UNIVERSITY PARK, PA-- Last semester, Fred Jones (junior—CMPSC) needed some extra credit and some money so he did what any PSY 002 student would do: become a guinea pig. Little did he know that agreeing to participate in Dr. Reverend Santos’s relationship study would become the worst mistake of his collegiate career. In a monumental press conference last week, Dr. Santos recognized Fred Jones as the most pathetic Penn State male for the 2001-2002 school year.

             Below is an excerpt from the press conference:

             “Mr. Jones has experienced a great deal of relationship woes during his two years at Penn State. As Figure One illustrates, the length of each successive relationship declines in a rapid manner. We would like to stress that the first relationship in the graph occurred before our subject was enrolled at this University, further demonstrating his complete and utter incompetence. Our team of researchers is still debating whether or not the data is best described by an exponential equation or by a power series. In either case, this guy is a fucking homely sack of shit.”

Figure 1

             Though much remains unknown about the relationships themselves, the numbers certainly do a lot of talking. The solid red line on the graph shows a line-of-best fit as suggested by y = 708.91x -5.5725. The dotted blue line is a graph of the exponential function y = 13917e -3.1527x. This means Fred Jones can expect his next relationship to last either 5.76e -20 days, or 0.464 days, depending on which equation is used. After that relationship, it only gets worse, as his future relationship lengths come even closer to zero.

             After the press conference Fred was said to be cautiously optimistic by the findings, noting that he would never be completely “out of the running” since neither of the above functions actually reaches zero. If you would like to contact Fred, or are interesting in dating him, he can be reached at FredJones@whatthefuck.com.