A friend of mine told me that I need to write out a 40 page statement about what I want in a partner in order to find my ideal partner*.

But I generally require that someone be honest about themselves, and that alone disqualifies large swathes of humanity**.

Which . . . I guess means that everything is working as intended.

*Well, OK, not actually 40 pages. It's just that apparently someone really did write out 40 pages of what they wanted, down to physical characteristics like hair and skin texture, and they got their ideal mate, but to me those are kind of just . . . adjuncts to the real human being.

**There is a girl who will not talk to me because I told her that it's fine if she's emotionally manipulating her guy friends and stringing them along, as long as she's honest with herself about it. She thought I was being snarky; I actually believe it. See also "you can choose your own damnation." You can be a monster, because monsters exist, but don't lie to yourself and pretend that you're a knight. Be aware and accepting that you are a monster - or else change yourself.

Today I saw a guy go into a five minute tirade over - of all things - women complaining. This included such gems of wisdom as "it's because of their bleeding vag" and "I have an extra chromosome, so I don't get emotional." That delivered while raging. Yeah, unless you have Down's Syndrome or Kleinfelter's or something . . . you don't. The number of chromosomes is the same. Also, it's XY vs. XX. The Y is a lot smaller than the X, so at the same number of chromosomes men have less genetic material than women, not more. Maybe you should take basic biology before you try to use biology to bolster your argument.

I could wish people realized how absurd they were.

But there would probably be worldwide mass suicides if that wish ever came true.

In academia, people scorn industry as some kind of low-hanging fruit.

But men have died trying to reach that fruit.

I have a soft spot for Metonymy.

Metonymy, in case you were sleeping through English class, is when an associated thing is used in place of the real subject. Most commonly, the part is used in place of the whole. When an official asks, "What does Downing Street say?" he isn't really asking what the literal street says. He's asking what the British government based there would say. The US does the same thing with "The White House" as a metonym for the functions housed by the White House. Properly speaking, if the thing is only a subcomponent of a whole, then what we have is synecdoche, but metonymy is the more general case.

Anyhow, I love songs about things which are really about other things.

C'mon Sea Legs, pull yourself together
You're gonna have to learn to like
The rockin' of the waves, whatever.
C'mon now, it's not meant to be easy
But you're not gonna spend your life
Being sick over the side.

Would you look at yourself, staring,
Hypnotized, into the deep, green sea.
A breath of wind could blow you away,
So hang on to your head.
A pinch of fog, you think you're going blind,
And an inch of snow, you're buried alive.
All weak in the knees, and tense in the hand,
You tear your eyes away or it'll never get better.

“They misjudged what the real demand was,” Quinten Stevens, chief investment officer at Stevens Asset Management, told CNBC, referring to the underwriting banks on the deal.

This isn't rocket science. Facebook has no physical product. Its highest tier of revenue comes from questionable companies that exploit the ability to charge cell phones of kids who don't know what they're buying. This has all been pretty well documented for years; it's not a sustainable business model.

You could argue that, say, Google has no physical product - except that the Android is actually a huge part of their revenue; it's projected to generate 1.3 billion dollars in 2012. Obviously a brand name is important, but just as obviously, you need to use that brand name to sell a product for which you can get paid.

I can't believe that this is being treated like some kind of esoteric wisdom that the CEOs of $100bn companies are incapable of grasping.

In a secured computer lab, a girl recently spent 15 minutes bitching really loudly about how nobody would open the door for her, and she had to go "all the way" back to her car to get her ID. She insisted it was "so rude," and "the least people could do," and that "nobody would bite or anything."

This is on a campus where there were three muggings last month, some of which were armed, in broad daylight.

So . . . I'm going to go out on a limb and say doors which are locked are locked for a reason. Nobody owes it to you to jeopardize their safety and that of everyone else so that you can save yourself the 30 second walk to your car. Didn't bring the key? Don't blame the people who don't know you and therefore won't let you in. Remember to bring your key and you won't have a problem.

It must be nice to never have been mugged or stolen from.

Apparently Charles Darwin married his first cousin, a practice which was common in his family. Scholars now estimate that, due to this, there was about 7% less genetic diversity in his offspring than might otherwise have been expected.

The Zen of Genetics: “It is hard to mate dead mice.”

I drank tea and built a ferry.

Rather than "should marriage be between a man and a woman" I think we have to ask ourselves, "Should the state be permitted to forbid people from marrying as they please?"

Heck, if Eika Eiffel wants to say she's married to the Eiffel tower, why not let her? Who does it harm?