my future will contain more fried pickles (or as sure as I could be, given the inherent uncertainty involved).

Before that happened, we got turned away from the bar we were trying to go to.  The bouncer said they could not accept vertical licenses (when you’re from Pennsylvania, you don’t get a normal horizontal license until your twenty fourth birthday [meanwhile: somebody has a birthday coming up]).  While the bouncer readily admitted that my license was a valid government issued id.  While he acknowledged it was indeed me, and was he happy to concede that I turned 21 nearly three years ago, he still insisted that I could not enter the bar.

So even though he was apologetic and friendly, and—more importantly—even though get turned away from the bar resulted in my eating a fried pickle which eclipsed downloading “Crosseyed and Painless” for Rock Band as the best thing that happened to me all weekend, and most likely for some time longer, I am choosing to stay upset about this.  And not just a little upset: irrationally upset.  If the bar is going to be irrational about their id policy, I’m going to be irrational too.

But yeah, fried pickles are awesome.

We have reached the exciting conclusion (but you might want to start with Part 1, and Part 2):

Meanwhile, a week ago Friday, I begun a family vacation to the beach.  Before that could happen, I had to do laundry on Thursday night.  Now, although I’m in almost every way completely satisfied with my current residence, it is equipped with what may be the worst dryer in the universe.  The major flaw: if you put too much in, the dryer will not tumble and nothing will dry.  “Too much” in this case is less than half of what you can fit into the washing machine (and it’s a small washing machine).  And if you need to dry a towel (which was actually the primary goal of doing laundry), they weigh so much that you’re pretty much fucked.  Secondary flaw: it takes at least an hour and a half to dry anything, and often significantly longer.  And the clock will just keep adding time so you never know how long is left.  Flaw 3: every once in a while it will just shut off and give the ominous reading “3E” which is far more symmetric in the numeric line display font.

Anyways, since I wear dirty clothes and haven’t lived there very long, I’m still learning how to best cope with such a shitty dryer (strategy 1: wear dirty clothes).  So at 2 am last thursday, I allegedly had 40 minutes before the first half of my load of laundry would be dry (I started doing laundry at 9.  I only did one load), before I could put more wet, clean clothes into the dryer and go to sleep.  I was very tired, and needed to do something to keep me occupied for at least 40 minutes.  I decided I’d take a shower, but before I did that, I decided a vacation mustache could only be a great idea.

I eventually get to sleep (although had to wake up early and dry the towel separately).  In the morning, my brother picks me up for the vacation, obviously jealous of my mustache.  We arrive at the shore around 4 o’clock.  Amazingly, his girlfriend actually encouraged him to “mustache up” (although not in those words) once we arrived.  And by  6 oclock, me, my brother, and of course my father were all in the same place with the pictured mustaches.

Obviously, the vacation was fantastic.

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oomb:

Highly underrated: Strawberry Milk.

Ben, where’d your comments go?  I wanted to comment about the fact that strawberry milk is disgusting.  It’s totally horrible stuff.  And that’s coming from someone with a positive opinion of strawberry milkshakes.  I don’t think this really warrants an entire post, but Ben disabled comments and now the natural order of things are upset.

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Onion, I expect better from you.

Above is the accompanying graph from their story “Nation’s Unemployment Outlook Improves Drastically After Fifth Beer.”  It’s a funny enough story, although I’d recommend the slightly funnier “Alcoholic-Beverage-Consumer Confidence Skyrockets.”

But, you should know: this is a horrible graph.  This is about as wrong as a made up graph accompanying a fake news story can be.  The first problem is that they graph Unemployment Outlook on the x-axis, eschewing the standard convention of the having the causal variable on the x-axis*.

Now, conventions are merely conventions, and the Onion is clearly not beholden to my own graphical-conservatism.  But they fucked up.  The way they graphed it, instead of the desired “drastic improvement” with the fifth beer, you instead have the smallest per-beer improvement.  That’s right.  The graphical evidence completely contradicts the entire article.

“But”, you want to interject, “look at that steep slope!  That means its going up.”  Well, it does mean something is going up, but what’s going up is beer consumption (ie, employment outlook is barely increasing with the fifth beer).  By using the nonconventional axis set-up, the Onion has confused itself, and gotten the graph very wrong.

The somewhat superior Alcohol-Consumer-Confidence article gets its graph correct.

*I’m not saying that causality does not go this way (clearly being employed can impact drink consumption, although I’d expect some u-shape in the graph), but the story is about the effects of drinking on outlook, not the other way around.