was queueing up to buy TOTO and came across some stats numbers(the odds, the grand prize money, the 2nd prize money ...) and some stats to why don't i have a girlfriend. This don't usually happen unless the queue is longer enough to form a super-human chain snaked till the level below.


Got this picture off dickie's blog to roughly show how bad it is.

This is a question that practically every male has asked himself at one point or another in his life. Unfortunately, there is rarely a hard and fast answer to the query. Many men try to reason their way through the dilemma( i'm speaking for myself)nonetheless, often reaching a series of ridiculous explanations, each more self-deprecating than the last: "Is it because I'm too shy, and not aggressive enough? Is it my opening lines? Am I a boring person? Am I too fat or too thin? Or am I simply ugly and completely unattractive to women?" When all other explanations have been discounted, most fall back on the time-honoured conclusion that "there must be Something Wrong!!" with me" before resigning themselves to lives of perpetual chastity.

After a short period of brooding, of course, these males will eventually come to the realization that the real reason they were never able to get a girlfriend is that they were too discriminating with their attentions. They will consequently return to the dating scene, entering a sequence of blasé relationships with mediocre girls for whom they don't really care, until they finally marry one out of fear of spending the rest of their lives alone.

Not me, though. I, for one, refuse to spend my life brooding over my lack of luck with women. While I'll be the first to admit that my chances of ever entering into a meaningful relationship with someone special are practically non-existent, I staunchly refuse to admit that it has anything to do with some inherent problem with me. Instead, I am convinced that the situation can be readily explained in purely scientific terms, using nothing more than demographics and some elementary statistical calculus.

Lest anyone suspect that my standards for women are too high( which some agrees), let me allay those fears by enumerating in advance my three criteria for the match. First, the potential girlfriend must be approximately my age — let's say 25 plus or minus three or four years. Second, the girl must be beautiful (and I use that term all-encompassingly to refer to both inner and outer beauty). Third, she must also be reasonably intelligent — she doesn't have to be Mensa material, but the ability to carry on a witty, insightful argument would be nice. So there they are — three simple demands, which I'm sure everyone will agree are anything ( not that hard, isn't it?).

Read on.

That said, I now present my demonstration of why the probability ( this is especially so when the LCD screen kept flashing the odds, the sum of grand prize when you looked up, thinking which numbers to buy) of finding a suitable candidate fulfilling the three above-noted requirements is so small as to be practically impossible — in other words, why I will never have a girlfriend. I shall endeavour to make this proof as rigorous as the available data permits. And I should note, too, that there will be no statistical trickery involved here; I have cited all my sources and provided all relevant calculations3 in case anyone wishes to conduct their own independent review. Let's now take a look at the figures.
Number of people on Earth (in 1998): 5,592,830,000. Assume it has grown. Est. figure in 2005 of 7,200,000,000

We start with the largest demographic in which I am interested — namely, the population of this planet. That is not to say I'm against the idea of interstellar romance, of course; I just don't assess the prospect of finding myself a nice Oriental girl as statistically significant. Est…who are female: 4,000,000,000. Accordingly, roughly half of the Earth's population must be discounted. Sorry, guys.…in "developed" countries: 605 601 000

We now further restrict the geographical area of interest to so-called "first-world countries". My reasons for doing so are not motivated out of contempt for those who are economically disadvantaged, but rather by simple probability. My chances of meeting a babe from Taiwan or a goddess from Japan, either in person or on the Internet, are understandably low. In fact, I will most likely spend nearly my entire life living and working in Singapore,
…currently (in 2000) aged 21 to 26: 65,000,000

Being neither a pedophile nor a geriatrophile, I would like to restrict my search for love to those whose age is approximately equal to my own. This is where things get a bit tricky, for two reasons: first, the census data is nearly two years old, and second, the "population by age" tables in are not separated into individual ages but are instead quantized into "15–19" (of whom there are 39 560 000) and "20–44" (population 215 073 000). Women aged 15 to 19 in 1998 will be aged 17 to 21 in 2000; in this group, I'm interested in dating those 21 or older, so, assuming the "15–19" girls' ages are uniformly distributed, we have
39 560 000 × ((|21 − 18| + 1) / (|19 − 15| + 1)) = 31 648 000.

Similarly, of 1998's "20–44" category, there are now
215 073 000 × ((|25 − 22| + 1) / (|44 − 20| + 1)) = 34 411 680

females within my chosen age limit. The sum, 66 059 680, represents the total number of females aged 21 to 26 in developed countries in 2000. Unfortunately, roughly 1% of these girls will have died since the census was taken;4 thus, the true number of so-far eligible bachelorettes is 65 399 083.
…who are beautiful: 1 487 838

Personal attraction, both physically and personality-wise, is an important instigator of any relationship. Of course, beauty is a purely subjective trait whose interpretation may vary from person to person. Luckily it is not necessary for me to define beauty in this essay except to state that for any given beholder, it will probably be normally distributed amongst the population.5 Without going into the specifics of precisely which traits I admire, I will say that for a girl to be considered really beautiful to me, she should fall at least two standard deviations above the norm. From basic statistics theory, the area to the left of the normal curve at z = 2 is
one-half minus the product of the square root of two π and the definite integral from 0 to 2 of e to the negative one-half x squared, which equals approximately 0.02275

and so it is this number with which we multiply our current population pool.
…and intelligent: 236 053

Again, intelligence can mean different things to different people, yet I am once more relieved of making any explanation by noting that it, like most other characteristics, has a notionally normal distribution across the population. Let's assume that I will settle for someone a mere one standard deviation above the normal; in that case, a further
one-half plus the product of the square root of two π and the definite integral from 0 to 1 of e to the negative one-half x squared, which equals approximately 84.1345%

of the population must be discounted.
…and not already committed: 118 027

I could find no hard statistics on the number of above-noted girls who are already married, engaged, or otherwise committed to a significant other, but informal observation and anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that the proportion is somewhere around 50%. (Fellow unattached males will no doubt have also noticed a preponderance of girls legitimately offering, "Sorry, I already have a boyfriend" as an excuse not to go on a date.) For reasons of morality (and perhaps too self-preservation), I'm not about to start hitting on girls who have husbands and boyfriends. Accordingly, that portion of the female population must also be considered off-limits.
…and also might like me: 18 726

Naturally, finding a suitable girl who I really like is no guarantee that she'll like me back. Assuming, as previously mentioned, that personal attractiveness is normally distributed, there is a mere 50% chance that any given female will consider me even marginally attractive. In practice, however, people are unlikely to consider pursuing a relationship with someone whose looks and personality just barely suffice. Let's make the rather conservative assumption, then, that a girl would go out with someone if and only if they were at least one standard deviation above her idea of average. In that case, referring to our previous calculation, only 15.8655% of females would consider someone with my physical characteristics and personality acceptable as a potential romantic partner.
Conclusion

It is here, at a pool of 18 726 acceptable females, that we end our statistical analysis. At first glance, a datable population of 18 726 may not seem like such a low number, but consider this: assuming I were to go on a blind date with a new girl about my age every week, I would have to date for 3493 weeks before I found one of the 18 726. That's very nearly 67 years. As a S'poren male born in the 80s, my life expectancy is probably little more than 75 years, so we can safely say that I will be quite dead before I find the proverbial girl of my dreams. Come to think of it, she'll probably be dead too.

So there you have it, my friends — finally, a cogent, scientific, non-self-deprecating argument for why I will never have a girlfriend. That said, if you happen to be a girl deluded enough to think that you and I have a chance together, feel free to drop me a line, but I warn you, you face odds of 157 060 to 1. I wouldn't bother if I were you.

Despite my efforts to research the matter, I could find no data on the distribution of beauty, either outer or inner, amongst the population. Perhaps attractiveness, being a largely subjective trait, does not lend itself to quantification. It is not unreasonable, however, to assume that like most other traits, it has a normal distribution. Indeed, this assumption seems to be backed up by personal observation and judgment — in any reasonably large group of people, most of them will be average-looking, and a tiny minority either exceedingly beautiful or exceedingly ugly.


It's all crap of what you have read earlier. As i'm just bored again, went surfing and found the abovewritten article interesting. So i did a Cut-n-Paste magic with some figures amended. Nonetheless, i've not checked my tickets. But you'll know it if i won; when i suddenly disappear. It's either those MFs who kidnapped me or i've gone space-travelling. It's Chinese Valentine's day today as well.

I Wish all lovely couples, newly-weds, newly-coupled friends, coupled friends, not forgeting those in B.I.M.C.(Boyfriends-in-Melbourne Clubs) a lovely, rosey V'day.

I wish all singles, may you find your love again in the soonest.

i wish all those whose loved ones aren't with them for whateva reasons, don't despair. You gain some , you lose.

After all... when you are in love, everyday is valentine's day.


- Stave Churches in Norway -

Travelling Norwegians must from early times have seen both wooden and stone churches of different sizes and constructions abroad. Craftsmen who accompanied long expeditions to maintain the boats and to erect storage buildings and houses at their destinations, may have worked in local construction teams and learnt foreign practices. Features of foreign building practice may therefore have been current around Norway long before the attempt to convert the country to Christianity.

During the Christianisation period in Norway, wooden churches and chapels were built, and traces have been found of over 30 of what are presumed to have been churches or chapels with a corner post structure. From the end of the 11th century, stone churches were also built, and more than 150 stone churches out of perhaps three hundred in total have been preserved. But in Norway more churches were built of wood than of stone, and out of perhaps over a thousand originally, 28 stave churches have been preserved. It is not known how many alternative designs the builders had to choose between when building the early Norwegian wooden churches, but the type that has so far been uncovered by archaeological excavation consists of buildings with posts dug down into the earth. Posts are the vertical, roof-bearing timbers that were placed in excavated post holes. Staves are the vertical, load-bearing timbers in the building. The frame of a stave church wall consists of a sill, staves and a top sill, and these have grooves that receive the wall planks.

The churches have been investigated and described for more than 160 years. Some authors claimed that the churches had been built by foreigners, whilst others said that the churches were re-used ancient Norwegian places of worship. When excavations were made at Urnes in 1956, post holes were found after older churches. The majority of descriptions of the churches of the Christianisation period from before approx. 1960 are therefore out of date. Today we consider the churches to be important expressions of their time that also describe the Church as an institution, bishops and landscape, and the finances of the client, and tell us about wooden buildings in Norway in general. Tree ring examinations tell us about the age of the buildings. Studies from abroad provide comparative information about master builders/ architects, design and planning, the connection between texts and monuments, and about wooden structures, as well as about missionary work, canon law and liturgy. In general there was a churchyard around the parish churches, of a suitable size for the requirements of the congregation. New churches may often have been located at the same place as the older church buildings, as this minimised the disturbance to earlier graves. If the churchyard was also new, it was ideally supposed to be blessed at the same time as the consecration of the church. The bishop's consecration of both the church and the yard must have been seen as creating a sanctuary, confirmed and guaranteed by the king. By interpreting traces that can tell us about how the builders of stave churches organised their work, how they selected and prepared materials, systematised elements, and erected, altered and rebuilt the churches, the history of a building can be described. There are still many questions that can be asked in relation to the churches, as each generation sees them differently.