Why I Will Never Have a Girlfriend

Why don't I have a girlfriend?

This is a question that practically every male has asked himself at one point or another in his life. Unfortunately, there is rarely a hard and fast answer to the query. Many men try to reason their way through the dilemma nonetheless, often reaching a series of ridiculous explanations, each more self-deprecating than the last: "Is it because I'm too shy, and not aggressive enough? Is it my opening lines? Am I a boring person? Am I too fat or too thin? Or am I simply ugly and completely unattractive to women?" When all other plausible explanations have been discounted, most fall back on the time-honored conclusion that "there must be Something Wrong with me" before resigning themselves to lives of perpetual chastity.

Not the author, though. I, for one, refuse to spend my life brooding over my lack of luck with women. While I'll be the first to admit that my chances of ever entering into a meaningful relationship with someone special are practically non-existent, I staunchly refuse to admit that it has anything to do with some inherent problem with me. Instead, I am convinced that the situation can be readily explained in purely scientific terms, using nothing more than demographics and some elementary statistical calculus.

Lest anyone suspect that my standards for women are too high, let me allay those fears by enumerating in advance my three criteria for the match. First, the potential girlfriend must be approximately my age—let's say 21 plus or minus three or four years. Second, the girl must be beautiful (and I use that term all-encompassingly to refer to both inner and outer beauty). Third, she must also be reasonably intelligent—she doesn't have to be Mensa material, but the ability to carry on a witty, insightful argument would be nice. So there they are—three simple demands, which I'm sure everyone will agree are anything but unreasonable.

That said, I now present my demonstration of why the probability of finding a suitable candidate fulfilling the three above-noted requirements is so small as to be practically impossible—in other words, why I will never have a girlfriend. I shall endeavour to make this proof as rigorous as the available data permits. And I should note, too, that there will be no statistical trickery involved here; I have cited all my sources and provided all relevant calculations in case anyone wishes to conduct their own independent review. Let's now take a look at the figures.

Number of people on Earth (in 1998): 5 592 830 000

We start with the largest demographic in which I am interested—namely, the population of this planet. That is not to say I'm against the idea of interstellar romance, of course; I just don't assess the prospect of finding myself a nice Altairian girl as statistically significant. Now anyway, the latest halfway-reliable figures we have for Earth's population come from the United States Census Bureau's 1999 World Population Profile (WP/98). Due presumably to the time involved in compiling and processing census statistics, said report's data is valid only as of 1998, so later on we'll be making some impromptu adjustments to bring the numbers up to date.

who are female: 2 941 118 000

I'd've thought that, given the title of this essay, this criterion goes without saying. In case anyone missed it, though, I am looking for exclusively female companionship. Accordingly, roughly half of the Earth's population must be discounted. Sorry, guys.

in "developed" countries: 605 601 000

We now further restrict the geographical area of interest to so-called "first-world countries". My reasons for doing so are not motivated out of contempt for those who are economically disadvantaged, but rather by simple probability. My chances of meeting a babe from Bhutan or a goddess from Ghana, either in person or on the Internet, are understandably low. In fact, I will most likely spend nearly my entire life living and working in North America, Europe, and Australia, so it is to these types of regions that the numbers have been narrowed.

currently aged 18 to 25: 65 399 083

Being neither a pedophile nor a geriatrophile, I would like to restrict my search for love to those whose age is approximately equal to my own. This is where things get a bit tricky, for two reasons: first, the census data is nearly two years old, and second, the "population by age" tables in WP/98 are not separated into individual ages but are instead quantized into "15–19" (of whom there are 39 560 000) and "20–44" (population 215 073 000). Women aged 15 to 19 in 1998 will be aged 17 to 21 in 2000; in this group, I'm interested in dating those 18 or older, so, assuming the "15–19" girls' ages are uniformly distributed, we have

Similarly, of 1998's "20–44" category, there are now

females within my chosen age limit. The sum, 66 059 680, represents the total number of females aged 18 to 25 in developed countries in 2000. Unfortunately, roughly 1% of these girls will have died since the census was taken;thus, the true number of so-far eligible bachelorettes is 65 399 083.

who are beautiful: 1 487 838

Personal attraction, both physically and personality-wise, is an important instigator of any relationship. Of course, beauty is a purely subjective trait whose interpretation may vary from person to person. Luckily it is not necessary for me to define beauty in this essay except to state that for any given beholder, it will probably be normally distributed amongst the population. Without going into the specifics of precisely which traits I admire, I will say that for a girl to be considered really beautiful to me, she should fall at least two standard deviations above the norm. From basic statistics theory, the area to the left of the normal curve at z = 2 is

and so it is this number with which we multiply our current population pool.

and intelligent: 236 053

Again, intelligence can mean different things to different people, yet I am once more relieved of making any explanation by noting that it, like most other characteristics, has a notionally normal distribution across the population. Let's assume that I will settle for someone a mere one standard deviation above the normal; in that case, a further

of the population must be discounted.

and not already committed: 118 027

I could find no hard statistics on the number of above-noted girls who are already married, engaged, or otherwise committed to a significant other, but informal observation and anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that the proportion is somewhere around 50%. (Fellow unattached males will no doubt have also noticed a preponderance of girls legitimately offering, "Sorry, I already have a boyfriend" as an excuse not to go on a date.) For reasons of morality (and perhaps too self-preservation), I'm not about to start hitting on girls who have husbands and boyfriends. Accordingly, that portion of the female population must also be considered off-limits.

and also might like me: 18 726

Naturally, finding a suitable girl who I really like is no guarantee that she'll like me back. Assuming, as previously mentioned, that personal attractiveness is normally distributed, there is a mere 50% chance that any given female will consider me even marginally attractive. In practice, however, people are unlikely to consider pursuing a relationship with someone whose looks and personality just barely suffice. Let's make the rather conservative assumption, then, that a girl would go out with someone if and only if they were at least one standard deviation above her idea of average. In that case, referring to our previous calculation, only 15.8655% of females would consider someone with my physical characteristics and personality acceptable as a potential romantic partner.

Conclusion

It is here, at a pool of 18 726 acceptable females, that we end our statistical analysis. At first glance, a datable population of 18 726 may not seem like such a low number, but consider this: assuming I were to go on a blind date with a new girl about my age every week, I would have to date for 3493 weeks before I found one of the 18 726. That's very nearly 67 years. As a Indian male born in the early 1980s, my life expectancy is probably little more than 70 years, so we can safely say that I will be quite dead before I find the proverbial girl of my dreams. Come to think of it, she'll probably be dead too.

Source:

http://en.nothingisreal.com

10 Reasons Why the Command Line is More User-Friendly than the Desktop

I aim all of these not just at Linux, BSD, and Unix-alikes, but at every computer system ever. Nor do I say all of this as a power-using geek, but to apply it to every computer user everywhere.

1. Keying is faster than mousing.
You might argue this point, and if you do, I'd just point out "Why are there keyboard shortcuts on most menu entries in a GUI?" And why are they called "shortcuts"? Because using a mouse to do something is the long way to do it, each and every time.

2. It's easier to both give and get help.
Nearly every Debian system has synaptic, and I'll bet most people use it. Yet even amongst synaptic users, they'll still answer questions with an "apt-get" statement. It doesn't matter if you use apt-get or synaptic; it's still more efficient to use the command expression behind the GUI action to answer questions online. You can interpret the answer into the GUI tool of your choice.
Ever seen somebody answer a question that has no command-line answer? "Go here, double-click that, click this pull-down, click the arrow, click 'yes', click 'edit', double-click this, that, highlight this..." And this applies on Windows as well; even there it's easier to define an action in DOS commands than it is to describe mouse actions.

This is why our mail is addressed to our house, instead of having instructions to the postman: "Go down main street, turn left, go to spruce street, turn right, go to the eighth building on the right, go up the stairs...".

3. Repetitive stress injury comes from the mouse, not the keyboard.
Do something that uses the keyboard for awhile, then do something that uses the mouse for awhile. How do your hands feel? I especially notice that when I play a game like Diablo or Starcraft, my right hand is cramping terribly after a few hours. But I can play Nethack all day and not feel any pain at all. It stands to reason that if you filter the work of both hands and ten fingers through one wrist and three fingers, you'll have more repetitive motion stress.

4. Commands are standard where GUIs are not.
How do I find a word in a document using a GUI? Do I click "edit - find and replace"? Do I click "view - find"? Do I click "find - search page"? Does the dialog pop up, or does it pop in from the side, or does it show up in a bar at the bottom? Do I have to click close afterwards, or will it close itself? Is the 'find' dialog separate from the 'replace' dialog, or are they combined? Does the dialog on the program understand a regular expression? It all depends on which program you're using - and often which version. And - again, no matter what platform - there's a dozen possible GUI tools to do the same thing with complete feature overlap. Which one do you have available?

How do I find a word in a document using a command line? Grep! I learned grep once in 1998 and haven't had to open the man page since. I'll still be able to use grep 20 years from now. Every Unix-based system has it, even Macs and Windows has it available, and it's always the same from platform to platform.

5. Commands are more powerful.
I don't care how well-designed the GUI is, there's always something you need to do that they forgot to put in a menu item for. But commands can be adapted to many purposes. Especially when you have to do the same action many times. Go ahead, resize a bunch of images to thumbnails in your GUI tool; you'll be working all day while I can type out an Image Magick incantation in one minute and go take a nap while it does it all automatically.

How about editing a document where you need to change all instances of something, except where a special case is true? Unzip a stack of downloaded files, rename them all to a specific scheme, and move them all to different directories? The GUI is good only for limited-use cases and specific actions, but it only takes you that far.

6. You can automate commands.
Really, you only have to learn each command once. Then, no matter how complex, you can save it in a shell script, run it from a menu item, execute it from one key-press, or even give it to cron to perform automatically. There is no computing job on Heaven or Earth that cannot be reduced to a single motion, given a proper scripting environment.

7. Commands are easier to remember than clicks.
Face it, our brains handle words better than they handle spacial sequences of motions. How many times have you tried to show somebody else how to perform a mouse task, only to realize that without sitting in front of the machine doing it yourself, you can't remember how it goes? Learn a command and it's yours for life.

8. GUIs are always changing.
Everybody wants to re-invent the widget set, patent the scroll wheel, re-think the dialog, put their own stamp on the GUI environment. Bring up GUI design, and there's a flame war all over the place about simple things like where a menu should go and whether to use a spin-box or a combo-box. Commands have been performed the same way since the keyboard was invented, end of story.

9. Commands are more error-safe.
All I ever hear is how you can accidentally type "rm -rf ./*" or "del *.*" in the wrong place and wipe out your file system, but look at practical experience. How many times have any of us actually done that? Now, how many times have you clicked 'yes' or 'allow' to the wrong dialog, clicked the wrong button and closed a window when you meant to minimize it, opened the wrong file in a dialog, selected the wrong action in a menu, had to make three tries to drag a selection box around a group of files, dragged and dropped a folder to the wrong place... the list goes on and on. Mousing takes intense co-ordination and concentration to hit a target a few pixels wide, and in the event of a mistake the wrong action is always performed instantly.

A command line does not fire off until you hit enter. So you can read it after you've typed it to be sure it's what you want to do. You can edit it before you execute it. And your brain is actually engaged in the task, instead of focusing on performing millimeter-precise actions with a few muscles in one hand.

10. You have to type to use a computer anyway.
You can get quite far on a computer without a mouse, as long as the programs are set up to accept keystroke commands. But try this: unplug the keyboard and hide it. Now, how far did you get using the computer? How can you IM, email, edit, comment, name files? No matter how much you love your GUI interface, you still spend the bulk of your time using a keyboard.

9 Funny Words Women Use

1. Fine: This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up.

2. Five Minutes: If she is getting dressed, this means a half an hour. Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just been given five more minutes to watch the game before helping around the house.

3. Nothing: This is the calm before the storm. This means something, and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with nothing usually end in fine.

4. Go Ahead: This is a dare, not permission. Don’t Do It!

5. Loud Sigh: This is not actually a word, but is a non-verbal statement often misunderstood by men A loud sigh means she thinks you are an idiot and wonders why she is wasting her time standing here and arguing with you about nothing. (Refer back to #3 for the meaning of nothing.)

6. That’s Okay: This is one of the most dangerous statements a women can make to a man. That’s okay means she wants to think long and hard before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake.

7. Thanks: A woman is thanking you, do not question, or Faint. Just say you’re welcome.

8. Whatever: Is a woman’s way of saying F@!& YOU!

9. Don’t worry about it, I got it: Another dangerous statement, meaning this is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but is now doing it herself. This will later result in a man asking “What’s wrong?” For the woman’s response, refer to #3.

Only in America

1. Only in America......can a pizza get to your house faster than an ambulance.

2. Only in America......are there handicap parking places in front of a skating rink.

3. Only in America......do drugstores make the sick walk all the way to the back of the store to get their prescriptions while healthy people can buy cigarettes at the front.

4. Only in America......do people order double cheese burgers, large fries, and a diet coke.

5. Only in America......do banks leave both doors open and then chain the pens to the counters.

6. Only in America......do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage.

7. Only in America......do we use answering machines to screen calls and then have call waiting so we won't miss a call from someone we didn't want to talk to in the first place.

8. Only in America......do we buy hot dogs in packages of ten and buns in packages of eight.

9. Only in America......do we use the word 'politics' to describe the process so well: 'Poli' in Latin meaning 'many' and 'tics' meaning 'bloodsucking creatures'.

10. Only in America......do they have drive-up ATM machines with Braille lettering.

11. Only in America......can a homeless combat veteran live in a cardboard box and a draft dodger live in the White House.