STANFORD, CA – The Salvation Army has partnered up with the Haas Center for Public Service in the first annual Stanford Turkey Drop. In addition to celebrating the fact that a bunch of white people didn’t starve to death, Thanksgiving marks the deadline at which long-distance relationships maintained during the first quarter of college must end. Severing ties with significant others who live on the other side of the country unfortunately results in a massive number of girlfriends who are no longer taken.
Student activist Brenda Shaffer, upon realizing the wastefulness of the tradition, decided to take action. “It just seems wrong to have all of these girls whose boyfriends can no longer have them, you know? I thought, why not give them to people who really need them? Thanksgiving is the perfect holiday for giving back, and so we’re having a girlfriend drive to collect whomever people don’t want, and then we donate them to needy, lonely Computer Science majors.”
Marc Welkins, a grad student specializing in machine learning, devised an algorithm for sorting the candidates based on such characteristics as hair color, height, knowledge of binary, and preference to Star Wars versus Star Trek. Depending on where they fall in all of the categories, the girls will be stationed at various tables where their future mates can decide what they care about most in a woman.
“Many of these guys have never actually spent time with anyone of the opposite sex,” explained Welkins. “My algorithm makes it so their utter inexperience becomes a non-issue. The preference cases are clearly laid out for them; all they have to do is see which one evaluates to ‘true.'”
Quentin Chase, a senior and excited attendee, anticipates that the system will greatly simplify the complexities of male-female interpersonal interaction. “I don’t understand why I can’t just pass dating criteria as parameters,” he lamented. “I’ve never even held hands with anyone. The closest I’ve come to getting any was when a girl put her arm around me for a group picture freshman year. Now I can finally see what human breasts look like in 3-D, and not as a pixel array.”
This year’s handout will take place next Monday in the lobby of Gates, where police are already preparing for the hordes of pale, skinny programmers expected to attend.
