Free Brain Trust by Garth Sundem

person. When sitting across from your dream date, you want to show a “like spike.” Unfortunately it has to be honest. “One thing that’s fascinating is that people can tell so fast—whether the flavor of the liking is unique versus general,” says Finkel. You can’t fake unique attraction, but neither should you try to tamp it down when it wallops you. Showing someone they’re special makes them like you.
    A second cool trick comes from the world of embodied cognition, which is a much-studied form of subconscious crossover between actions and thoughts. For example, people excluded from a social group in a lab setting report the lab itself feels colder. Finkel and Eastwick also point to a study of the “attractiveness” of Chinese characters—subjects found characters more attractive when they pulled them toward themselves than they found the same characters when they pushed them away.
    In the world of speed dating, embodied cognition means that you want to sit instead of rotate—you tend to like thingsyou approach. Sure enough, Finkel and Eastwick showed that while women are overall pickier than men, if men stay put while women rotate, it shortens the pickiness gap. (Think about this in terms of gender stereotypes, in which men pursue and women are pursued.) So in addition to letting your “like spike” (as it were) show, find a speed dating situation that allows your sex to sit—dates will approach you and so will like you more.
Mining dating data—try saying that ten times fast. Now bask in the glory that is a truly massive data set, generated by millions and millions of online dating profiles and their click rates. First, men get more responses to their messages if they don’t smile in their profile pictures. And $20,000 in salary compensates for an inch in height. (Online daters lie, adding an average of two inches and 20 percent to their true heights and salaries.) And there are good and bad words to use in messages. Netspeak like “ur” for “your” hurts message response, as do physical compliments including the words “sexy,” “hot,” and “beautiful.” Instead use words that show interest that runs more than skin-deep like “awesome” and “fascinating.”
Puzzle #4: Matchmaker
You’re the benevolent facilitator of a speed dating session. John, Jake, Jeremy, and Justin arrive to meet Emma, Ella, Eliza, and Eva. As per regulations, they all chat and then they all score each other—er, evaluate each other. If the chart below shows these scores (girls’ evaluation of guys on the left, and guys’ evaluation of girls on the right—the higher score the better), how should you pair these love-struck contestants in order to create the most overall happiness?

In the immortal words of rapper Skee-Lo, do you wish you were a little bit taller? Wish you were a baller? Wish you had a girl who looked good and you would call her? Wish you had a rabbit in a hat and a bat and a ’64 Impala? It’s a lengthy list.
    John Fontanella, physicist at the US Naval Academy, can helpyou with the second—being a baller, that is. He wrote the book on basketball, or at least on The Physics of Basketball , which you can use to light up the scoreboard regardless of height and/or possession of said Impala.
    First, the basics. In homage to the Naval Academy, think about basketball as ballistics. You’re blasting a projectile that travels up and then down, while also traveling horizontally, describing a parabola from your hand to the hoop (ideally). In basketball’s case, the higher the arc, the more straight down the projectile travels as it nears the hoop, and thus the bigger the target looks (you already knew this). But the shortest distance between two points is a straight line and so the higher the arc, the longer the shot’s total distance and thus the more precise it has to be leaving your hand (error is magnified over distance).
    So there’s an optimal angle of release—one that balances the desire