Editor's Blog May 23rd 2012
Don’t Believe the Hype
Did you know that during the average life span, you would have produced enough saliva to fill a swimming pool? These and many facts that circulate on the Internet may sound amazing, but don’t hold up to scrutiny. For example, how big exactly is this swimming pool?
Fact, is something that unless you can confirm it through at least three reputable sources, is nothing but an anecdote that you can tell your friends, but be prepared to a chorus of “bullshit” from your listeners or readers.
Oh, there are some facts that have been confirmed, like your eyes will be always the same size from the moment of birth but your ears and nose never stop growing. I just wonder that if you lived to a very old age would you start looking like a pachyderm?
Some so called ‘facts’ are down right unfounded, one in particular made me laugh, it goes like this: On any given day, sexual intercourse amongst humans takes place 120 million times. Now, as far as mathematics is concerned, I am a complete moron, but I kind of find this number a tad on the low side, and I will now attempt to come up with my own figure and show the working out.
7 billion people on earth, of those 7 billion lets say that 2 thirds are of sexually active age, giving a start figure of about 4.6 billion people. Lets say that of 4.6 billion people we can lose another third due to things like,
- Being ugly.
- Ginger.
- A member of the clergy.
- Male impotence.
- Feminists.
- Christian fundamentalists, or other religious groups that frown upon sex before marriage.
- In Prison (not impossible but more difficult)
So 4.6 billion divide by 3 gives us about 1.5 Billion people, of which we can say that half of these would be teenagers, which would give us about 150 million, but because teenagers are to busy masturbating, being all awkward or playing world of Warcraft, so they don’t count.
A final figure of approximately 150 million is all that remains according to my ham fisted algebra. Very close to that original Internet factoid of 120 million right? Well no, you see they left out a couple of important variables.
Lets say that ideally half of the 150 million are women, which gives us a figure of 75 million women, who a third would be menstruating or already pregnant or lesbians, leaving us with about 25 million women and 75 million men. Out of the 75 million men, the internet will tell you that 1 in four men are gay, so we must allow for that, out of the 75 million men 18.75 million of them are gay, leaving us with 56.5 million men.
The totals as they stand now leave us with 25 Million women and 56.5 million men who are sexually active right! Wrong! Half of each sex we will assume that they are married and everybody knows married people only have sex about twice a year.
So we are now left with 12.5 million women and 28.25 million men who are able to have sex on an any given day, but everybody knows 28.25 million men don’t go into 12.5 million women (unless its German Porn) so for the sake of rounding things up lets say that we are left with an equal amount of both sexes 12.5 million men and 12.5million women.
Again we have left out a major variable in that out of 12.5 million women, half will have a headache or doing their hair and half of the men will be playing Call of Duty or too drunk to perform, leaving us again with a figure of 6.25 million men and 6.25 million women.
Finally then, I have concluded that the Internets fact that on any given day sexual intercourse amongst humans occurs 120 million times is erroneous and according to my calculations it is something more like 6.5 million times much lower than I expected.
As a final note and by way of a disclaimer, the originator of all the mathematics found above does not know how to do long division and never sat his GCSE’s, but even then this should serve as a lesson to all of you, don’t believe every thing you read on the internet.
Editor invites anyone with mathematical prowess to challenge these findings.
Ed.
