We all know that if there’s one thing certain to happen to professional tennis players who get hurt in skydiving accidents, it’s that a clandestine para-military organization will swoop in and replace the now defective natural parts with über-awesome cybernetic ones. Thus began the saga of Jamie Sommers in a 1975 episode of The Six Million Dollar Man

The episode garnered the actress her own series which ran for three seasons before losing its charge but the concept was so riveting that it could work at almost any time so I was always surprised that, TV movie specials aside, it never got re-made.

That’s why I was excited about the new Bionic Woman television show when I first heard of it. With the advancements in medical technology leading to new story ideas coupled with improvements in special effects, it could be a huge leap over the original which, let’s face it, doesn’t hold up very well. That’s not to say I didn’t watch it. I did, but only because of Lindsay Wagner, one of those natural beauties who never needed makeup to look terrific. And she won an Emmy for the show, so I guess she can act.

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Groundbreaking - and heartwarmingly unessential - research done by University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou has attempted to confirm what a generation of suicide girls has always feared - that vampires do not exist.

His reasoning? On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was just over 530 million people. If one vampire existed on that day and bit one person per month, and then each new vampire also bit one person per month, by 1605 the entire planet would be nothing except vampires.

Now, I am okay with there being no vampires, though I think the world would be poorer without that cinema classic, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

And, without vampires, I would not be able to spend 4 seconds scouring the internet and find pictures like this:

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Who knew that the sex lives of African bat bugs could be so interesting? Males with female genitalia, female bugs with ‘paragenitals’ on their abdomens that guide the males to the right spot by basically impaling them if they mess up, males trying to impregnate males.

It’s Extreme Transexualism, coming soon to a species near you.

Why is it necessary in these bugs? Males tend to get overanxious and just start stabbing away anywhere in the abdomen but they really need to go into a special warm place that some men on the internet know nothing about - though it’s still in their abdomen, in the case of female bat bugs. Yes, male bat bugs use blood insemination and then the sperm have to swim to the ovaries.

It’s gruesome and bizarre and therefore completely worthy of a science article that transcends zoology and gets right to the sexual politics.

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“It’s hard finding the perfect woman,” my friend Jack said to me.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Do you want to borrow my copy of Poison Ivy: The New Seduction?”

“No, no, we all know why you never answer the phone when My Name Is Earl is on TV. You went three hours early to get tickets for DOA the day it opened and ended up being the only person in the whole theater. I mean finding the perfect woman for me is difficult. I am always excited when things get going but then I find some annoying flaw.”

“I understand completely,” I said, though in truth I did not. It’s well known that the line of perfect women waiting to date scientists is so long it can be seen from space. “Have you ever written down the qualities you want, or are you more the type who likes a lot of qualities and will enjoy any girl who is exceptional in one of them?”

“I think I am that second one,” he said. “I don’t want to be elitist.”

“No, setting your standard high and settling for less only by necessity would be too easy, I agree,” I said. “Let’s take the scientific approach. I have all of the women I can think of in the handy Cashitude 8500 laptop. We can create a regression algorithm that will help you converge on the perfect one.”

Off to the lab we went.

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I have always loved numbers. My whole life I have manipulated them, caressed them, cared for them.

My friends, I am a six fiend.

And I am not alone. Heck, even among physics gurus I am in pretty good company, including notables such as Paul A.M. Dirac, which, by the way, is his real name and not something he made up just for D&D. That guy lived for number correlations.

Numbers are significant because on a personal and a collective conscious level numbers help us understand the world in a way that letters cannot. I can go anywhere in the world and hold up two fingers and the most illiterate peasant in China knows that means I am with two supermodels. Can I speak Chinese? Well, yeah, Mandarin actually, but you can’t.

Plus, there are 400 dialects in China so I certainly can’t express how many supermodels I am with in any other way and have it be so clear. Numbers are the magical language. I can do music with numbers ( the circle of fifths ), language, art and science. Even when I do TKD I am using a sine wave.

Numbers work for everyone. Numbers have order and meaning. To pseudo-scientists they even have esoteric definitions. Numerologists, for example, claim that 1 is the Yang and 2 is the Yin, staying in our Chinese theme. More on that later.

My favorite? Six.

Six is important. Six is famous. Six was the magical number of ancient Avalon. Christian authorities labeled six “the number of sin” and 666 is certainly a bad thing. One of its Egyptian forms is seshemu (”sexual intercourse” ) ­ shown in hieroglyphics by male and female genitals doing … you know, what I do a lot more of than you … and we still know of it today in the Sufi love-charm designed to open the “cave” of the Goddess: “Open, Sesame.”

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