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Meanwhile, the responses to yesterday’s Religion on Trial post have been terrific. Keep them coming.

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That’s one apparent lesson of the data in this recently published paper by three careful researchers. If I’m reading their tables correctly, they say roughly this:

Taking as given your reported age, height, race, weight, income, attractiveness, education, marital status and so forth, there is some class of users who have about a 50/50 chance of contacting you. Now if you are a 5′4″ woman and you subtract 11 pounds from your reported weight (lowering your body mass index, or BMI, by about 1), then you’ll hear not from 50% of that class but from almost 60%. On the other hand, if you are a 5′10″ man and you *add* 7 pounds to your weight (adding about 1 to your BMI), you’ll hear from about 53%.

Moreover, these effects fall off very slowly, so that even very thin women gain from underreporting their weights, and even very heavy men gain from overreporting. The effects also fall off very slowly with BMI differences, so that even quite heavy men prefer thinner women, and even quite thin women prefer heavier men.

This isn’t the question the researchers set out to study. Their real goal was to understand why we tend to marry people very like ourselves—is it because we prefer those people, or is it because those are the people we tend to meet? Roughly, their conclusion is that online and offline daters have pretty much the same tendency to seek others like themselves, which suggests that the driving force is preference, not search cost. But this odd fact about weight fell out of the data along the way, and it strikes me as puzzling enough to ask my readers what they think is going on here.

A hat tip to Robin Hanson, who noticed this curiosity before I did, and to my very thin friend Elizabeth Boskey for the title.

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• Which is sunnier — “partly sunny” or “partly cloudy”?

My faith in the power of pure reason was severely shaken when I realized I could construct equally plausible arguments in either direction. So, with reluctance, I abandoned theory and turned to evidence, in the form of the logos employed by two of the more popular weather forecasting sites:

	Weather Underground	Accuweather
Partly Sunny
Partly Cloudy

Weather Underground takes an unambiguous stand: partly cloudy is definitely sunnier than partly sunny. Accuweather is a little, umm, hazier on the issue; apparently at Accuweather, partly cloudy means something like “somewhat wispier clouds, covering more of the central portion of the sun but a bit less of the edges, than partly sunny”. Overall, though, it appears that at Accuweather, partly sunny is sunnier than partly cloudy.

I turned to The Weather Channel to break the tie, but as far as I can tell (after checking ten-day forecasts for a half dozen cities), the melancholy folks at The Weather Channel are quite incapable of ever seeing the world as “partly sunny”. “Partly cloudy” they use with reckless abandon.

I invite commenters to weigh in both descriptively and prescriptively on this issue—what do “partly sunny” and “partly cloudy” usually mean in practice, and what ought they mean? If we succeed in resolving the matter, we can tackle the even more difficult question:

• Which is colder — “cold” or “rather cold”?

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I’m not sure if this counts as serious engagement, but I am reminded of the apparently little-known fact that the singer/actor/TV phenomenon Dean Martin did exactly this. In fact, he overdid exactly this. By the time he was 27 years old, Martin had sold 10% of himself to MCA Records, 20% to his manager DIck Richards, 35% to his other manager Lou Perry, and 25% to the mobster Frank Costello. That left him with 5% of himself—”$50 for every grand he made” in the words of writer Nick Tosches. A year later, he hired yet another manager and sold him another 10%. Having now sold 105% of himself, it became imprudent to earn money. Therefore, in need of something to live on, Martin sold yet another 10% of himself to nighclub owner Angel Lopez.

It took two years of bankruptcy proceedings to untangle the mess and give Martin a fresh start. (The story is engagingly told in Tosches’s book Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams.)

Is there something about this kind of contract that particularly invites fraud?

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gaelic

The clip is from the Subliminal Learn Gaelic Irish/Scottish CD available from Brainwave Mind Voyages. According to their website, listening to this CD while you sleep will train you not just to speak Gaelic but to read it as well. (If the clip above didn’t work for you, please try it again while sleeping.) If you really want to go high-tech, they also offer an ultrasonic track that teaches you Gaelic in complete silence.

In case Gaelic is not your thing, the same company offers subliminal CDs that will teach you to dance, trade stocks, or stop pulling your eyelashes. Or on the racier side, there are CDs for subliminal breast enhancement, “natural male enhancement”, and combating both impotence and the gag reflex.

Unfortunately, nobody seems to have developed a technology that will teach you to keep squirrels in your pocket while you sleep. For the time being, only the traditional methods are available. But who knows what the future might bring?

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The secret of invisibility and the secret of keeping a squirrel in your pocket—all for one low price of $24.95. Now there’s something you’d never see under socialism.

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• A useful recipe for salted water. Do not fail to read the reviews.
• A puzzle I got from the mathematician Alexander Merkurjev. If I recall right, he told me that it had appeared on a college entrance exam in the old Soviet Union:

  A regular 400-gon is tiled by parallelograms. Prove that at least 100 of those parallelograms must be rectangles.

  (A regular 400-gon is a 400-sided figure with all sides equal and all angles equal. The parallelograms can all be of different sizes and shapes—or not. “Tiled” means that the interior of the 400-gon is entirely covered, with no overlaps.)

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I was reminded of this when a comment on a recent blogpost asked for my further thoughts on the economics of superstition. This, after all, might be one area where economics lags behind its sister sciences. And this in turn reminded me of a true social science classic—anthropologist Michael Pacanowsky’s investigation into the origins of the folk belief that the utterance “Please pass the salt” is causally linked to the passage of salt from one end of a table to another.

Enjoy.

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