“Analytics will not help you in your love life. Just feel.” – my horoscope on a random TV screen in Jumpin Java

I recently listened to an episode of This American Life that described the statistics behind finding “the one.” A Harvard Phd student described the sad and sobering stats that him and the other physicists calculated. I was originally planning on doing my own calculation for the SF bay area… but when I saw my horoscope I have decided not to…

I did however dig up some good stats for the calculation. Not everyone has the same requirements but for me, things weren’t looking that great…
– 7.5M people in the SF bay area
– ~40% are between the age of 18 – 39 (yea, I know this is a pretty big age range, but I was trying to have an open mind)
– ~30% have a bachelors degree or higher

A few stats that I haven’t been able to find… and perhaps for the better:
– How many are women? I’m guessing this can’t be that good…
– How many of those women are single? This might be better than other parts of the country…
– How many are shorter than me? Yes, I have a weird complex.

A few weeks ago, Bert, Monica, Lij and I headed to Half Moon Bay to check out a negative tide. I don’t really know the specifics but it is where the water level is extremely low so you can check out small tide pools and find some pretty interesting animals. We ended “finding” (i.e. someone else found them and dumped them and then we picked them up) some mussels and decided that it would be a fantastic meal to steam them up with lots of butter and garlic.

Things we learned the following day regarding mussels.
1. They can KILL you. Yes, wild mussels can kill you.
2. There is a convenient hotline number. Yes, we called it.
3. Ripping off the “mustache” of the mussel is pretty darn hard.
4. Mussels are best enjoyed with friends.