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And, specifically, a woman’s overall sex appeal is enhanced when some men find her ugly.
can imagine our man browsing her profile, circling his cursor, thinking to himself: I bet she doesn’t meet many guys who think she’s awesome. In fact, I’m actually into her for her quirks, not in spite of them. This is my diamond in the rough, and so on.
The pleasant scent given off by many flowers, like orange blossoms and jasmine, contains a significant fraction (about 3 percent) of a protein called indole. It’s common in the large intestine, and on its own, it smells accordingly. But the flowers don’t smell as good without it. A little bit of shit brings the bees. Indole is also an ingredient in synthetic human perfumes.
I am certain that even the most reticent teenager in 2014 has written far more in his life than I or any of my classmates had back in the early ’90s.
The Internet has many regrettable sides to it, but that’s one thing that’s always stood it in good stead with me: it’s a writer’s world.
very perrtinent observation
Given finite room to work, longer words mean fewer spaces between them, which means less waste.
Throughout the list you see groups typified by slang, pop culture references, jargon, goofy puns—people drawn together by special ways of speaking, and it’s exactly the kind of language (and information) that until now has been lost to history.
Whether friend to friend, stranger to stranger, lover to lover, or author to reader, we use words to connect. And as long as there is a person bored, excited, enraged, transported, in love, curious, or missing his home and afraid for his future, he’ll be writing about it.
Research using a variety of sources (e-mail, IM, telephone) has shown that the more mutual friends two people share, the stronger their relationship.
She is there at work parties, there at reunions, and there when your gamer friends come over for that all-day Magic: the Gathering blowout you look forward to all year. (Or she’s not there, if she can help it, but you get the idea.)
Have a meeting with Microsoft people, and they’ll roll up with their Windows phones and Surface tablets, dutiful hounds chewing tough bits of tendon.
Because self-measurement is all well and good until some ex-girlfriend comes in ahead of your wife.
Part of it is the “… is always right” thing—nobody likes a person with that much power.
But very humble questions like Do you like scary movies? and Have you ever traveled alone to another country? have amazing predictive power. If you’re ever stumped on what to ask someone on a first date, try those. In about three-quarters of the long-term couples OkCupid has ever brought together, both people have answered them the same way, either both “yes” or both “no.”
it is an asset, that richness can be a liability. You rarely meet a stranger on Facebook. The site is, by design, people you already know and whom you’ve already made up your mind about—they’re your friends, after all.
It’s a social scientist’s curse—what you most want to get at is exactly what your subjects are most eager to hide. This tendency is called social desirability bias, and it’s well documented: the world over, respondents answer questions in ways that make them look good. The most famous case was the so-called Bradley effect: in 1982, California voters told exit pollsters they had elected a black governor, Tom Bradley, by a significant margin, but in the privacy of the ballot box they had actually given his white opponent a narrow victory.
If you accept these two independent estimates of 5 percent, arrived at using three of the biggest forces in modern data—Nate Silver, Google, and Facebook, with an assist from that standby of old-school polling, Gallup—you
Unfortunately, Google Search is ineffective for estimating the number of lesbians in the country. The many straight men looking for women-with-women porn garbles the data.
In fact, for sexual attitudes, if any group is an outlier, it’s straight women. They’re comparative prudes: 6.1 percent of straight men, 6.9 percent of gay men, and 7.0 percent of lesbians are on OkCupid explicitly looking for casual sex. Only 0.8 percent of straight women are, which probably says more about the taboo against sexual forwardness in (straight) females than anything else.fn5
Neither Montoya nor Petersfn1 are all that different from Dale Carnegie, who rebranded himself from the plain “Dale Carnagey” by borrowing the golden surname of the steel magnate Andrew, and who, like these latter-day men, reduced character to bullet points and saw influence above all as the key to success.
