Similar-interests-listings aren't symmetric

A minor quirk (or feature?) of LJ's find-users-by-similar-interests is that scoring is not symmetric. A's score on B's similar-list does not necessarily equal B's score on A's list. Given the same shared interests between B and A, this is counterintuitive to me. For example, compare myself with cjsmith, who is probably headed home now from Houston... on her similar-interests list, the LJ algorithm scores me at 18.126, 3rd on her list. But on my list, CJ only gets 13.179 and 90th place. For the same set of shared interests... weird.

Off to bed now...

No cell, no deal?

I'm putting together an autonomous drilling proposal in response to an astrobiology call, due in 2 weeks. Fortuitously, my counterpart S at our robotics partner company is at the same conference this week in Washington.

After laboring overnight, I found a printer at the hotel and managed to sit down with S and go through the proposal. She seemed enthusiastic, interested, even slightly flirty. We worked out several issues. Fine. Then, as we were dispersing at the end of the day's sessions, S said that she would be out of the office until a week from tomorrow, and asked for my cellphone number so that she could contact me from various locations with her questions and suggestions.

I said that I didn't have a cellphone. After a look of bewilderment, her body language changed. S became wary, a bit distant... obviously my technical credibility had just suffered greatly due to my lack of a given communications appliance. "But, you travel so much... how can you work without one?" "I use payphones and e-mail -- NASA doesn't pay for cellphones, I'd have to get a personal phone."

At the next possible interval, S ditched me... just as she might have lost some loser in a bar. It wasn't subtle. Who knows what will happen to our drilling proposal, now? Sigh...