Window shopping for love isn't just for red-light districts anymore.

The culture that brought you Cliff Notes, television-on-demand and instant coffee is revising the chapter on dating and introducing singles to a whole new way of conducting the business of pleasure: speed dating.

Speed dating, the round-robin technique of meeting 20 people in the time it takes most to muster a "hello," shuffles people into different combinations of pairs until (hopefully) a match is made. After the shuffle you fill out a "hot-or-not" type evaluation that lets compatible people know its OK to contact each other.

The taste-everything-on-the-menu technique got its start in the early '90s when Yaacov Deyo, a Los Angeles Rabbi, decided there ought to be a better way for Jewish singles to meet. In the decade since its advent, the technique has dropped the religious connotation and picked up leagues of interested parties trying to put a little love in their time-constrained lives.

Which is exactly what Drew Civelek, Model U.N. president, saw the need for when he brought speed dating to Penn State for a night as a fundraiser for his group last night. Civelek's club had its University Park Allocation Committee funding cut and needed a way to raise some money. And in the meantime it's raised some eyebrows, but more importantly, the interest of students.

"You come to Penn State, you make six friends and you don't really talk to anyone else," Civelek said. "We're trying to make a big university small."

And they're doing it in record time. When Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in 1954 it shattered perceptions of what was possible in the world of racing and spilled onto headlines worldwide. But in the world of love, is four minutes all you need?

Maybe it's enough to know if you're willing to spend the precious commodity of time on Date No. 2. Or maybe it's a sign that our culture has finally done the unthinkable: We've made love a business plan where we aim to maximize efficiency and minimize cost. Are we robots?

Or are we just trying to squeeze meaning into days when the term "free time" seems like it should be taught about in mythology class? Is speed dating the solution to this constant pressure for our time, or is it merely a reflection of the problem?

The answer is simple: We don't have time to think about it.

But Civelek stressed that the Penn State version of speed dating, or the Nittany Notes of love, is merely for kicks.

And if Romeo finds Juliet, that's icing on the cake. He said the people who seemed to be interested in the event were the people who thought it was funny -- people who saw portrayals of speed dating in movies like Hitch and The 40 Year Old Virgin and figured it would at least be an entertaining diversion. But he gave an interesting outlook on why the dating sampler platter might be gaining popularity.

"It's kind of a commentary on our inability to talk to each other," he said. "The response that we're getting shows that people do want to talk to each other, but we're just losing those skills."

So you have to wonder, what other skills are we losing along the way? This is the generation that traded home cooking for microwave dinners, and the food lost its taste. We opt for e-mail over office hours. We send instant messages instead of making phone calls. We pick Web sites over toll-free hotlines. And we get the same results, just without the sensation of human interaction.

We're taking the tedious legwork out of things, but in the process we seem to lose something. We're more concerned with the destination when it's the journey that really counts. I know most people involved probably aren't looking for their life partner, but eventually they will be. Do you want to tell your kids you met their mom at the dating factory?

I'm probably taking this too seriously. But if people start text-messaging their wedding vows, don't say I didn't warn you.