If you weren't around for the 1986 claim that an unmarried forty-year-old woman had a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than getting married (which turned out not to be true), here's a new horror story. According to a recent column (soon to be a book) by feminist Maureen Dowd:

"A 2005 report by researchers at four British universities indicated that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to marry, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise."

This factoid (which I predict will also be shown untrue) would have been terrifying to me before I went to college, where I found that smart women are very much in demand. (Actually, I'd already found that out at high school math club.) Among heterosexuals I've known in CS, many brilliant men have been unsuccessful at finding partners, while almost all of the women who want to be appear happiliy partnered.

[Note: An earlier version of this post listed some of my current and past employers (MIT, Microsoft, and Google) as places where heterosexual women were likelier than men to be partnered. I realized, though, that I can't back up that claim. It could just be that my female co-workers are more likely than male ones to share information with me about their romantic status, and I falsely assume that men who don't say anything are unpartnered and women who don't say anything are satisfied with their relationship status. I should stick to quantitative science.]

Nevertheless, after reading the above article, I felt grateful to be married, which my high IQ should supposedly preclude (although I consider IQ tests bogus). If it's on the Internet, it must be true.

My latest credit card statement has a fraudulent charge of $24.99 from "Digital Age 888-529-98 Cyprus". Apparently, this is a wide-spread fraud.

References and further information:

• Digital Age Fraud
• Digital Age Credit Card Fraud

This picture was taken at the progressive Modern Times Bookstore. I was amused at the juxtaposition of the criticisms of capitalism next to the iPod guide:

I found this no-parking sign interesting:

Presumably, the "toxic treats" sign does not describe the food being sold at this Mission convenience store:

On the political front, the progressive San Francisco Bay Guardian criticized a candidate for local office by saying "he talks more about enforcing the law than soaking the rich". Uh, I thought we wanted the rule of law. My mistake.

Here is an idea I posted to Halfbakery, the site for discussing half-baked ideas:

Evolutionary biologists have pointed out that one reason for diseases of old age is that, in the evolutionary environment, there was no selection against them. Since people tended to die young from violence, bacterial and viral infections, and starvation, and because people were chosen as mates while young, there was no selective pressure against diseases that strike later in life, such as Alzheimer's disease and, to a large extent, heart disease.

We can fix this problem and permanently improve the human race by applying this observation to test-tube babies. Specifically, an individual needn't decide whether to reproduce his or her genes while young. Instead, they could store their eggs or sperm when they are young. When they are ready to have children, they would use the stored gametes of their now elderly relations or other individuals they admire.

For example, one of my grandparents is still alive, alert, and relatively healthy at age 104. He also has many traits that I admire. If I wanted to become a parent, I would have sperm from my grandfather combined with an egg from a long-lived relative of my husband and implanted in my womb. My child (technically also my aunt or uncle) would be biologically related to me but likelier to be much healthier.

While many high-tech fertility techniques increase the medical needs of later generations (by allowing relatively infertile people to pass on their genes), my proposal would reduce future medical needs. After a few generations, enough bad genes may be weeded out for people to go back to having children the natural way, with the human gene pool permanently improved.

As a follow-on to Things I say to my students, here is some bad houskeeping advice:

• "When you soak a dirty pot, you should change the water every few days or things will start to grow in it."
• "It's more efficient to wash your hands before eating than after every time you use the bathroom."

Feel free to contribute your own.

I highly recommend If Fox News Had Been Around Throughout History, which I found through New Media Musings.

I'd long known about the Nixon prison envelope but only recently found out about the Reagan envelope, both for sale now from The Santa Cruz Comic News.

These pictures are from FREEWAYBLOGGER.com.

• "I know it's tempting, but you should never lick a soldering iron."
• [In lecture on character encoding:] "Why do we use Unicode if ASCII was good enough for Jesus?"
• [When a student's cell phone rings:] "Could one of you leap on that to save your comrades."
• "For homework, eat a stick of butter."
• "Don't anthropomorphize computers. They don't like it."
• "We didn't have GUIs back then. We had to use the command line, like animals."
• "I know my sense of humor can be strange, so please let me know if anything I say offends you. You can put a note under my door, a rock through my window..."

Headline and teaser from today's New York Times:

Documents Show Supreme Court Nominee's Close Ties to Bush

Harriet E. Miers found him "cool," said he and his wife were "the greatest!" and told him: "You are the best governor ever."