Blessed by the Potato

Here’s a bit of humour for you, since the site has been decidedly too serious for the last little while. None of this is mine.

The Free Cornish Army

15 Reasons to Date a Geek (original author unknown)

In the wide world of dating, there are many options. Do you go for the flashy guy with the smooth smile, or the dude in the corner typing away on his laptop? The following are reasons why I think my fellow females should pay more attention to the quiet geeks and nerds, and less attention to the flashy boys.

1.) While geeks and nerds may be awkward, they’re well-meaning 9 out of 10 times. That smooth dude with the sly grin and the spider hands? Wonder what HIS intentions are… plus, I’ve never had a geek guy not call me when he said he would. Score major points THERE.

2.) They’re useful. In this tech-savvy world, it’s great to have a b/f who can make your laptop, desktop, and just about anything else that plugs into a wall behave itself.

3.) They’re more romantic than they’re given credit for. Ok true, their idea of romance might be to make up a spiffy web-page with all the reasons why they love you, with links to pics of you and sonnets and such… but hey. It lasts longer than flowers, plus you can show your friends.

4.) Due to their neglected status, there are plenty to choose from. You like ’em tall and slender? There are plenty of geeks/nerds who are. You like ’em smaller with more meat on their bones? Got that too.

5.) They’ve got brains. Come on now, how can intelligence be a bad thing?

6.) Most are quite good at remembering dates. Like birthdates and such, especially if they know it’ll make you happy. Due again to their neglected status, they’re more attentive than guys who “have more options”. Plus, with all that down time without a steady girlfriend, they’ll likely have mental lists of all the things they’d love to do once they GOT a girlfriend. [editor’s note: this one is probably the least true: geeks often seem lost in their own timeless world and have no idea that a birthday is let alone when it might fall]

7.) Sex. Yep. Sex. I’m not really familiar with this myself, but I’ve friends who’ve been intimate with geek guys and it’s raves all around. They say a virgin wrote the Kama Sutra… all that time thinking about sex, imagining sex, dreaming about sex, (they are male after all) coupled with a desire to make you happy? Use your imagination.

8.) They’re relatively low-maintenance. Most can be fueled on pizza, Twinkies and Mt Dew. No complicated dinners needed here, so if you’re not the best cook, eh. Can you order a pizza? [editor’s note: also, since many are nocturnal at least part of the year, and have been since they were young, they haven’t had mommy cooking for them all their lives, and can likely cook for themselves and you]

9.) Most frequent bars as often as slugs frequent salt mines. You won’t have to worry much about your geek guy getting his “groove” on with club hotties because, frankly, he’ll be too busy rooting around under his computer wondering where that spare cable went. You won’t have to worry about him flirting with other women because, 9 out of 10 times, he’ll zip right by them in a perfect b-line towards the nearest electronics store. I’ve seen this happen.
Me: “Eww. Victoria Secret’s Models… They’re so skinny. How is that feminine? You can see her ribs!”
Geek Guy: “ooooooo…”
Me: “Hey!” *notices he is staring lustfully towards the computer store*
Geek Guy: “What?”
Me: “Never mind…”

10.) Although he may not want to go to every outing with you, you can arrange swaps, as in, you’ll go to his Gamer Con dressed as an elf princess if he’ll take you to the ballet. Plus, if he doesn’t want to go someplace with you, you won’t have to worry much about what he’s up to. You’ll probably come home to find him asleep on his keyboard in a sea of Mt. Dew cans with code blinking from the screen. It’s ok. He’s used to this. Just toss a blanket over him and turn out the light.

11.) His friends aren’t jerks. I can’t stress this enough. You’ll more likely get “Omg! A GIRL!! Can I see?!” than “Hey hot stuff back that ass up here and let me get some grub on…” They’re awkward geeks too and will, 9 times out of 10, treat you with the utmost respect and, more than likely, a note of awe. A cute girl picked one of their clan to date? It could happen to them! Hope! Drag some of your single girlfriends over, open up a pack of Mt. Dew, crack open the DnD set and get working. Nothing impresses geek guys more than a girl who can hack-n-slash (well ok maybe if she can code… a geek can dream).

12.) They’re rarely if ever possessive. They trust you, so you can be yourself around them. You like to walk around the house in a ratty t-shirt for comfort? He won’t care. He does too! They won’t get pissy if you don’t wear make-up or don’t want to bother primping your hair. If you gain a few pounds, they won’t try their best to make you feel like crap. [editor’s note: this point is true, but I don’t think possessive is the word the original author meant, since geeks can be very possessive…]

13.) They’re usually very well educated. Physics majors and the like. See #5. You won’t have to listen to him blathering on about his car (ok maybe a little), he’ll have loads of other interesting things to talk about. Politics, world events, how much the chicken burgers down at the local place
rock, so long as you douse them in hot sauce…

14.) You’ll almost never have to hear, “Yaw dawg whazzap!!” plop out of their mouths. Unless it’s in jest. They spell properly, use correct punctuation, and are able to tell the difference between the toilet and the floor. They almost never get “wasted”, so you won’t have to worry about coming home to find him and his friends passed out on the floor amidst a pile of beer bottles. Mt. Dew cans, perhaps…

15.) And the final reason why geeks and nerds make great boyfriends: They actually give a damn about you. Not how you look (though that’s a plus), not how skinny you are, not how much make-up you primp yourself up with, but they like you for you. That kind of thing lasts longer than “DaMN baby you got a fine ass!!!” Believe me.

I have to step in and add one last important point:

16.) They don’t watch sports, at least not religiously. This will make scheduling almost anything easier, and free up the TV for watching anything else.

Email, that most vital of life blood of the Internets, is the one thing that should never fail us. Imagine the chaos as millions of email junkies realize that if they want to ensure that a message gets somewhere that they’ll have to pick up the phone and verify it the old-fashioned way.

Barbaric!

Unfortunately, my email server has been inexplicably been dropping messages seemingly at random, and it has me really worried. I’m a real email junkie, and have been since I first got internet access. Earlier today, I was poo-pooing call waiting, asking why anyone would want to pay for the priviledge of having the phone constantly go boo-woop while you’re talking to one person, then risk losing that connection to placate the new caller. If someone really needs to reach me while I’m on the phone, I said, they can call my cell phone or email me. Yet all of a sudden, it feels like that cornerstone of my life is starting to shatter.

Sure, email’s known to have the odd problem here and there. Sometimes messages get stuck in transit between mail servers, often arriving hours and in extreme cases, days after they were sent, rather than the delay of seconds we’re used to. Sometimes it gets bounced entirely after a few days in the queue, or it may be caught in the spam filter. But it’s always somewhere if you care to look — if someone were to send a follow-up email or ask you in person if you got their email, and you had to say that no, you hadn’t, you could try to check up on it. If it didn’t land in your spam folder, then there’s a good chance the sender got a return receipt telling them that their email bounced.

However, I’ve had at least 2 people over the last week tell me that they sent me email that I never got (amounting to 5 emails between them). They never got a return receipt, either, which suddenly has me worried about the utility of my email. And if email becomes suspect then what’s next? I fear my entire universe will come crashing down around my shoulders leaving me with nothing but a hunk of graphite and a pack of stamps, and even that might get lost! In fact, it seems to happen more than with email — in January I had an express post package get lost, despite showing up as delivered on their tracker.

So I had this really weird dream last night that the Fraser Institute was out to get me. They started by sending a bunch of annoying and harrassing letters to my parents’ house, followed by teams of snipers. I was yelling “why does the Fraser Institute have my home address? And why are they trying to kill me?!” The weird part was that the letters were mostly written on the inside of the envelopes they sent, so I’d open one up and sigh thinking it was empty, and then there’d be this writing on the inside…

I have to wonder if this is yet another indication that I’ve completely lost my marbles, or if it’s my subconscious trying to tell me something about the danger of conservative think-tanks…

The Fermi Paradox is a very neat concept when considering extraterrestrial life. It goes, quite simply, like this: “Where are they?” If life is abundant in the universe, and the natural goal for any technologically developed civilization is to spread to the stars (not only expanding for expansion’s sake, but also spreading out so that a global catastrophy doesn’t wipe out the species), then why have we not yet seen any evidence of extraterrestrial life? Our knowledge of Von Neumann probes, exponential growth, etc., tells us that by all rights they should be crawing all over us by now. Even if the odds are low that life will form, and lower yet that they’ll become intelligent, the galaxy is a really big place and there’s been enough time. So, are we the first? While someone would have to be first, it seems like that’s about as likely as us being the only life in the universe. Could we just not be looking for evidence in the right way? That’s entirely possible: while we’ve been beaming out huge amounts of radio for the last century or so, we’re starting to replace a lot of those communications with point-to-point microwaves and fibre optics. It might be that a civilization only bothers with broadcast radio (that can penetrate the ionosphere) for a few hundred years, and after that settles down to more energy-efficient, clearer, point-to-point transmissions (or even faster-than-light tachyon type communication). But what about their physical presence? Even a totallitarian galactic government imposing some sort of Star Trek-like non-interference Prime Directive couldn’t keep every religious nutjob or escaped prisoner from trying to touch down on Earth (and indeed, this happened quite a bit on Star Trek).

I’ve been reading Permanence lately, and they have another take on the matter (similar to the inevitable biological/nuclear holocaust type scenario)… but that’s actually something to talk about another time. No, today I’m not really going to talk about aliens, I’m going to talk about love.

The Fermi Paradox of Love

I’ve come up with a version of the Fermi Paradox that goes like this: if there are billions of people on the Earth, and more people being born than we can hope to comfortably sustain, then where are our mates? We’re getting close to the age at which we’d like to start having kids, and despite keeping an eye out for the better part of a decade, talking to thousands of people, and possibly dating some… we still find ourselves asking the question “where are they?”

If we’re meant to have one and only one soulmate, then why hasn’t the Potato or Flying Spaghetti Monster pushed them towards us with Its all-knowing tentacle? And if that’s just a silly romantic notion, why haven’t we managed to find someone who, while not perfect, is certainly close enough? If there are plenty of fish in the sea, where are they?

Now, I’m no Drake, but I could potentially throw out some variables anyway. Let’s say that the number of ideal candidates for you is N. Then, we can determine an approximate value of N by:

N = P · G · A · L · S · C · D

Where
P = total population of the planet
G = portion of population that is of the appropriate gender and orientation
A = portion within your age bracket who are available
L = portion who meet your gross limits (the sort of things you could filter out with a simple questionnaire, eliminating those who may have tatoos, drive drunk, molest children, vote conservative, smoke, or otherwise not meet whatever personal, non-negotiable limits you may have)
S = the smacktard quotient; in other words, the proportion who seem ok when you first meet them, but turn out to be utter smacktards when you get to know them a little bit (acutally, mathematically it’s the number of people who aren’t smacktards, so 1 – % of smacktards)
C= portion who meet your more subtle requirements (the ones you may not even be conscious of — the sort of things that you only find out about after you get to know someone fairly well, in other words, your compatability)
D = the “dumb luck” modifier, which includes factors such as happening to meet someone if they do exist, not having something traumatic happen at a bad point in the relationship (for example, getting a new job in another city while the relationship is too young to ask someone to move with you, or turn down the opportunity for them, or to sustain extended periods in long-distance limbo; or having your ex call in the middle of your third date wanting to get back together)

Taking a rough estimate, we have:
P = 6 billion
G = 45% (the gender part is easier than trying to guess what proportion also meets the orientation part)
A = 5% (assume that about 10% of total people are in the proper age bracket, and about half of those are available)
L = 20% (sounds about right, but who knows)
S = 25% (I think this is probably still being generous)
C = 5% (this one’s hard to judge, but I think that of the people who were in my age group, available, met my gross criteria, weren’t smacktards after getting to know them a bit, only about 1 in 20 would be compatable enough to keep trying with)
D = (assuming no other dumb luck, let’s say you meet 60 000 people in the “looking out” phase of your life) 6×10^4/6×10^9 = 10^-5

Which gives: N ~ 4

This is part of the fun of being a xenobiologist or SETI member. You get to just take a wild guess at a number, and if you’re right to anywhere within a few orders of magnitude then you’re doing pretty good.

Of course, there are other problems, paralleled with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which revolves around the question of how to go about your search. For SETI, we primarily scan the skies for radio transmissions, but what if broadcast radio gets replaced by point-to-point (narrowbeam) communication in an extremely short amount of time (relatively speaking). It harkens back to the question of “why do girls seem to date total jerks far more often than should be possible statistically?” When we pull out the spectrum, we immediately see why: nice, shy guys are invisible. You’ll need special tactics and tools to find them.

Interestingly, as you get older, this equation changes, and not for the better, I should think. The smacktard quotient S probably increases as people mature a bit, or at least learn how to better hide their inner jerk (this latter part will be compensated for by a decrease in C, since you’ll still find out, it’ll just be later in the relationship). The C factor can change fairly dramatically in either direction, partly because as you get older you deal with problems better, and thus the range of people you can be compatabile with increases, but at the same time, you can have more bad memories that make you go “no, I like you and all, but that totally reminds me of something my ex used to do and I can’t deal with that.” Also, since you have less time left in your life, you may not be willing to commit to a promising relationship to see if it will in fact work out. Most dramatically, A will change from the influence of two factors. First, as you get older you will find your age bracket expands (a 19 year old likely won’t consider dating someone younger than 17 or older than 25 — an 8 year span — whereas a 30 year old might date someone from 22 to 38 — 8 years in either direction), and second, as you get older, the number of singles decreases. While the divorce rate is atrocious, there are still a significant number of people who get married and stay married.

Naturally, as we get older we also realize that things in life aren’t perfect, and that our long-held plans and/or dreams will simply have to change. Sometimes this just involves fairly minor compromises (found the right person and just wanted to wait until you were actually making more money than those on welfare to propose? Well, they won’t wait forever, so if that point in your life is still 5 years distant, you might need to jump-start the process a bit). However, some people are finding that they face darker decisions. I’m not saying I know anyone thinking of this, but some girls have given up on trying to find the right guy and settle down before having kids. Sperm is cheap, being a single mom isn’t so unusual anymore, so why not just get pregnant when you’re ready and fertile, and let the guy come whenever the fates decide? It does influence your odds of finding a guy, since now you also have to figure in the number who, despite liking kids, aren’t so keen on helping to raise some that aren’t their own, and you also have to deal with a drastic decrease in time available for romance. But it does completely bypass the issue of getting married (or merely pregnant) partially out of desperation, and then having to deal with joint custody and messy breakups.

And for the low, low cost of monthly bleed-outs, you too can have this kind of reproductive freedom!

Rabbits!