I think you will find that the vast majority of young women my age, myself included, are not attracted to "older" men.

That sounds like generalizing from one example to me. The fact that only in a small minority (my guesstimate would be at around 15%) of heterosexual long-term relationships is the woman older than the man (at least where I am) suggests otherwise.

What are the costs associated with flowers?

These kinds of posts are better when the OP has brought some research to the table.

The best solution I’ve heard started by looking at who benefits from this norm [older women] and wondering whether they could have contributed to it.

While this is generally a good question to ask, at this point you would also need to think of a plausible mechanism by which older women could have contributed to the change. What new powers have older women (Would this be women over 30? those over 40?) gained compared to younger women, younger men and older men in this period that they could have used to change the norms so drastically? How would they have cooperated between themselves to thwart the other groups' desires?

A few centuries ago, we did not have the laws against child labour that we do today, and it was common for young children to work and support their families. This norm has changed, and I don't think we need to ask the question of who benefited and posit that there has been an increase in this-or-the-other group's power to explain the shift.

Nowadays in many parts of the world sixteen-year-old girls themselves have a say in who they hook up with, which is something a lot of societies in ancient times (and very many even now) did not grant them. This should definitely be a factor in your analysis!

While not exactly an answer to your question, this Economist article talks about certain situations where social norms and options available in the workplace etc might push younger women away from matrimony altogether, not just matrimony with much older men.

Attempted 2 online courses on Coursera. Grossly overestimated my own free time and conscientiousness, failed to make it even mid-way through both.

I'm not giving up though. Have signed up for one course this month - the introduction to Quantum Mechanics taught by Umesh Vazirani. Must do better and complete the course this time because if not, I just might start to self-identify as someone who plans, but does not execute!

Why pick out those events?

It's easy to see it as a coincidence when you take into account all the events that you might have counted as significant if they'd happened at the right time. How about the discovery of general relativity, the cosmic microwave background, neutrinos, the Sputnik launch, various supernovae, the Tunguska impact, etc etc?

Irrationality Game

If we are in a simulation, a game, a "planetarium", or some other form of environment controlled by transhuman powers, then 2012 may be the planned end of the game, or end of this stage of the game, foreshadowed within the game by the Mayan calendar, and having something to do with the Voyager space probe reaching the limits of the planetarium-enclosure, the galactic center lighting up as a gas cloud falls in 30,000 years ago, or the discovery of the higgs boson.

Since we have to give probabilities, I'll say 10%, but note well, I'm not saying there is a 10% probability that the world ends this year, I'm saying 10% conditional on us being in a transhumanly controlled environment; e.g., that if we are in a simulation, then 2012 has a good chance of being a preprogrammed date with destiny.

You can get the 'author's version' of the paper 'for personal use, not redistribution' by going to this website, and providing your email ID:

http://web.ku.edu/~gillab/pubs.html

Unfortunately, the article in question (by Gillath et al) is expensively paywalled.

From this lack of Openness (ha ha) I predict that the article won't begin with the opening line of R.E.M.'s "Good Advices".

Catholicism of all things

Of the branches of Christianity, and perhaps of all religions, Catholicism has the most developed theology, the most rigorous set of justifications for belief, the longest intellectual tradition and tries the hardest to be convivial with reason. Other branches and other religions would be a lot more surprising (unless you're counting Quakers and Unitarians, for which religion has very little to do with "belief" as we understand it here.) Especially for a self-described virtue ethicist.