mathbabe

My title today is the subject line of a message I received from my buddy Jordan Ellenberg. Thanks for making things so easy for me to blog this morning, Jordan!

So here’s the subject: a Silicon Valley entrepreneur’s self-help book, including advice on how to quantify and measure your sex life, among other things – every other thing, in fact.

Just in case you’ve missed it, there’s a movement afoot among certain people to collect data about themselves on the level of heart rate, daily exercise and eating patterns, and the like, with the goal of self-improvement.

It’s got a name – the Quantified Self movement – and if I haven’t mentioned it before, it’s because honestly, it’s too easy, and I generally speaking like a challenge.

I saw a bunch of these guys at the health analytics conference I went to a couple of months ago, and let me tell you, they’re weird, and they know it, and they don’t care.

They honestly feel sorry for people who don’t have a Ironman Triathlon (or four) to train for via wireless excel spreadsheets. I mean, how do those people know whether they’ve actually improved? How do they know if they’ve eaten enough carbs? How do they know if they’ve slept??

As far as these Quantified Selfers (QSers) are concerned, it’s only a matter of time before everyone is, like them, making themselves perfect, and they’re the vanguard with nothing to be defensive about.

So anyhoo, those QS guys are convinced that they’re accomplishing something with all of their number collecting and crunching, like maybe they’ll live forever or something (after curing cancer), and they’re just so douchey I feel sorry for them. Blogging about them and trashing them would be like a mean older kid in the playground telling a bunch of little kids that there’s no Santa Claus.

Why do that? Why pop their bubble?

Here’s why: it’s just plain fun, especially now that they’ve ventured into sexy territory with their spreadsheets.

Here are a couple of questions for the Quantified Sexual Selfers (QSSers) in the audience, please get back to me.

1. Yes or no: nothing says “hot ‘n’ steamy” like a fitbit readout of historical orgasms.
2. Where does the sensor band get attached, and does it come with a vibrating option?
3. Are your orgasms more satisfying before or after syncing your daily data with Stephen Wolfram’s?
4. What’s your metric of success, and how do you know your girlfriend ain’t gaming the system?