…well, actually, it is.

My sister is having brain surgery this week. (Hope she doesn’t mind me spilling the beans here on the blog- holler if so, A. I know you check in from time to time!) Officially it’s a biopsy, but they’re going to take out as much as they can as long as they’re in there, I think.

She’s had an enlarged pituitary, or maybe a tumor in there, for several years. Turns out it’s pretty common; one source I read said that something like 20-25% of people show some “abnormal” growth there. (At what point does it become so common that it’s not abnormal anymore? 30%? 50%+1 person?)

Anyway, she would go in and get her noggin scanned every year or two for a while, and this time around they said it’s time to get after it, it’s getting bigger/too big, might start messing up your vision (pituitary tumors often manifest by pressing on the optic nerves).

It’s actually kind of cool surgery (assuming, of course, that they’re not doing it on YOUR head, or the head of a loved one like your little sister) because they go in through your sinuses. I wonder if you get a sore nose afterwards?

The odds are greatly in her favor. It’s been pretty slow growing, as most of these are, and they’re pretty much never the big “c” word (cancer). Plus it’s a relatively accessible part of your brain, which is a Good Thing.

Still, it’s pretty freaky, and of course with any surgery there’s always some element of risk. Of course, there’s an element of risk getting up and taking a shower, or driving to work.

Anyway, if I don’t blog regularly over the next several days… it’s probably because my mind is elsewhere. At work I gotta focus on the job, so everywhere else I get to be spacey, including my blog.

It’s kind of weird. I’ve had a few surgeries myself- under sedation (not really fully out, but definitely in la-la land) when I had a knee scoped out, my wisdom teeth out, and a couple of times for ulcer repair/exams; and under general for a throat surgery and a sinus/nose surgery.

And you know, those times didn’t really bother me much. I just looked on it as “well, here’s something that has to be done” and did it. But for some reason, this one is in the back of my mind more. I think it’s just because of the impact of the words “brain surgery”. That just hits you more than “having bits of cartilege sucked out of your knee”.

Even though it’s not MY brain, it’s still a pretty Big Deal to me- I love my sis and don’t want anything bad to happen for sure!

And should anyone start to feel sorry for me, save it- but send a nice thought out to my little sister, pray to the deity of your choice, because she is pretty awesome and shouldn’t have to be sweating out this kind of thing (as if anyone should have to worry about such thing). Thanks, I (and she) appreciate it!

…and definitely pleases the right.

The right that they were dealing with is the right to keep and bear arms. You know, that pesky Second Amendment, that specifically says the people have that right.

They got it right by ruling (for the first time on a question directly framed around the Second Amendment) that Washington DC’s law banning the ownership of handguns is unConstitutional. Exactly correct, Supremes.

And this will no doubt make much of the right wing happy.

Now, I’m not a right winger. My dad thinks I’m a communist. I think I’m more moderate, and the problem is that the right has just moved so far from the mainstream that anyone left of them looks like Fidel Castro.

But one thing I do definitely believe in is the Bill of Rights, and while I don’t want to have the whole argument all over again (I’ll leave that to Luis, who I am sure will write about this on The Blog From Another Dimension) I think it’s very simple: The Second Amendment clearly says that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

You can yammer on all you want about militias and so forth, but the reality is that stuff is just explanatory; the meat of the 2nd is that it’s a right held by The People. Every other time the Constitution uses that phrasing (“the people…”) it’s commonly accepted that it’s a right that we each have as individuals.

Personally, I think it’s an awesome ruling because it will hopefully let us now focus on the REAL question, which is whether or not we should have that right in the first place. The Constitution has a procedure for amending; if we, as a nation, truly have come to a conclusion that we shouldn’t have a right to keep and use guns, then by all means let’s amend that sucker.

Thing is that I don’t think America is anywhere near ready to give up her guns. I could do it without much trouble from a logistical point of view; I haven’t fired either of my guns (a 90 year old shotgun handed down from grandfather to my father to me, and a cheap Chinese knockoff of an AK-47 paratrooper assault rifle) in at least 4 or 5 years. I used to have a handgun but sold it- not because I had philosophical objections, but because I never practiced with it and figured it was more of a risk than an aid to safety.

On the flip side… you know, I can see the notion of why the Framers wanted the people to be able to have guns. They were dealing with a whole different environment, where they didn’t have a few hundred years of stability in government. They lived in a frontier nation and the felt very, very, very strongly that a government that didn’t have buy-in from its people was a corrupt one.

They also felt that the people had to have the power, not the government. Ironically, this is a major campaign plank for Barack Obama; he wants to change things so that the people have more power, not the big-money corporations and rich guys.

What’s more, we used to take for granted that the President and executive branch wouldn’t intentionally try to expand their power far beyond what the Constitution lays out. After 7+ years of George W Bush, we can obviously no longer take that for granted. What’s more, we can’t even count on Congress to grow some balls and step up and do something about it.

A guy at work a few weeks ago seriously said that he thinks we should show up with a couple million people in DC and take the joint over, because the people running the show right now have so completely lost touch with the nation as a whole. I don’t know if he even really realized that by advocating the overthrow- violently, if necessary- of the US government, he was committing a crime, but there are people who honestly feel that way.

And those people honestly believe that one of the few things that DOES keep the government reasonably in check is the fact that the people, as a whole, can have a gun if they want.

I don’t know. I’m a Second Amendment absolutist; I believe it says what it says, and it says that the people have a right to have a gun. But as to the NEED for the Second Amendment… I guess I’m more on the fence.

It’s a discussion we’ll be having and hearing more of over the next several years, I’m sure.

I’m a bit of a geek. I can admit it, which is the first step in dealing with a problem. Of course, these days, is it really a problem? Geeks are the richest men in the world, after all.

Anyway, one thing about being a geek is that some scholarly research is stuff that I really like to read.

Since I’ve done online-dating (OLD) for years now, and in fact met G there, research into OLD really interests me. G and I keep saying we should write a book about it, and in fact we’re starting to more seriously consider it; I’ve done it a long time and write too much, and she’s got not just OLD experience but also ran a business as a dating coordinator for a while. She did singles mixers, ran some speed dating events, etc.

There’s a really interesting paper out by some dudes at MIT, talking about how factors like income and height and weight affect choices by men and women in online dating.

(from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/30/technology/30scene.html)

Recently, three economists – Günter J. Hitsch, Ali Hortaçsu (both from the University of Chicago) and Dan Ariely (from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) – examined the experiences of a sample of users of a major online dating service and subjected it to empirical scrutiny. Their paper, “What Makes You Click,” is available on Mr. Hortaçsu’s Web page.

Users who sign up for a dating service typically post a profile describing their age, income and other characteristics along with an optional photo. The researchers asked University of Chicago undergraduates to rate the users’ physical attractiveness based on the photos, adding another variable to the mix.

The online service provided the researchers with information about which sites a user browsed, whether the user sent e-mail to other users or replied to them and whether the user exchanged phone numbers. What happened after that particular milestone was not recorded.

…

What are people looking for? The most important variable, for both men and women, is looks. Furthermore, posting a photo is a big help: women who post photos receive about twice as many e-mail messages as those who do not, even when they report that they have “average looks.”

Having a lot of money is good for attracting e-mail messages, at least for men. Those men reporting incomes in excess of $250,000 received 156 percent more e-mail messages than those with incomes below $50,000. Women like men with a higher income than they have but men do not want to date women who earn more than they do.

Or here’s yet another study, this one done not in an OLD service setting but in speed-dating…

For long-term mates, the expected sex differences emerged: Men kept preferring attractiveness, and women opted for social status, as well as warmth and trustworthiness. But after their minimum requirements for these necessities were met, both sexes chose well-rounded partners over those with the very best looks or the highest status.

…

In practice, Li said, people’s budgets in the mating market are determined by what they themselves have to offer. “So a guy who is extremely high status or very wealthy can trade up for a more physically attractive partner,” he said. And “women trying to make themselves more physically attractive so they can get a higher quality mate are not completely misguided.”

…

John Marshall Townsend, professor of anthropology at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, says that women’s status requirements often complicate their search for a mate. Townsend showed a group of female medical students, law students and professionals pictures of men dressed in different ways – wearing, for instance, a fast-food uniform or a designer suit and Rolex watch. He also gave participants descriptions of each man’s social status.

The results were decisive. “Here’s Mr. Hottie, but if he’s in the wrong costume, and given the wrong status description, then she won’t go out with him, much less go to bed with him or marry him,” said Townsend. “You could put Cary Grant in a Burger King outfit, and he looks dorky.”

And getting back to that first study, done by some folks at MIT, who are pretty dang good at crunching numbers, is a terrific blog post:

Here’s the really interesting table: the looks/income tradeoff table. Guys, if you are a 7, how much more money do you need to earn to be the online-dating equivalent of a guy who is a “10? looks-wise and earns $62,500? (Or at least, get as many emails responding to your online personal)

1 – $186,000 (so total income is $248,500, $186,000+$62,500)
2 – $169,000
3 – $159,000
4 – $151,000
5 – $143,000
6 – $128,000
7 – $86,000
8 – $37,000
9 – $25,000

An equivalent table can’t be constructed for women, however. Men in the study showed a slight preference for women earning $50,000 – $100,000 versus lower incomes, but earning more than that didn’t seem to improve outcomes.

There’s other tables that can be constructed: a 5?2? guy needs to earn $269,000 to get as many responses as a 5?11.5? man earning $62,500. Asian guys need to earn $309,500 a year to get as many responses from white women, as a white man earning $62,500 would. (These are the factoids you get when MIT geeks try to analyze online dating?)

Now, I don’t know if anyone else finds this interesting… but man, I sure do. In addition to the income/looks table there’s also a income/height table and an income/race table for guys (as the blog author points out).

I guess when it comes to OLD I’m lucky I’m a tall white guy with a decent income- it allows me to make up for my obvious personality defects.

I almost hate to admit this, but while watching the movie “Iron Man” last night (which was very entertaining, by the way) I noticed a little something that the computer nerds had thrown into the film.

It’s full of CGI scenes and elements, of course, like any modern big budget action flick. They’re more or less seemless; it’s incredible just how far technology has come in just a few years and how well that kind of stuff can be put onto film.

During one scene, the hero’s main assistant, Pepper Potts (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) is zipping through a computerized database of records that she’s going to steal for her boss, Tony Stark (aka Iron Man). On one of the pages? the name “J Lebowski”. It zips by so fast that I wasn’t sure I’d really seen it (okay, that’s a lie, I knew that I’d seen it) and today I checked online and sure enough, it’s in there.

Lebowski is of course the name of Jeff Bridges’ character in the movie “The Big Lebowski”, and Bridges plays a big part in Iron Man. Just a neat little nod to the movie geeks/nerds/fanboys for you.

What’s funny is that I’ve never actually seen “The Big Lebowski”, so I guess I’m not ALL movie geek.

Anyway, go see Iron Man, it’s entertaining and fun and all the things that a big budget summer action movie based on a comic book should be.