I've always been intrigued by the concept of "Schrodinger's Cat." For those of you who aren't familiar with this unforunate beast, here's something from Wiki:

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Schrödinger's Cat: A cat, along with a flask containing a poison, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If an internal Geiger counter detects radiation, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not a mixture of alive and dead.

In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, a system stops being a superposition of states and becomes either one or the other when an observation takes place. This experiment makes apparent the fact that the nature of measurement, or observation, is not well-defined in this interpretation. Some interpret the experiment to mean that while the box is closed, the system simultaneously exists in a superposition of the states "decayed nucleus/dead cat" and "undecayed nucleus/living cat", and that only when the box is opened and an observation performed does the wave function collapse into one of the two states.

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It occurred to me that we have something similar here. The person you may be talking to on a dating site simultaneously exists as a "real" person and a "fake" person -- only through observation (i.e., an actual face-to-face meeting and getting to know the person better) will one scenario or the other manifest itself distinctively.

Same with "nice guy" vs. "not-so-nice guy."

On the other hand, I've ended up with more than enough dead cats to know what's coming....!

Oddly enough, this does make sense. Maybe I need a drink?

Oh Lex, you're so cute but damn if you don't make my head hurt.

See, this is the kind of stuff I think about when I'm not writing a book....

Interesting concept. Makes sense when compared to the internet, in a sense you are talking to "a person" and "a machine" at once. It's stuff like this that should definitely be written into the Lexanity Handbook. Or Book of Laws. Or whatever the heck it is....

You and Thomas Pynchon.

Hey, don't be abusin' no cats. Poor kitties. Next time use the Pavlov's Dog example instead.