Dear Abby advice

This morning I saw a case of a 33-year-old reader who wrote to Dear Abby about the difficulty she was having in finding a mate. She lived in a small town and she had already considered all the eligible men in her town. There was a singles club, but that was 30 miles away in the city. She had tried the Internet but she got men in their 50s where she had stated that she did not want anyone over 37. Dear Abby said she should go to the city and hunt for her man there.

I agree with her. To me a small town means one of population 10,000 or so. Therefore the best she can do here is a person who is one in 10,000. In my web page Logarithms Keep Dr. Brown in Perspective, I describe such a person as an L4, where the 4 is the number of zeroes after the 1. If it were me, I would find an L4 unacceptable as a partner, since one can easily find an L6, a person who is one in a million, as I show in that web page.

However, to find an L6, you need to be in a P6 place - a place with a population of 1,000,000, with six zeroes after the one. This means at least a moderate-sized city. So yes, I would say she should go to the city to find her partner. A singles club is not the best place, since people there are random. If there are 100 people there, the best she can hope for is an L2. Instead she should go after men who share common interests with her. She could go to a birding club if she enjoys birding, for instance. The most important common interest by far is religion, so the best place for her to find her mate in the city is a church. She needs to choose a church in the city which corresponds most to her beliefs, not necessarily that of her family or the one she has been going to all of her life.

There is one problem with this advice that needs to be mentioned. If she goes about getting a partner in this manner, she will be using a lot more gasoline. Many experts feel that petroleum will run out soon, around 2010. Alternatives are being developed, but still one should try to minimize the amount of gasoline one uses. The Dear Abby reader could take care of this problem by moving to the city. Also why did she get men in their 50s when she went to the Internet? She is 33 years old so she is a member of Generation X and born in a time when births were de-emphasized; a scarce generation. 50-year-olds are in the Baby Boom generation, which are numerous. Further, these men want women who are younger than them, perhaps because they may want to start a family. These two things outweigh the scarcity of older men due to men dying earlier than women.

I wish her luck in finding a partner.

Hype in the news

The news media really exaggerate and twist events in their coverage of them. Stocks took a brief downturn today and then went back up. So how did Yahoo describe the downturn around lunchtime? They said, "Stocks fight hard to keep gains after data." Nonsense. Stocks don't fight. Did you ever go to an arena with a boxing ring in it and see a common stock punching an opponent? Do stocks pull out rifles and start shooting into a rifle-filled ridge? Maybe that's why the market has been down lately. Stocks are confused because they can't figure out how to fight.

Weathermen say lots of silly things in their broadcast. "Here comes this front marching through the area tomorrow…" OK, Cold Front, Hup, two, three, four, column leftttt…. Harch! "Storms will be firing up in the afternoon hours." Storms are made out of water, not fire. "A severe thunderstorm has erupted in central Illinois." Hey are these thunderheads, or are they volcanoes? I've never seen lava come from a thunderstorm.

These may seem funny but I believe that events, especially adverse events, are exacerbated by the continual hyping it up by the media. The media should tell things as they are instead of turning storm clouds into hot lava and putting blue chip stocks in the boxing ring. I will be making more reports of media hype in the future. It's not to hard to find it.

Astronomical year

It looks like astronomy will dominate my activities this autumn. Toastmasters runs into several conflicts. I have written a humorous speech for this year's Humorous Contests, a speech about our unreasonably bogged-down airline system done in the same spirit as the movies Airplane and Airplane 2. However, if I get beyond the Area level, I will have to quit. The Division Contest conflicts with the Virginia Association of Astronomical Societies (VAAS), and I am to give an introductory keynote speech to that. The District Conference has been moved to conflict with a mathematics meeting that I am going to. I am not giving a Speechcraft at my congregation because two of my biggest helpers and I are instead trying to save a weak Toastmasters club that meets the same night that the Speechcraft would have.

Instead, there are a large number of astronomical activities. A newspaper reporter interviewed me for articles in local newspapers today. There are several skywatches coming up in the next couple of months, and there is that VAAS convention that I just talked about. I intend to bring astronomy, and if possible, mathematics to the people in the next few months; to tell what it is about, and how to view the heavens with a telescope. I also hope to get involved with mathematics as well, probably teaching.

September 11 a holiday?

There is a proposal to make September 11 a holiday to remember those that were lost in Planeattack on this day last year. It seems to be too close to the event to make it a holiday. We did not make 1941 December 7 a holiday, even though that cost thousands of lives and led to a horrible war. There is another objection, though. It is too close to Labor Day. We already have two holidays that are too close to each other, namely Christmas and New Year's. The result is an entire WEEK of holidays for many of us. Would the same thing happen to Labor Day and Planeattack Day? That would be most inconvenient when we are trying to get our children back to school. One way of working that out is to move Labor Day to the time that most of the world celebrates it on, on May 1. That would provide a holiday in the holiday dearth between Presidents' Day and Memorial Day. But I think it may be too early to decide on a holiday. It took at least a decade to decide to make a holiday for Rev. Martin Luther King. So for now make September 11 a day of remembrance without a formal holiday, and time will answer whether it should become our 11th national holiday.