A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait looks at the evidence for the massive collision that left exoplanet Kepler 107c an astoundingly dense body.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly tells her readers the secrets of the success of her relationship with her husband, Jose.


• Centauri Dreams notes what the New Horizons probe has found out, of Ultima Thule and of Pluto, by looking back.


• The Crux shares the obituaries of scientists from NASA for the Opportunity rover.


• D-Brief reports that NASA has declared the Opportunity rover's mission officially complete.


• Dead Things introduces its readers to Mnyamawamtuka, a titanosaur from Tanzania a hundred million years ago.


• Drew Ex Machina shares a stunning photo of Tropical Cyclone Gita, taken from the ISS in 2018.


• Far Outliers notes how the Indian Army helped save the British army's positions from collapse in the fall of 1914.


• Joe. My. God. notes a Christian group in the United States trying to encourage a boycott of supposedly leftist candy manufacturers like Hershey's.


• JSTOR Daily looks at why covenant marriage failed to become popular.


• Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money explains the hatred for new Congressperson Ilham Omar.


• The Planetary Society Blog links to ten interesting podcasts relating to exploration, of Earth and of space.


• Drew Rowsome interviews Tobias Herzberg about Feygele, his show in the Rhubarb festival at Buddies in Bad Times.


• Frank Jacobs at Strange Maps looks at the evidence, presented by (among others) Geneviève von Petzinger, suggesting that forty thousand years ago cave artists around the world may have shared a common language of symbols.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that the policies of Putin are contributing to a growing sense of nationalism in Belarus.

• A viral study claiming young gay men overwhelmingly prefer monogamy turns out to have used very poor data-gathering techniques. Slate reports.


• Drew Rowsome takes a look at The Ritz, a 1977 mainstream film that made use of gay culture and bathhouses. How does it read nowadays?


• The Toronto Police Service has made an application to Pride Toronto to walk, as a contingent, in this year's parade. This year may not be the best year for that. CBC reports.


• This safe date app designed for queer men of colour by a Toronto group is timely. It's just sad that it's needed. NOW Toronto reports.


• Hornet Stories links to the online art, at Instagram, of gay comics artist Inkollo.

• Kambiz at Anthropology.net notes evidence that Neanderthals in Italy used fire to shape digging sticks 170 thousand years ago.


• Missing persons blog Charley Ross reminds online commentators to be careful and reasonable in their speculations online, if only because these last forever.


• D-Brief notes a new study of the TRAPPIST-1 system suggesting that its outermost planets, in the circumstellar habitable zone, are so low density that they must have abundant volatiles. Water is the most likely candidate.


• Hornet Stories introduces readers to the impressive photography of New York City's Peter Hujar.


• At In Media Res, Russell Arben Fox meditates on the issues of friendship in the contemporary world.


• Joe. My. God. shares representative Tammy Duckworth's mockery of the authoritarian Donald Trump, aka "Cadet Bone Spurs".


• JSTOR Daily notes the continuing importance of the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.


• The Map Room Blog notes that someone has made cute maps of seven solar system worlds for children.


• Marginal Revolution links to an article looking at how some of the schoolgirls abducted in Nigeria by Boko Haram are doing.


• The NYR Daily engages with "Soul of a Nation", a touring exhibit of African-American art in the era of Black Power.


• The Planetary Society Blog reports from the scene of the impending Falcon Heavy launch, sharing photos.


• Towleroad notes a South African church that not only beats its queer parishoners but fines them, too.


• Window on Eurasia suggests Western sanctions could hinder the Russian development of its Arctic presence.

Exton says that gay women tend to use Internet dating a lot more than heterosexual women because it’s harder to meet other gay women, but that the experience is never quite right. “It works in the sense that you can chat to other people and maybe go on the odd date but they were all faulted quite seriously in a number of different ways,” she says. “I was interested in programming personally and I’d done the dating stuff before, I’d looked at doing other dating apps and I thought this is it, this is the one.

“When we started it, there was the problem of helping women find other women they fancy or could go on a date with, but the biggest problem was the number of guys who create profiles on lesbian sites,” Exton explained. “They are full of fake profiles and no one’s taking the time to go in and make sure it is a genuine profile. A lot of the previous lesbian sites were just add-ons”.

Exton says that many of the current lesbian dating sites are an extension of sites originally created for gay men and that this doesn’t serve the intended community.

The idea of men making fake profiles to browse a lesbian site might sound spurious but Exton has been surprised at the rate and extent to which this happens. “Daily, we have about five guys registering for an invite and it’s unsubstantiated but the emails have a guy’s name on them. We’ve seen fake Facebook accounts set up to try and get invites. You’ll see they set up an account yesterday, have no friends but they like Dattch and something like ‘Lesbian and bi girlies of London’. It’s amazing. The fact that people will go to that extent to try and check out gay women or convert them or meet up with them.”

Dattch currently verifies profiles manually, so each person is checked out at least to make sure they are female. From here, profiles will be linked to Facebook to see if applicants are women and if their profiles are well established.

From the Web-based heavy hitters like OkCupid, eHarmony, and Plenty of Fish on down to newer apps like Skout, How About We, and MeetMoi, they’re all developed by men. This might not seem like a big deal, until you consider one read on why Grindr has been so successful: the app has a “for us by us” appeal to gay men. But when it comes to heterosexual-dating technology, all-male co-founders represent the wants and needs of only half of their target audience. Sure, they can try to focus-group their way out of the problem, but if an app for “straight” people is to get anywhere close to Grindr’s level of success, women have to not just join out of curiosity. They have to actually use it.

Men are slightly overrepresented among dating-service users, according to a 2010 Duke University study, and when it comes to apps, men tend to be more willing to use location-based dating features. On either platform, they’re far more likely to use the services aggressively. A Northwestern University study found that men viewed more than three times as many profiles as women and were about forty per cent more likely than women to send a message or chat after viewing a profile. “The most desirable partners, especially the most desirable women, are likely to find the process of sifting through so many first-contact e-mails aversive, perhaps causing them to disengage from the process altogether,” the researchers write. They call this “the deluge problem.”

Both Web entrepreneurs and armchair sociologists will tell you that women are different. Despite our commitment to baseline feminist ideals, most of us don’t like to be relationship aggressors. We prefer to meet someone in person, not just browse pics of his pecs. We respond to emotional cues and pheromones and all sorts of subtle factors. But what if that isn’t entirely true? What if women are just as open to spontaneously meeting a man for a drink—and maybe more? After all, in a survey of a hundred thousand OkCupid users, over half the women said they’ve had casual sex. Women may initiate contact less frequently, but they are comfortable reaching out first if they see a profile that appeals to them. Maybe the real failure is that no one has built an app that women want to use.

[. . .]

So what do women want? If you look at the precious few dating sites and apps with female founders, a pattern emerges: women want authenticity, privacy, a more controlled environment, and a quick path to a safe, easy offline meeting. Coffee Meets Bagel, which is both an app and a Web site founded by three sisters, sends you a match and then sets a deadline by which you have to either “like” or “pass.” If you get a mutual “like,” you’re instantly connected to your match via text message (without the other person seeing your real phone number). You can choose to be shown only friends-of-friends through Coffee Meets Bagel by connecting the service to your Facebook account, or you can choose to keep it private and anonymous.

Whether the TTC likes it or not, adultery is legal as is the provision of a “dating service” to hook up would-be partners. This would not be the first such service to advertise on the TTC. LavaLife ran ads in subway cars, and there are dating service posters in some subway stations. Somehow, I doubt that everyone using these services tells their spouse/partner what they are doing.

Subway ads are running right now for the movie “It’s Complicated” whose plot involves a love triangle between a woman, her ex, and her new boyfriend. The posters include a tasteful view of Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin in bed. I don’t know whether their characters are married at the point in the film where this scene occurs, but that’s hardly the point. If the TTC is going to start censoring ads based on behaviour that is legal, they will have to be consistent.

thebitterguy

The collection, which Calvin "squirreled away" over the decades, includes at least 60 poems written on scrolls, by typewriter, some even scribbled on the back of grocery lists. One is written like a bank statement: "Here's my annual accounting of my love for you," it starts. Another are the lyrics to a song, "Valentine Cowboy."

"It's been a lot of fun, in her writing them and me getting them," said Calvin, 87, a professor emeritus in computer science at the University of Toronto.

"It's a little too cute," said Phyllis, 81, going through some of the poems, which include sonnets, haiku, limericks and ballads.

One of the poems is receiving a more public viewing this Valentine's Day after it caught the attention of U of T English professor Ian Lancashire. A decade ago, he started a project to create a poetry database online. He happened across a poem Phyllis had written to Calvin in 1969, called "First Person Demonstrative," while editing a collection of poems she was trying to get published. He liked it so much he decided to add it to his Valentine's Day edition of the database.

"Initially, I didn't expect these to be any more than dashed-off verses, just private things I wrote," said Phyllis, a science fiction writer and poet.

But her poem resonated with Lancashire and he decided to feature it on the website. "I thought hers was the most honest, heart-rending and human of the love poems that I have read. I thought it was complex because it captured the shyness, the delight and the long feeling of a marriage that has gone on for 20 years."