Wondrous Apparitions, Provided by Magicians.

[Poll #999635]

EDIT: And in case anybody's interested, I'm not a survivor. Skills aside, I'm sort-of value-engineered, and I require regular outside chemical input to sustain my processes. So in case of Zombie Apocalypse, you better get me to write down anything useful I happen to know.

1. Gratuitous pictures of orangutans. OOOK!

2. Wildly unimportant experiments seek insight into the human condition. Featured: Do men or women write better personal ads? How can you tell when someone is lying? Does your last name impact your quality of life? ... and so on.

When triadruid, kittenpants and I were out having dinner last night, we noticed a thing. It seems like when we all go out together, we are almost always asked if we want to split the check. When triadruid and I go out together, we are almost never asked if we want to split the check. When kittenpants and I go out together, we are sometimes asked if we want to split the check, and sometimes not. kittenpants and triadruid did not provide an impression about what happens when they go out together.

We're going to collect some data and see if this is indeed true. It is our hypothesis that the three of us together generally read as "friends hanging out" or "couple taking out a friend or relative", which would perhaps involve check-splitting. If either kittenpants or I are out with triadruid only, we probably read as hetero couples, so less likely to want to split the bill. If kittenpants and I are out together, we figure that in some establishments, they read us as a homosexual couple, and in others, as friends hanging out, so the split or not-split will vary by location.

So tell me, Vast Unpaid Research Department, particularly you other poly folks or others who regularly dine out with more than one other person, are you asked if you want to split the check? What other check behaviours have you noticed as you go out?

I will be the first to admit that my grasp of the rules about socialization, and especially those about romantic/sexual/marital relationships is not very solid. So I was hoping that you lot could give me some sort of feeling for the question in my brain today. The question has to do with how to deal with the ex-whatever of someone who is your friend. If you are friends with someone, and they break it off with a person they are dating/sleeping with/married to/whatever, is it okay for you to pursue their ex? If you are the ex-whatever of someone, are you offended if they date/sleep with/marry/whatever someone else?

I'm not asking this because I'm interested in pursuing anybody's ex. I'm not interested in how I should be relating to the people who are currently hooked up with any of my exes. I'm not passing judgment on anybody's behavior, or inviting others to do so. I'm just curious, and I don't know what people percieve the rules to be on the thing. Please help?
( Behind the cut, there is clicky. )

Newsflash: Smart chicks get crazy laid, says the Boston Globe (and it ain't so bad being a smart guy, either).

More dispatches from the No Shit, Really File, as interpreted by this article's author, and then re-interpreted by me:
- Highly educated people tend to form more egalitarian family/love relationships than less-educated people.
- The level of equality in a relationship seems to be correlated to its stability and the level of satisfaction reported by the partners. (No shit, really? If people don't treat their partners like servants, the relationship is better? Who would have guessed?)
- College educated women both give and get more oral sex than less educated women. (No statistics on how people with college educations and penises fare in this area, but one can imagine, I suppose. Also, this was an example cited by the reporter as "being more adventurous in bed". That alone speaks volumes about American sexual repression.)
- Men are less likely to be misogynistic asshats than ever before. Women are less likely to be tolerant of men who are misogynistic asshats than ever before. (Again, no data on how women treat men, or how men tolerate women, or how anybody who isn't in a heteronormative monogamous gender-normative relationship relates to their partner(s), but hey.)
- Other interesting stuff. Read the article, would you?

Three things from around the flist this week:

1. Are you tone-deaf?. infintysquared passes along this opportunity to test out of future recruitment attempts for the church choir (or this opportunity to engage in, as he puts it, some musical dick-waving). I tested out at above 90%, which is not a surprise. triadruid tested out in the normal range (low 70s, I think), despite what he may tell you about his ears, brain, or singing ability.

2. The Best Thing Ever Project, noticed by digibri, asks users to choose between two options to determine the best thing ever. It's a fine way to waste a whole lot more time than one might think. There used to be a site called whatsbetter.com that did a very similar thing, and that Dan The Abbot Of Lesbians and I used to discuss endlessly over IM during interminable afternoons at work, but that site has passed. I'm all nostalgic all of a sudden, but this is a worthy substitute.

3. From rougewench, ( Which Bond Girl Am I? ) The results here should be surprising to no one.

Jesus may have walked on ice, or: how we have no effing public dialogue at all about the you know, vague possibility that religion is, you know, myth rather than historical fact. The weather part of this is actually sort of nifty, but the reporting on it is rather crap.

Also, special bonus funtime poll: At the moment I happened to click on it, the poll attached to this story indicated that 35% of its respondents believed that every word of the Bible was literally true. Now, I understand that this sort of poll is much like a livejournal poll, which is to say, designed for the amusement of some of its readers rather than with the intention of producing any useful information, but still. That tells me that 35% of the people who bothered to click in either a)haven't read the Bible and are just bullshitting, or b)are simultaneously not very good at maths and also crap at critical reading.

Favorite line in the article: "Tabgha is the town where many archeological findings related to Jesus have been found." Why, oh why, am I not in the journalism business? Even setting aside the fact that well, as far as I know anyway, there aren't any archeological findings related to Jesus that haven't been later determined to be frauds, um, well, it's thing with the findings being found.

The foundation of my personal irrational faith is that once upon a time, in a time now lost to history, there were copyeditors. I can't prove this, but hey. As the curator of Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Archaeology, Israel Museum says in another story in the news today (which gives the implication that authentic finds from Jesus' life are being shown in museums while burying the little note that none of the items shown have any relation to Jesus way down in the last paragraph of the story), "But there is still a lot of archaeology going on, and new discoveries are being made all the time".

I have to admit that one of the reasons for this morning's first post was to include the SiteMeter button. What this does is, like most counting things, tracks views of the entry. Why? Curiosity, mostly. I am a data whore. And also because it looks at where you're reading from, and then generates a list of servers and a world map.

Now, I really don't care how many people read me. I have a pretty good idea of that already. They're mostly on my flist. That's all good. But I have enjoyed looking at where people are reading from. This morning's post got hits from Poland and somewhere the former USSR, Italy, France and so on and so forth. That's kind of neat.

But it's not what really tripped me about the dataset. What I really want to know is who out there is reading me from these servers, all of which appeared in my listings:

- house.gov
- customs.gov
- osd.mil
- prisonstripsearch.com

Anyway, it's kind of a neat toy.

[Poll #650071]