Capella has a post on what she looks for in a man. I’ve got some thoughts on such lists, but I want to mull it over before writing anything more extensive about it. Reading over the first bullet point, which is a thirst for intelligence, the thought occurred to me: There’s got to be a dating service that focuses on people with high IQs. It’s not always easy for these people to meet each other and a relationship with too high an intelligence differential can be problematic. Plus, people with more intelligence often have money. Not super amounts, but perhaps enough to fund a dating service.

Turns out that there is something called IQ Cuties. Obviously I’m not in a position to check out how worthwhile it is. I think that such a service would be better off the internet. I once enrolled in a specialty dating service a while back and got fleeced pretty good. It was of a religious nature. I probably would have been better off going to church. In any case, it’s a lot easier to get sums of money out of people (like me) when you’re brick-and-mortar-plus-Internet rather than potentially some fly-by-night Internet operation.

The specialty operation that I enrolled in went out of business shortly after my term expired. So maybe Lavalife is the way to go, business-wise.

Has anyone seen those ads for Chemistry.com that rib on eHarmony? The gay ones I understand, but I didn’t quite understand why “We accept everybody!” is a great selling point for a dating service. I signed up with the aforementioned fleecing agency in part because they did cull the herd, so to speak. Then again, they were probably rejecting people that were more up my alley than the ones I actually dated (except one who was absolutely marvelous though of course I failed to recognize that at the time), so maybe that’s where Chemistry.com would have come in. But while I wouldn’t refuse to date someone that was rejected by eHarmony, I don’t know that I’d jump in the pool with a bunch of rejects. I did that enough in junior high, thankyouverymuch.

A while back Unfogged clued me in to something called CrazyBlindDate, where basically you set something up on short notice and in stark contrast to the aforementioned dating services is indiscriminate in nature. Even though it’s completely out of my nature, I might have done something like this when I was single. It’s sort of like the old apartment complex I lived in out in Deseret. It was $300 a month with all bills paid, filled with ex-cons and miscreants, and the most interesting place one could ever ask to live for a little while. Particularly when you’re writing a blog, as I was at the time. CrazyBlindDate probably provides excellent blogfodder.

If you ever feel tempted to get a potato salad tub at Walmart, I would caution against it. It doesn’t taste very good.

Things that don’t taste good usually come in one of three categories. They’re either “bad but guilty pleasure yummy”, “bad but of course good for me” or “inappropriately sweet.”.

This is neither. This is just… bad. I don’t understand. I like potato salad sometimes. It has the right nutrient contents, which is to say that it’s unhealthy but not in an sugary way. It’s not a mishmash or two foods that don’t work together. It just doesn’t taste good.

I don’t understand.

A few days ago I wrote a post about the advantages to being the oldest kid on your little league baseball team. Apparently the same is true of soccer:

In one study published in the June 2005 Journal of Sport Sciences, researchers from Leuven, Belgium, and Liverpool, England, found that a disproportionate number of World Cup soccer players are born in January, February and March, meaning they were old relative to peers on youth soccer teams.

A while back Half Sigma linked to an interesting article in the New York Times about, among other things, the academic advantages of being the oldest kid in your class and how parents are trying to take advantage of this:

However, more recent research by labor economists takes advantage of new, very large data sets and has produced different results. A few labor economists do concur with the education scholarship, but most have found that while absolute age (how many days a child has been alive) is not so important, relative age (how old that child is in comparison to his classmates) shapes performance long after those few months of maturity should have ceased to matter.

The article is interesting as is the topic as a whole. My oldest brother Ollie was held back into my older brother Mitch’s grade and even though Mitch is the smartest of the three of us, Ollie outperformed Mitch in elementary school (getting into the honors program while Mitch didn’t) and did comparably well until they went off to college where Mitch excelled and Ollie didn’t. My sister-in-law was young in her class and struggled for a while as well, though she ended up with a full-ride scholarship and is now a lawyer.

But what this really got me thinking about is the increasing gender gap between young men and young women. Some have suggested that the problem is that schools are increasingly geared more towards natural female behavior with the kids being told to sit down and be quiet and games of tag and dodgeball being banned and all that. I do think that there may be something to that theory. There are also some that believe that female teachers are overly concerned about the female students to the detriment of the male students that just seem to annoy them. That theory is not completely without merit either, though I don’t think that attitude is widespread enough to come close to approaching the problem.

What I thought about as I read the article was if comparative age makes such a difference, what about comparative maturity? It’s somewhat well known that girls are more likely to be ahead of the maturity curve and boys behind it in the early years. What if the issue isn’t so much teacher bias or feminine rule systems but simply a function of teachers teaching at the maturity level of their more mature, predominantly female, students? Then again, is that any different from a curriculum aimed more towards females than males on the whole?

I think that it is. If the study the NYT cites is sound, then that represents a structural problem for boys. One that can’t simply be addressed by making boys less like boys or diagnosing them with behavioral disorders and drugging them. It’s not so much a matter of boys being boys when they need to behave but rather of boys being held to a higher standard of maturity than they are comfortably capable of. Boys may decline to express the maturity and lose out that way or they may try to meet these expectations and expend mental/emotional energy doing so that they might otherwise be dedicating to classwork.

It also means that there may be some solutions to the problems. Half Sigma suggests cutting grades into 6-month groups rather than 1-year, which may help somewhat but wouldn’t address the gender disparity. Single-sex education might be a better example of a remedy. Put the boys all together and there should be less of a maturity gap. Plus you can play around with with more active learning that some believe is more conducive to the ways that boys prefer to learn. Alternately, you could consider different age cut-offs for boys and girls, putting the boys’ cutoff in July and the girls’ in December.

On the other hand, if it is all so comparative, maybe it’s pointless to even try. There’s always going to be a bottom half. A youngest boy as well as an oldest. Would taking these measures simply be shuffling the same deck? Perhaps so, though it would seem to me that the gap between the most mature girl and least mature boy would be less than the gap between the most and least mature boys. You can’t eliminate the problem, but perhaps lessen the effects.

A little while ago I mentioned that I have a very poor sense of smell. To which Barry asked:

Do you also have a diminished sense of taste, because those things seem to go hand in hand. Not to overuse a body-parts metaphor…

The truth is that I don’t know for sure, but I think I do. In all honesty, I didn’t realize that I had a poor sense of smell for the longest time. It’s difficult when you don’t have anything to compare it to.

I remember back in junior high when stink bombs were all the rage. Early on, I really didn’t know what they were. While everyone around me scattered in search for cleaner air, I would just stand there and sniff. I’d think to myself, “Hmmm, this smells like rotten eggs or something. Maybe rotten fruit. Definitely smells interesting. Very interesting.” I similarly don’t mind the smell of farts. I sort of have a vague, “This smells bad” feeling, but it’s more of an observation than a feeling. In some ways I like it just because it’s interesting and different.

But with smell, you are eventually notified that you are not smelling things that others are smelling. Clancy frequently asks if I can smell something and I say that I can’t. Something like that happens enough and you start to get the idea.

With taste, though, I don’t really have that. If I’m eating something, I can taste it. It may taste bland, but I know that I am eating something and therefore I think more inclined to be able to taste it. Sort of like I can sometimes smell things only after Clancy points them out to me.

At the same time, when it comes to food, I’m a big texture person. What something is made of is as important as how it tastes. I don’t like rice even though rice has little or no taste to it. I don’t like rice even if it’s mixed with something I do like that should theoretically engulf the non-taste of the rice. I just don’t like eating it. If I’m more fixated on texture than most people, that probably means that I don’t taste as much as they do.

The other thing is that I love, love, love spicy food and food that has any sort of really strong taste. I’ve commented before that the worse a food makes my breath, the more I probably like it. Garlic, onion, jalapeno, you name it. And the stronger the taste, the better. Whenever I eat Thai food I typically go for the spiciest stuff they’ve got or the next one down, which is usually higher than anyone else at the table that has eaten there is willing to go. Since I’m not a particularly tough person when it comes to discomfort, it’s likely that I am not as uncomfortable eating that stuff as the next person… which would bring me back to diminished tastebuds.

Sometimes when I’m bored I think about somewhat useless things that interest me enough to make the time go by. That’s where some of my posts around here come from. Lately I’ve been thinking about what I would do if it were up to me to try to save the comic book industry and DC Comics in particular. I’ve reached a stumbling point in one of my branches of thought and I need your help. If you can answer the below questions, it would help me out. So please give it a try whether you are at all interested in comic books. In fact, it’s those that aren’t very interested in comic books whose help I most need.

I want to know what you know about the various characters. I am going to link the characters names to a picture of them. If you don’t recognize the name, click on the image to see if that jogs your memory at all.

The options are:
A) I know who this character is and I know how he became a superhero
B) I know who this character is, but I don’t know how he became a superhero
C) I recognize the character’s name and, but couldn’t necessarily identify him
D) I know this character on sight, but couldn’t name him
E) I don’t know who this is

Note that if your answer is “Which [character name] are you referring to? The origins differ slightly/greatly from one to the next” then your answer is probably (A).

1. Superman
2. Batman
3. Wonder Woman
4. Green Lantern
5. The Atom
6. Hawkman
7. Martian Manhunter
8. Nightwing
9. Blue Beetle
10. Captain Marvel
11. Triumph
12. Black Canary