Why I don’t have a girlfriend: an application of the Drake Equation [pdf]

Nice! :) But you forgot to include parameters like "spatial proximity". You are more likely to find university educated women in a university. Also, a lot of women in the university are around 24-34 (graduate students? -- they are trained to talk about anything on the planet!). Physically attractive -- hard to find, computer science dept is probably NOT going to help. Try the physical training dept. Humanities would be a better bet.

Congratulations AlphaMonkey, you'll find the love of your life in the closest university's Humanities department. Since you posted the document at the warwick website, you probably are not too far away from her ;-)

I did this same thing too in first year undergrad (first year alone in a strange city), and then I realized that I was an idiot. Clearly people hook up all the time, so the probability of meeting someone isn't that low.

Key difference: people who want to hook up put themselves in situations where they meet other people who want to hook up.

The probability of me meeting a fruit vendor is the same if all I had to go on was total random probability of meeting strangers, but instead I just go to my closest grocery store which is conveniently located 80 metres from my house, and then I buy some fruit.

The reason the author does not have a girlfriend (if that's really true) is more likely related to the fact that he's spending his time writing stuff like this instead of meeting people.

I am going to go out on a limb and say the reason he does not have a girlfriend is the fact he is too busy pondering the Drake equation. It's funny how highly analytical people can quantify the most difficult things, but fail to see the obvious.

I am sure there is some sort of equation you could perform to figure out how many girls you have to meet daily to increase odds - but instead of doing that, go out and actually meet girls. You might surprise yourself.

The main problem with any Drake Eqn. related statement is that nobody seems to propagate uncertainty about the terms.

The main problem with any mathematical analysis of whether you're going to meet someone and build a rewarding relationship with them is that you're looking hard at your own life instead of caring about someone else's.

Obviously this is just for fun, but the author screws up his reasoning pretty badly. For example:

a) He says .0014% when he means 0.14%.

b) He interprets "X% of Londoners fit my criteria" as "on a given night, I have X% chance of meeting someone fitting my criteria". Apparently on a given night he meets exactly one randomly-sampled Londoner?

fL is not right - in the Internet age, its unimportant where the women are.

Sorry, he screwed up the math.

Using rate of formation of people and fraction of people who are age appropriate in the same equation is not correct. The correct math would be rate of formation of people multiplied by the length of time they are age appropriate. Instead of multiplying by 0.2 he should be multiplying by 11. Which makes for a factor of 55 difference in the result.