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Man Uses Drake Equation To Explain Girlfriend Woes
artemis67 writes "A man studying in London has taken a mathematical equation that predicts the possibility of alien life in the universe to explain why he can't find a girlfriend. Peter Backus, a native of Seattle and PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick, near London, in his paper, 'Why I don't have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK,' used math to estimate the number of potential girlfriends in the UK. In describing the paper on the university Web site he wrote 'the results are not encouraging. The probability of finding love in the UK is only about 100 times better than the probability of finding intelligent life in our galaxy.'"
Common, this is just a stunt in order to get his picture all over the net in order to find a girlfriend !
He must count on the fact that girls will try to prove him wrong or that girls will be pleased to be the one in a million girl.
Brilliant tactic although... ;-))
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
So what you are saying is love is affected by the uncertainty principal and to observe it or attempt to quantify it in a meaningful manner fundamentally changes it?
What's the mathematical odds that he might be gay? (Not that there's anything wrong with that)
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Oh come on, it's obvious. He doesn't have a girlfriend because he is the type of guy who would use the Drake equation to figure out why he doesn't have a girlfriend. Duh.
Does this mean that someone like Magic Johnson, who supposedly had sex with more than 10,000 women, probably had sex with more than 100 aliens?
Of course. That's where the AIDS came from.
Sounds like someone doesn't understand Statistics.
Of course not! 90% of people don't, and 150% of people know that. Duh!
So basically you're telling us what we already know - that it's only American (and possibly Canadian) girls who only want to date morons.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Right. Any story about a mathematician finding a girlfriend should be in the science fiction section.
You are welcome on my lawn.
What are the #1 and #2 rules for avoiding stabbing a random stranger on the street?
It seems my booklet got lost in the mail, so I thought I would ask you.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Hooters hooters, yum yum yum.
Hooter hooters, on a girl that's dumb.
What's all this education he's looking for?
Pesonally, I think he doesn't have a GF because he's the type of geek who thinks of explaining why he doesn't have a GF with the Drake equation
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
I'm thinking some of his numbers were off. Particularly his estimate of the number of women in the acceptable age bracket. He had 5%, but I'm betting it's more like 68% for your average person (+/- 1 standard deviation) and that's the combined concept of "people he would find attractive that would also find him attractive". The human race simply would not exist if you could only bring yourself to schtup 5% of the population and only 5% of those would let you. That already increases his chances by a factor of almost 300. That brings his odds back to 1 in 1000, which seems reasonable and realistic. Then factor in the number of women he can poll in his productive years in search of those 1/1000ths (compared to the number of planets he can poll for signs of civilization in his lifetime) and the odds of finding someone rapidly approach one. Which makes intuitive sense, since as I mentioned before, the human race still exists.
The people who need to be worried are the outliers. The folks who are 2 or 3 deviations from the mean in terms of attractiveness (physically, mentally, emotionally, materially). Those on the high end may be forced to settle. Those on the low end may have to sample outside their species.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
After getting Fox news coverage and front page Slashdotting N* is now significantly higher than the paper estimate.
One of these things is not like the other... (at least as far as he's concerned)
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
I once did a similar calculation for my city of 200,000, and came up with an answer of approximately 2. At that point I concluded I would never find either one of them, and gave up.
LOOK! ALIENS!!!
Someone hates these cans.
Prove this, and I'll show by induction that all the positive integers are subsets of 1!
We'll share the credit!
Are you sure about #2?