Was the light bulb more important than the pill? An online gathering of scientists nominates the most important inventions of the past 2,000 years. Some of their choices might surprise you.

By Sharon Begley

What changed the course of human events most profoundly? It wasn't a general or battle, emperor or president or assassin, as the "Great Man" school of history holds. It was more likely ... well, clocks or hay, the thermos bottle or smelting or writing. It was, in other words, a technological invention, according to 80-plus scholars gathered in the electronic salon called Edge (www.edge.org). In November, literary agent and author John Brockman, who presides over Edge, asked scientists and other thinkers to nominate the most important invention of the last 2,000 years. In the postings being released this week, one theme emerges: while the absence of any single political event would not have changed history much (if Gavrilo Princip hadn't shot Archduke Francis Ferdinand to start World War I, something else would have), the absence of certain inventions would have produced a world far different from the one we inherited. Without the automobile, there would be no suburbia.
Some of the Edge offerings are predictable (the steam engine, the telescope, space travel); some suggest that their nominators should log off occasionally (the Internet, public key encryption). Others are provocative: batteries, notes philosopher Daniel Dennett of Tufts University, allowed the development of transistor radios and cell phones, which are "the most potent weapons against totalitarianism ever invented, since they destroy all hope of centralized control of information." Even an invention as simple as knitting, argues physicist Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., triggered changes. Before knitting, many children died over the winter, so parents did not dare invest emotionally in them. The warmer clothes made possible by knitting "freed parents to develop a loving relationship with their children," says Dyson. Together, the nominations make a strong case that how we think, and the social and political institutions we create, are products of the science and technology we invent.

READING GLASSES Simple pairs of spectacles, says psychologist Nicholas Humphrey of the New School for Social Research in New York, "have effectively doubled the active life of everyone who reads or does fine work—and prevented the world being ruled by people under 40." That alone gets them into the inventions pantheon, but glasses also foster the mind-set that people need not accept the body nature gave them, and that physical limitations can be overcome with ingenuity.

THE ATOMIC BOMB With the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, mankind demonstrated that it had forged a technology that could, in seconds, return civilization to the Stone Age. Forever after, with or without a cold war, we will live in the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

THE PRINTING PRESS Among Edge's 80-plus postings, Gutenberg's 15th-century invention of movable type won by a landslide. The printing press allowed, for the first time, the rapid and widespread dissemination of information, knowledge and scholarship. It not only made myriad other inventions possible, since most inventions build on accumulated knowledge, but also triggered profound and lasting social and political changes. The printing press "led directly to mass literacy [and] democracy," notes Hendrik Hertzberg, executive editor of The New Yorker. Agrees physicist Raphael Kasper of Columbia University, "It spread knowledge beyond a small number of privileged individuals, thus permitting larger numbers to share or debate world views and to build upon past and present ideas."

CLOCKS Timepieces allow the practice of science, which is filled with quantities such as cycles per second. More important, they induce what W. Daniel Hillis, the father of massively parallel computing and vice president of R&D at the Walt Disney Co., calls the "temperament" of science. The clock, he says, embodies "objectivity. It converted time from a personal experience into a reality independent of perception. It gave us a framework in which the laws of nature could be ... quantified." Clocks also offer a metaphor for the unfolding of natural law—"God as watchmaker," winding up creation and letting it run—that lay the foundation for scientific thinking.

PLUMBING Waterworks, the plumbing and sewers that carry clean water to homes and fields and dirty water away from them, allowed cities to develop, argues Carl Zimmer of Discover magazine. "Without waterworks, the crowded conditions of the modern world would be utterly insupportable," he says. Waterworks allow microbial diseases such as cholera to be controlled, promoting public health, and let agriculture bloom in arid regions from the Middle East to California, shifting entire economies.

THE STIRRUP Historian Lynn White argues that the stirrup revolutionized warfare and made feudal society possible. With the Magna Charta, feudalism led to the idea of the consent of the governed. Keeping to the equine theme, Freeman Dyson nominates hay, without which civilization could not exist in northern climates. "Without horses you could not have urban civilization," he says. "So hay gave birth to Vienna and Paris and London and Berlin."

NUMBERS What does 3,780 have that MMMDCCLXXX lacks? Place value, thanks to the Hindu-Arabic number system, in which the position of a digit conveys information about its value. Combined with the use of a symbol for zero, the number system allows modern mathematics and hence science and technology, argues neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran of UC, San Diego. Without it, says mathematician Keith Devlin, "Galileo would have been unable to begin the quantificational study of nature that we now call science. Today, there is scarcely any aspect of life [including computers] that does not depend on our ability to handle numbers efficiently and accurately." Calculus, invented independently by Isaac Newton and Wilhelm Leibniz in the 17th century, builds on this number system. Modern technology might have arisen 1,000 years earlier if the Greeks had invented calculus, suggests computer scientist Bart Kosko.

ERASERS AND DELETE KEYS Along with "Wite-Out, the constitutional amendment and all the other tools that let us fix our mistakes," says Douglas Rushkoff, author of "Cyberia" and "Media Virus," these inventions give us the "ability to go back, erase and try again." Without it, "there would be no scientific model," for science is predicated on the notion that all "Truths" are merely tentative, ready to be overturned by the next discovery. Nor, without erasers and their cousins, would there be "any way to evolve government, culture or ethics," says Rushkoff. "The eraser is our confessor, our absolver and our time machine."

BIRTH CONTROL PILL The pill stimulated "feminism and the consequent erosion of conventional family structure in Western society," says Oxford University neuroscientist Colin Blakemore, and also fostered "the beginnings of an utterly different attitude to the social role of women." But arguably its most important effect, he suggests, was "the growing conception that our bodies are servants of our minds, rather than vice versa."

CLASSICAL MUSIC Works like Beethoven's, with their exquisite orderliness and beauty, have influenced "other forms of cognition," suggests psychologist Howard Gardner of Harvard University. According to the theory of the "Mozart effect," classical music fosters spatiotemporal thinking—the kind that underlies logic and math. Besides, says Gardner, "the pleasures of classical music are so widely available and cause so little damage."

THE COMPUTER Forests are felled so the digerati can write paeans to the power of processors to change the way we live, but computers can also save civilization itself, says neurophysiologist William Calvin of the University of Washington. Global climate is changing under the onslaught of greenhouse gases (from burning coal, oil and natural gas). Only computers, Calvin argues, "may allow us to understand the earth's fickle climate" and thus "prevent a collapse of civilization." If computers save us from ourselves, they will also "govern everything we do in the next 20 centuries," says physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University. They will push "the next phase of human evolution," he predicts, with self-aware, self-programmable computers becoming "integrat[ed] into [our] own development."  
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Newsweek International, Dec. 28, 1998/Jan. 4, 1999

The arrest of Augusto Pinochet has forced Chile — and the rest of Latin America — to wrestle with its brutal legacies.

By Brook Larmer

Under any other circumstances, Augusto Pinochet might consider this the perfect retirement. Chile's 83-year-old former dictator, after all, is in England — a country he once called "the ideal place to live" — ensconced in a luxury mansion suited for a former head of state. Tucked away on a private road in the London suburb of Wentworth in Surrey, Pinochet's current abode — known as The Everglades — is an elegant nine-bedroom house whose lawn borders the 17th fairway of the Wentworth Golf Club. The rent is steep, an estimated $17,000 a month, but no worry: his friends in Britain and Chile are picking up the tab. Pinochet, who looks every bit the English grandfather with his groomed white hair, arched eyebrows and slow, potbellied shuffle, isn't playing any golf. But from his yard the retired Army commander can see the jets ascending from nearby Heathrow Airport, where he was treated with deference when he arrived in September on his first foreign trip as a civilian. That's what he loved most about dear old England: its civility and restraint, its respect for the rules.

Only one small detail ruins the reverie: Pinochet is living under house arrest, facing extradition to Spain on charges of torture, terrorism and genocide committed during his 17 years in power. He is the victim, you might say, of Britain's respect for the rules. Shortly before midnight on Oct. 16, Scotland Yard detectives showed up at the London clinic where Pinochet was recovering from back surgery and, wielding an extradition warrant issued by a Spanish judge, placed the groggy old man under arrest. When the history of the 20th century is written, that simple act may end up being as significant as anything Pinochet did — good or bad — during his dictatorship. His detention has not only thrown Chile into a national crisis of conscience, revealing the haunting power of the past and the enduring tension between memory and forgetting. It has also pushed human-rights law into a controversial case that is being closely watched throughout the world.

Nobody is watching more carefully than the dictators who were counting on a peaceful retirement — and the victims who could never forget. The Pinochet case is the first to test whether crimes against humanity really do have, in practice, universal jurisdiction. Can any person be arrested and tried for crimes against humanity in a country that is not his own? That possibility has spurred new hope among victims that their tormentors may be brought to justice, but it has also raised new concerns — especially in the United States — that it will inspire wild vendettas. The next time George Bush or Norman Schwarzkopf is on vacation in Europe, for example, could he be arrested and extradited to Iraq for his "crimes against humanity" during the 1991 gulf war?

So far, nothing that extreme has happened. But in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Pinochet case has already inspired victims' groups to seek retribution more energetically. A few weeks ago a Haitian group petitioned France to extradite former dictator Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier, who fled there in 1986. In November, Cuban exiles filed a lawsuit in Spain against Fidel Castro, but the same Spanish court that is pursuing Pinochet rejected the case, citing Castro's protection as a current head of state. Cuban exiles bemoaned the "double standard," charging — as many Chileans do — that the human-rights community is interested only in right-wing despots. The biggest similarity, however, is in neighboring Argentina, where a judge has arrested two former members of the military juntas and several others for their role in the theft of infants during the "dirty war."

In Chile, Pinochet's arrest struck like a lightning bolt. And little wonder. Even today, 25 years after leading a bloody military coup against the socialist government of Salvador Allende, the unrepentant ex-dictator provokes such raw, contradictory emotions that it's sometimes hard to believe that people are talking about the same man. Many Chileans see Pinochet as a right-wing monster who disfigured their country's long democratic tradition, killing so many opponents without leaving a trace that a horrible new word — "the disappeared" — was added to the lexicon of human-rights abuses. Many others, an estimated 40 percent of all Chileans, prefer to see him as a kindly hero who saved their country from Marxism and laid the foundation for what has become the strongest economy in Latin America, with 14 straight years of solid growth.

With Pinochet's arrest in London, all those passionate divisions have come roaring back. The day he was arrested, Chileans poured into the streets of London, Santiago and Madrid in dueling demonstrations of joy and indignation. On Nov. 25, Pinochet's 83d birthday, Britain's highest court ruled, 3 to 2, that he did not have immunity from prosecution for crimes against humanity. Watching a live broadcast of the verdict at the posh Pinochet Foundation building in Santiago, a crowd of elderly, well-dressed Chileans turned angrily on the journalists present. "Get out, you sons of whores!" yelled one stately grandmother. "It's your fault! You're part of the socialist plot against our national father," screamed another woman in a silk blouse and pearls as she reared back to punch a photographer. Two weeks later, on Dec. 9, the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, British Home Secretary Jack Straw seemed to seal Pinochet's fate: Britain, he said, would not block his extradition.
But Pinochet has always been a survivor. And last week, in a breathtaking turn of events, the general got a reprieve. Britain's highest court quashed its earlier decision denying Pinochet immunity from arrest and announced that it would set up a new five-judge panel to hear the case in the new year. If Pinochet can convince the new panel that he does have immunity, he will be free to leave. If not, the appeals process alone could take so long that Pinochet might never face trial — or ever return home.

None of this would have happened, of course, if Pinochet had stayed home in the first place. In Chile he is safe. Almost from the moment he took power in 1973 he began constructing a series of legal, political and psychological barriers to keep himself untouchable. A 1978 amnesty law shielded him and his henchmen from prosecution. When he lost the 1988 plebiscite, he brokered a deal to continue as commander of the armed forces. And when he retired earlier this year, his own 1980 Constitution provided him with yet another protected niche: senator for life. And with many Chileans exhausted after years of fear and division, the civilian governments have seemed far more interested in racing toward the future than in uncovering the ugly, and potentially destabilizing, truths about the past. "This is a society that has a deep-rooted fear of conflict," says Santiago psychologist Elizabeth Lira. "So people have been conditioned to stay silent as a price for keeping the peace."

The silence has been only partially broken before. A 1991 government- sponsored investigation found that there were 3,197 deaths and disappearances from 1973 to 1978. The document, known as the Rettig Commission report, cut through the military's blithe denials of human-rights violations and was hailed as a model for democratic transitions, because it revealed the truth without seeking revenge. Yet the report didn't address Chile's 90,000 torture victims and 50,000 people who fled the dictatorship, and it did nothing to dampen the military's sense of being above the law. The only high-profile jailings of military officers came under U.S. pressure in the 1976 Washington car-bombing death of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt. Two senior Army officials were jailed in 1995, including former head of military intelligence Gen. Manuel Contreras, who insisted from his jail cell that he took orders from one man: Pinochet. "Contreras is a scapegoat, but that's OK," says one Chilean businessman. "We can't even think about trying Pinochet. He's too big a symbol."

Pinochet's best defense has been a booming economy. By squelching protest and bringing in the Chicago Boys — led by University of Chicago guru Milton Friedman — Pinochet radically reshaped the Chilean economy, reviving export industries and introducing free markets into nearly every facet of public life. After some bumps in the early 1980s, the economy has grown by nearly 7 percent a year since the mid-1980s — three times the Latin American average. This year Chile withstood the Asian crisis much better than its neighbors did, with growth slowing only to 4 percent. Much of the newfound wealth has not reached the poor — Chile's income gap is still among the widest in Latin America — but the middle class has expanded rapidly. And most of its members are too busy buying into the Chilean dream to bother ruminating about the past. Last year Santiago traffic police pulled over thousands of people for talking on their cellular phones while driving — which is illegal there — only to find that a third of them were using fakes made of plastic or wood.

Chile's transition isn't all for show, but in some ways it isn't much more substantial than those fake phones. On the outside it seemed a shining success: peaceful, prosperous and relatively democratic. But the tumultuous reaction to Pinochet's arrest shows that the wounds of Chile's past are far from being healed. The case has thrown Chile's consensual politics into a tailspin by revealing the chasm that still divides Chile between right and left, rich and poor, victors and victims. "We may have appeared OK to the outside world," Congressman Juan Pablo Letelier, son of Orlando Letelier, told The Washington Post. "But we're like a model family trying to hide the fact that their children were on drugs or their father was an alcoholic. Only now we can't hide it anymore."

Many Chileans, naturally, would rather keep this all in the family. They feel insulted that foreigners — especially their former colonial masters — are digging up their past and trampling on their delicate democratic transition. Did Spain put Franco's henchmen on trial, they ask? Has Britain punished its leaders for their excesses in Northern Ireland? (Has the United States, for that matter, really owned up to its role in the 1973 coup?) "It is an invasion of our country's sovereignty and pride; this is a domestic affair," says David Turner, an Anglo-Chilean who ran Chile's Shell Oil subsidiary for more than a decade. "It is damaging because it uncovers old wounds, and old wounds only heal with time."

For psychologists and human-rights activists, however, the controversy generated by Pinochet's arrest is a healthy reawakening of memory. If Chileans don't deal with the underlying issues of their conflict — and if nobody is held responsible for heinous crimes — then the past can come back to haunt. "It's impossible to construct a future by forgetting the past," says 49-year-old Pedro Alejandro Matta, who, as a law student, was tortured and imprisoned for 14 months before being sent into exile. "For 17 years they falsified history and hid the truth," says Matta, who returned to Chile in 1991 to start documenting the abuses at the torture centers. "Pinochet's arrest has opened a Pandora's box, and that creates some conflict. But that is the only way to create a truly democratic country. Otherwise, we forget the past and risk having history repeat itself."

The question, of course, is how to look at the past without provoking the old cycles of revenge and recrimination. Over the past two months — the longest period that Pinochet has been absent from his homeland — Chileans have talked more openly about the dictatorship than they have in years. Any hopes of reconciliation seem dim, but a common vision for the future in which human rights are respected may be emerging. The Roman Catholic Church has attracted broad support for its push to reopen an investigation into the deaths and disappearances under Pinochet. In a recent survey, nearly two thirds of Chileans polled said that Pinochet should be tried for his alleged crimes — a significant increase, even though most said the trial should take place in Chile, not Spain. (Pinochet now has 12 lawsuits pending against him in Chile, accusing him of everything from murder to genocide. But the 1978 amnesty — along with his status as senator — still protects him from prosecution in Chile.) Perhaps the most significant development has been the consensus on the left and right to find the remains of the disappeared. "That's just a starting point, but it's so elemental to any society," says one human-rights worker in Chile who requested anonymity.

Even in custody half a world away, Pinochet still holds Chile in his sway. And he is not budging an inch. In a rambling 13-page letter released on Dec. 11, Pinochet said that he had no blood on his hands. "I am absolutely innocent of all the crimes and deeds of which they irrationally accuse me," he wrote. Pinochet said that there may have been 3,000 deaths during his 17-year rule, but that one third of them were the result of left-wing terrorism. Chile's Foreign Minister José Miguel Insulza, a former exile who has worked tirelessly for Pinochet's release despite having been forced into exile by Pinochet, responded incredulously: "I'd like to see the documentation for that." In the letter Pinochet portrays himself as a martyr who would unite Chileans through his suffering. If the old man could go to Chile these days, he would see that his detention has served to revive the painful memories and old antagonisms of the past. But Pinochet can't leave. He's stuck in the garden of his lonely mansion, watching the outbound planes leave the England that he loves. 
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 Leonardo Dicaprio

Amid Titanic fanfare, he took a puzzling, club-crawling break

By now, we know his sign (Scorpio), his middle name (Wilhelm), that he once played the organ and that he bites his nails. Too much info already? Not for the global hordes of Leo-lovers who have generated more than 500 Web pages, made bestsellers of four biographies and devoured enough DiCaprio-related magazine stories to sink an even larger ship since their idol surfed the Titanic tsunami to superstardom this year. The 24-year-old actor, who earned $2.5 million playing charmer Jack Dawson, now commands $20 million a film. Maybe more. Says one top producer: "Leo is worth whatever money he would ever want to make."

The lure of a huge paycheck didn't change his decision to take a year off from acting, even as Titanic plowed into the record books (worldwide box office exceeds $1 billion) and roles in The Man in the Iron Mask and Celebrity kept his face on movie screens and the bedroom walls of countless teens. "He hasn't worked, because that's what his heart is telling him," says Titanic producer Jon Landau. "He goes out and does what he wants to do for himself." And others. When he wasn't exhausting us with his capacity to party ("I won't ever be a weird recluse," he assured Teen magazine), he impressed us with quiet good deeds, visiting paralyzed Chinese gymnast Sang Lan, attending a Make-A-Wish Foundation lunch for ill teens and donating $35,000 to a public library going up in his old Los Feliz, Calif., neighborhood.

But don't expect to see him exploring his soft side onscreen anytime soon. After nearly signing to play a yuppie serial killer in American Psycho, he opted instead for the role of a drug-taking homicidal backpacker in Trainspotting director Danny Boyle's The Beach. Will the grisly role tarnish his star? Just the opposite. Says Baz Luhrmann, who directed him in William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet: "Leonardo DiCaprio has other talents as an actor. If he can get through the shock wave of being this popular and can get back to his acting, what we'll see from him is an enormous capacity and an enormous range." 
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Monday 7 December 1998
Stephen Hawking to appear in The Simpsons
By Rosemary Behan

STEPHEN HAWKING, author of the best-selling A Brief History of Time, has fulfilled a personal ambition in being given a part in the American cartoon series The Simpsons.

Professor Hawking, 56, who is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, flew to Hollywood last week to record his distinctive electronic voice before animators begin creating his image for the cult television series about a dysfunctional family.

Prof Hawking plays himself as "an intellectual", complete with "supercharged wheelchair". The episode, to be screened in the United States in the spring, involves the setting up of a Mensa group in the Simpsons' home town which goes badly wrong, leaving Prof Hawking to rescue the credibility of "clever people".

Bonnie Patila, the producer, said: "He comes in to make a commentary on the universe as a whole and intellectuals. It's a show that has to do with intellectuals and we don't know anyone more intellectual than him."

The recording session was a one-off but the producers are considering regular appearances for Prof Hawking. Friends said the academic "greatly enjoyed" his Hollywood experience and would like to get more acting parts.

Other celebrities to have appeared in the series include Kim Basinger, U2 and former president George Bush. 
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GEORGE MICHAEL TALKS

Pop star George Michael, who has long been wary of the media, is talking to the press about his arrest last spring on lewd conduct charges. "If I'm going to be remembered in America as the guy that got caught playing with himself in the toilet, then I want people to know my take on it," Michael tells USA Today. Michael, 35, doesn't deny his behavior but says police entrapped him with a "very cute" undercover cop who lured him into a public bathroom. Michael says eight policemen attacked him like a "SWAT team." Michael also thinks authorities punished him because they wanted to show they could be tough on celebrities. "I was a convenient celebrity to slap on the wrist," he says. Michael pleaded no contest, paid an $810 fine and agreed to 80 hours of community service. 
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Mr Showbiz
December 4, 1998
Springsteen-E Street Band Tour Rumors Flourish

Will they or won't they? That's the question on the lips of many Bruce Springsteen fans in the weeks following the release of the four-CD box set Tracks, which cracks the vaults for dozens of previously unreleased studio recordings circa 1972-1998, most featuring the E Street Band. In interviews Springsteen has given in support of the box, he has danced around the question of touring with his once and possibly future band, generally stating that he's open to the idea, but offering no specifics, even when interrogated to the point of squirming on Charlie Rose's show two weeks ago.

Rumors of a tour are not only swirling, but a consensus is building as to what appears likely to happen. Sources in North America and in Europe suggest a spring-summer arena tour with the E Street Band is a go, with the first shows likely to take place on the continent in April, kicking off in Scandinavia. After Europe, Bruce and his bandmates would hit the States for a relatively quick run through 20 to 30 cities in an effort to keep him from spending too much time away from his family.

As for an official announcement of the tour, insiders say that word could come as early as a series of interviews Springsteen did with Bob Costas to be broadcast on NBC's Dateline this Sunday night and on the Today show Monday and Tuesday. If there is no announcement from the Costas pieces, it's expected Springsteen will confirm the tour during a European press trip through Berlin, Stockholm, Milan, and London next week. However, it must be noted that Springsteen has changed his mind on events of this magnitude before, and while plans may indeed be taking shape, not a single date has been confirmed.

Springsteen hasn't mounted a proper tour with the E Street Band since the conclusion of the Amnesty International Human Rights Now! tour in 1988. In 1995, Bruce and the band made a couple of television appearances promoting the release of Springsteen's Greatest Hits album, which featured three new recordings with the E Streeters cut in January of that year. The group's biggest tour ever, the 1984-'85 Born in the U.S.A. campaign, still stands as one of the most successful in rock history in terms of tickets sold, highlighted by a six-night stand at the 65,000-plus capacity Giants Stadium in E. Rutherford, N.J., and a four-night tour closer at the 90,000 seat L.A. Coliseum. 
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Cosmopolitan
Is this the man you want to marry?

From the first time he ambushed you with that outrageous smooch, the quiver in your stomach
hinted he could be The One. But before exchanging your single status for that binding band of gold, chill the bridesmaids. Might your partner merely be a stud du jour? Take this quiz and find out!
By Melina Gerosa

1. Your boyfriend makes you feel:
a. As desirable as a Sports Illustrated model.
b. More crucial to your bed than the sheets.
c. Absolutely unsubstitutable.

2. When the two of you pass a couple with a cranky baby, what happens?
a. He turns up his Walkman.
b. You squeeze each other's hands; a family is (probably) in your joint future.
c. You smile longingly while he - relieved the kid isn't his - grins gratefully.

3. Snooping around your boyfriend's car, you discover a recent note from a previous squeeze. You:
a. Don't care. He's never far enough away for any rekindling.
b. Wonder but keep worries to yourself.
c. Casually ask how his ex is doing.

4. All that holiday-party eggnog has tightened the fit of your party dress. He:
a. Teasingly calls you his real-life Roseanne.
b. Pushes the olive oil away from your focaccia.
c. Suggests an afternoon of Rollerblading over playing couch potato.

5. Unusual for you, Ms. Voracious, but it's been some time since you've unleashed your usual bedtime hunger. When you shut him down yet again, he:
a. Groans and clicks on ESPN.
b. Starts kissing your neck, slowly but surely working you into the mood.
c. Asks what's bothering you.

6. If, God forbid, things didn't work out with him, you know that:
a. A new and just-as-good Mr. Ring Bearer would come along eventually.
b. You'd never fully recover from the loss.
c. You would be heartbroken for a while but would feel ready to date soon enough.

7. Your Aruba rendezvous was beset with daily downpours. The two of you return:
a. Disappointed; beaching it for a week is why you went.
b. Relaxed; together-time was the main goal.
c. Sated; you made love nonstop.

8. He charms you most with his:
a. Eccentric habits.
b. Hilarious impersonations.
c. Surprise bouquets and thoughtful notes.

9. You're filled with a rush of love when you imagine him:
a. Five years from now, tending to your tots.
b. Busy at work that very moment.
c. On one of your steamier first dates.

10. When his favorite team is playing, he:
a. Yells and screams like a five-year-old.
b. Supplies you with endless and enlightening commentary. Who knew following a sport could be so riveting?
c. Is so sucked in, you use the time to pay bills, play catch-up with your girlfriends.

11. Mark each of the following statements T for true or F for false.
a. You come from similar backgrounds.
b. He grabs your hand a lot when you're out with friends.
c. The two of you have every single interest in common.
d. You don't like the relationship he has with his mom.
e. You're the first girlfriend he hasn't cheated on.
f. You enjoy watching the way he eats with chopsticks.
g. Your early courtship was laced with a series of coincidences.
h. Talking is rare during lovemaking.
i. You like it when his toes touch yours in bed.

12. The time you had that pregnancy scare, he:
a. Patiently assured you that you'd both been careful about birth control.
b. Suffered at your side through the home pregnancy test.
c. Was equally stressed out- couldn't stop calling to find out whether you'd gotten your period yet.

13. Your favorite joint activity would have to be:
a. Hanging out and talking.
b. Fooling around.
c. Hitting bars, clubs- making the scene.

14. The first person you'd call if you'd been given a promotion:
a. Your closest girlfriend
b. Your parents
c. Him

15. If you were to stop speaking midsentence, he'd:
a. Cock an eyebrow and wait for you to continue.
b. Smile and complete your thought.
c. Fix you with a blank stare.

16. When doubts begin to gnaw at you, your boyfriend:
a. Backs off and gives you time to think.
b. Jump-starts the romance with his own enthusiastic certainty.
c. Puts on a macho front-though you know he's panicking inside, the poor darling.

17. Since the moment you met him, you've felt:
a. Fiercely attracted.
b. Filled with respect.
c. Comfortable, secure.

18. The little voice in the back of your head:
a. Stopped picking at him ages ago.
b. Pressures you to nab him before some other lucky girl does.
c. Has never said an unkind word about him.

19. His buddies want him to join them for a golf weekend in Arizona. When he mentions the trip, you:
a. Encourage him to go; he's always been good about your nights out with the girls.
b. Say yes but secretly wish dates were included- and that the destination were Bermuda!
c. Remind him of plans you made with another couple for that weekend.

20. The quality in him that really turns you on?
a. The way he handles a tough situation
b. His sexy style
c. The respect he commands from coworkers 
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