At UW's Student Life Centre, I've had a lovely chat with some 21 y.o. Canadian-English girl from UoGuelph about a month ago. She was waiting for her UW boyfriend (I recall she said he was a PhD student from Iran), who didn't show up for like over 30 or 40 minutes at the time I found her sitting around the room and looking lost.

During the course of our conversation, which was a good number of minutes (the guy ended up being 1 hour late, which she said never happened before during the previous 8 months they've dated), I've asked her how they've met, and, apparently, she told me that there's this one canadian web-site called plentyoffish.com, that's absolutely free to use, and she found him over there.  "If my mum can find herself a partner on the internet, then why can't I?", -- she confessed regarding her discovery of site. :-)  She told me she was almost ready to give up, however, since every other message she was getting from the members was regarding the colour of her panties... It makes me kinda curious -- is the colour really so damn important, or is it just the girl's misrepresentation / misremembering of the actual content of the messages?  I've registered at a few sites since then, and after browsing various profiles on various free sites, the phenomenon of the importance of knowing the colour of the panties seems to be surprisingly important for reasons I still can't fully comprehend. :-)

P.S. Regardless, okcupid is just so much better than plentyoffish, so don't take this as an advertisement by any means. :-)  Want some proof that it is?  If you get really bored, try registering an account at plentyoffish, and see if you can mention "okcupid", not even "okcupid.com", without it being automatically replaced with "spam" in your profile. :-)  Those that provide good service don't need to worry about hiding their competitors! :p  And that goes before even mentioning how poor POF's interface is. 

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/06/25/rape-fantasies-and-hygiene-by-state/

It's interesting how there appears to be quite a consensus around certain questions based on the geographical location of the respondents. Frankly, I'm kinda scared of going back to the US after being in Waterloo for so long; at least my destination places appear to be in consensus with my overall preferences on the questions... I'm Constant, and as such, I'm always a bit scared of the change. :p

http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2009/11/17/your-looks-and-online-dating/

How do you know who's attractive and who's not? If you're talking about the ratings that the profiles can receive from the peer users of okcupid, then, first of all, I thought 1 is the lowest number of stars you can give out, not 0 as is suggested in the article, right?

Then, there's also a question of what it is that is being rated. Since only one rating can be assigned to the profile, I usually rate the overall attractiveness of the profile. The quality of the photograph also affects the attractiveness a great deal, so, if the photos could be rated individually from 0 or 1 to 10, then I wouldn't be surprised if different photos of the same person might as well receive different scores and the difference in the results to be statistically significant.

testing