Getting it on

I'm about a week late and a dollar short with this post. About a week and a half ago, the blogging world was all a chatter about a study coauthored by a Dartmouth professor titled "Money, Sex and Happiness: An Empirical Study." (I noticed that the date on the pdf is 2003. Maybe I am not as late as think I am.)

It caught my eye because I don't work on any topic as nearly as exciting as this. I submitted a paper titled "Estimating the Number of Essential Genes in a Random Transposon Library" to a conference in Hong Kong on Friday. I know of only one other person who works on this topic and none of my citations were from before 2004. I submitted to the Hong Kong conference to get fast turn around on the review and, if accepted, have dim sum at the Luk Yu Teahouse. A journal would be nice, but we'll see what the next step is once the review comes back.

Back to the paper. Mathematically, I understand how one equates a monetary value to sex. It's differences in the log odds ratio in the logistic regression. I can't make the step metaphorically. What does it really mean that having sex once a week rather than once a month is equivalent to having extra $50,000 a year? I posted a photo of my bedroom along with the text while thinking about this. It's so drafty in my apartment that I think I would want the money. Actually, I wonder what the monetary equivalent to insulation is in Christchurch if one were to run the exact same study. At the end of the university mag Canta that came out today I find these answers to the question "How cold should a flat be before you turn on the heaters?"

• Turn them on anyway.
  
• When it's colder inside your flat than outside your flat.
  
• As cold as Mr Freeze's place is.
  
• Negative ten degrees black.
  

Maybe a buck twenty five.