I built another version of this about 30ish years ago, you can see it now at www.deathclock.com. I sold the site about 15 years ago (helped pay for an adoption). It was my first "successful" website, getting near 5 million views per day. It was also a useful programming exercise (learned the painful way that one ColdFusion function wouldn't support large numbers and others would, so had to do so wrangling to get the final number right).
This is going to sound stupid but your website is one of my first memories I have of the internet.
I was shown it by a school friend (we were about ~8 years old) and I remember being scared about the result, none of could read English well so pretty sure we filled out nonsense for the weight input :)
I have the almost exact same story as parent.
Was around 10 years myself and remember using your website and being really scared of what the outcome would be
I remember that site and it was actually what I was expecting to see when I clicked on the OP! I feel like the version I remember stumbling across had smoking but no BMI but I can't corroborate it on archive.org
Smoking and BMI and other stuff came after I sold it. I used to have hardware models too - I forget who I partnered with. It never did earn any real $$.
Hey! I used that website when i was very young and surfing away my curiosities on the limited web.Thanks for that, i never thought i'd see the guy who made it.Also i believe it's one of the first sources (if not the first) where i learned what BMI was[if the version back then had it, which i think it did].
Back when this was announced, I blogged about it and built a demo. This demo simply finds a random cover over the past 50 years. It updates every - 30 seconds - I think. Anyway, here it is:
I'm currently in China now adopting my fourth child. I would not agree with this comment, although obviously I'm biased. When you adopt you have the choice between accepting a child that is healthy and one with special needs. Sometimes these needs are severe, sometimes minor. If you accept a child with special needs, the wait for placement can be much quicker. That is what we did and our child has a minor issue that can be corrected with cosmetic-level surgery. In my opinion, that is nothing. But to be clear, there are perfectly healthy children open for adoption as well.
I've seen multiple people now talk about how unprepared the adoptive parents seemed to be. From my view, this is the minority. We are currently at the end of our stay and are at a hotel with maybe 10-15 other families. Every one we've spoken to were very prepared and knew what they were getting into.
Well, I'd certainly never pretend to have the first-hand experience you have! I was only reporting my impressions from a TV documentary, 2 years ago. I don't even remember which area it was, or the program's name. You obviously seem to know what you're doing; maybe my impressions were incorrect, or the program spun it that way.
As for the kids - don't get me wrong, plenty were healthy; but they did not conform to normal asian notions of physical attractiveness. The unavoidable conclusion was that the chinese adoptive parents, who had first choice, cared greatly about this factor, whereas the americans either couldn't tell or didn't care.
