The study, still under peer review before publication, analyzed 22,000 online daters and found that women put a premium on income and height when deciding which men to contact, said Dan Ariely, a Duke behavioral economist who worked with University of Chicago researchers on the project.

For example, the study showed a 5-foot-9-inch man needs to make $30,000 more than a 5-foot-10-inch one to be as successful in the dating pool.

So, at $30,000 an inch, Mason being 5′ 10″, and me at 6′ 3″, that makes me $150,000 more valuable to women than Mason.

What? It’s science!

Dad, Joe Henderson said his family’s celebrating supabuh this Sunday. Can we go?

Timmy, it’s not supabuh, it’s Super Bowl, and you know our family doesn’t celebrate Super Bowl.

What’s a Super Bowl?

Well, it’s kind of like an ordinary bowl, but it’s filled with the most wonderful things you can imagine.

Like Cocoa Puffs?

No, Timmy. Beer.

Basically, this is all a roundabout way of saying that strip poohsticks needs to become a thing.

Lady Astor: “Mr. Churchill, you are drunk!”
Mr. Churchill: “Yes, and you, Madam, are ugly but tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be ugly.”

Mr. Churchill: Mixing drunkenness and governing since 1910.

But seriously.

My main problem with the iPad is that it seems to be a plus-sized iPhone rather than a shrunken MacBook. It’s an iPod touch that doesn’t fit in my pocket, but can’t replace my laptop. It’s basically a third thing that Apple expects me to buy; third to my MacBook in my backpack and my iPhone in my pants. It is, in short, not the product I want.

Let’s look at the typical hipster using the typical 13″ MacBook Pro in the typical San Francisco independent, organic, irony-laden coffee shop. He’s sitting there with his laptop, on which he has Safari (Firefox, if he’s slightly nerdy) open on Facebook; he’s got iChat open with his latest main squeeze; iTunes is playing his indie rock in his headphones; Mail is up because he’s supposed to be working; and he has Pages running for that term paper. We’ll call these functions The 95% — the stuff modern computers are used for 95% of the time.² The other 5% are silly things like Photoshop, Final Cut, Xcode, and Coda.

Sitting next to his MacBook and his fair-trade, non-fat latte is his iPhone. He uses his iPhone for the same things we all use it for: texting, email, internet, maps, games, music, videos, and occasionally making phone calls. Now, really, he can accomplish all these things on his computer. Texting is iChat for cell networks, and even phone calls can now be done through Skype, but he likes being able to access them without having to get out and fire up his laptop. The size is key here. If the iPhone was much bigger, it wouldn’t fit in his obnoxiously tight hipster jeans. The iPhone comes nowhere near to accomplishing The 95% — but why should it? It’s a computer that fits in your pants.

The iPad is something else. It can do The 95%. All the things Mr. Hipster is doing on his MacBook Pro can be done on the iPad, and apparently they can be done quite elegantly.³ But it can’t replace his MacBook. And not for lack of the 5%. He has no real need for Photoshop and doesn’t care what Xcode is. It can’t replace the MacBook because it requires one to sync with. He can’t backup his iPad or sync his iPhone without a “real” computer. He also doesn’t seem able to print his term paper or import his photos from his fancy camera without a “real” computer.⁴

The iPad gets so close to being able to do everything you really need it to, but it falls short. It isn’t like the iPhone where it’s expected to be NOT a computer. Why can’t the iPad be one? The price Apple has set on the iPad clearly shows that they don’t expect it to really compete with their MacBook line. I understand that the iPad is supposed to be NOT a laptop; what I don’t understand is why. I can carry my iPhone in my pocket and my iPad in my backpack. Why do I have to have a third, notably more expensive computer back home to tie everything together?

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the iPad is the correct metaphor and we’ll all be buying three big-ticket items from Apple. But it’s not the product I wanted. Disappointment’s a bitch.

My thoughts, for what it’s worth: It’s harder than most people realize to change things after they get that way. Or more articulately: Once people (the internet) get into habits, those habits die hard. For example, people still enter “www”, we still buy bottled water, and the Tonight Show is still terrible. It’ll be rather difficult to convert the internet from Flash to HTML 5, however it will help that there are concrete benefits. Still, it’s hard to get more than 5% of internet users to care when the YouTube system somehow works acceptably.