Popularity Vs. Progress

Today, a couplet of stories that caught my eye:
1. Your Facebook likes can be use to determine your intelligence and sexuality.
This not only appears on WIRED but also in the new slimmed-down Sydney Morning Herald which adds that apparently liking the "Wu-Tung Clan" denotes masculinity.  I thought it was Wu-Tang myself, but then I have no idea who they really are, I assume a rap act . . . . .
Okay, I exist on Facebook but that is all.  Why I would want to tell the corporations what I like and dislike is beyond me.  The popularity of things is no measure of their worth, especially in the long term. 

and then there is this:
NIST has created a refrigerator chip that can get down to 256 mK, which is pretty close to the temperatures where superconductivity occurs if I am not mistaken. The unit is very small too, which would mean that superconducting computer chips could be made. That would not only produce possible speed gains for computers but also since this is such a small cooler and all solid state,  maybe these coolers could be added to more conventional chip designs to boost performance.
No report of the power consumption of the cooler though.
To me this is much more interesting than the Farcebook survey, but then I guess I really am a nerd.

In other news: By the number of views, m y artwork blog (The Z-Buffer) is much more popular than this blog. I guess no-one really gives a shit about reason, sense or philosophy,  but someone cares about a bit of art.

Finally, today is the end of my second voyage of  misery and defeat at the hands of a dating website.
I don't think it is just me either: there is something weird and bad going on there. Stay away from all "dating" websites folks,  remember if you meet "the love of your life" after a few days they don't get any more $ out of you so they have no interest in helping you really, and there are some very sick people out there who want to rip you off.I was contacted by several of them. I have never had so many vampires and panhandlers hitting on me before. It's not that they are even intelligent or even tactful about it either: tragic really.