29 August, 2007

the facts of life

if you're not a regular peruser of the new york times i can strongly suggest heading over to bugmenot and picking up a free password (i'm a lazy and poor man. you should be too), so as to permit access to their wide variety of generally above par articles.

you have to work for superlatives from me.

one that particularly entertained me of late was this appraisal of the mathematic logic behind the fairly non-controversial assumption that men have more sex than women.

In study after study and in country after country, men report more, often many more, sexual partners than women.

One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5.

But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for heterosexual men to have more partners on average than heterosexual women. Those survey results cannot be correct.


all of us are lying to researchers about sex. and i think that is pretty awesome. a better conversation piece i can barely imagine... and while we're talking about sex, this is the EU's attempt to promote how awesome the sex in their films is. because they didn't already have a reputation.