Former Google software engineer Nelson Minar does all kinds of cool things, like "building a metacomputer out of the idle resources on the Internet but ran out of money" and this web site crowd visualization. OK, who are we kidding? We have no idea what any of that shit is. But we totally get his latest project, "Ages of Craiglist M4M ads."

Just so we're clear, Nelson's "not in the market myself but the discourse is so efficient that I enjoy reading it in idle moments." Not that there's anything wrong with that.

The image above delineates his findings, based on the last seven months of archived RSS:

"for the Bay Area boards, a collection of 485,000 unique personal ads...I suspect it's a mix of Craigslist's demographics and the relation between sexual desire and sexual access as men age... I'm particularly curious about the relation of the poster's age and the age of their preferred partner, but the data is a bit fuzzy."

We love Nelson almost as much as we love Heather from Top Model, Temple Grandin, or Beth Spotswood, and think his work deserves support from someone who shares his enthusiasm for statistical analysis. Latterman, you up for it?

If we're reading the chart right, it looks like the top age of the CL M3M poster is 35 -- exactly the age of SFist editor Brock "too gay" Keeling. Surely, this is more than mere coincidence. Chief? Care to comment?