All Thoughts Being Equal

Matt Yglesias at Slate reports that there's a new dating site on the block, where "generous" guys can bid on first dates with "attractive" women. From the site itself: WhatsYourPrice.com is the only online dating website where money can buy you love or at least a first date. Based on our patent-pending dating system, WhatsYourPrice.com provides the platform for generous members to bid on a first date with attractive members. By offering a little incentive, attractive members are more inclined to take a risk on someone who isn’t their usual type, and if the date goes sour, at least they won’t be going home empty handed. Once you get past the socially squicky concept of bidding for love, I'm a bit confused as to the gender-norm setup here. On the one hand, the site's graphics make it pretty obvious that men are the "generous" ones and women are the "attractive" ones, but in that "About" blurb they try for a little ...

I'm only a few pages into Daniel Loxton's Why Is There a Skeptical Movement? (available in PDF here ) and it's already fascinating. I think I had heard a bit about how Harry Houdini leveraged his experience as a stage magician to combat the "spirit mediums" so common (and so fraudulent) in his day. What blew me away, though, was how far back these skeptical roots went. P. T. Barnum offered cash prizes to any psychic who could "pertinently" answer questions he had sealed in envelopes and stored somewhere else. Okay, you know your game's crooked when P. T. Barnum thinks your "humbug" has gone too far! Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, and M. Guillotin served on a special commission to the French monarchy to investigate "animal magnetism" healing touch quackery. Sort of like an 18th c. Justice League, but for science! and mostly French.   This stuff goes back yet another century, to the Pseudodoxia Epidemica of Sir Tho...