Teenage Scientists Have Redefined Sex In Order To Have Less Of It

We’ve talked about this before. Not only do I think kids today are smarter than we ever were, I pretty much can’t wait for them to run the world. Nothing … and I mean nothing … in the corporate world compares to trying to get laid as a teenager. And not only are kids today having sex like cocaine-fueled bunnies, they are convincing researchers they’re having less of it. That, my friends, is scientific brilliance.

But there’s confusion in the scientific ranks about all of this and I will tell you why; it’s because teenagers are so smart they redefined sex to fool researchers so they can have more of it. First, the data. Item 1: a new study found that students who think about sex and listen to music about sex actually have more sex than other students.

How can that be true? I thought about sex all of the time as a teenager and I can assure you that thinking about sex - and I even went so far as to post pictures of mostly-naked girls in my bedroom as a hint - actually did less to make real naked women appear.

This is why scientists were secretly happy when well-meaning teachers put sex education in the curriculm. Nothing makes it easier to get laid than showing girls what they would be doing if they were ‘grown-ups’ - that is the kind of subtle peer pressure we could never have dreamed up. Thanks National Education Association!

And yet, it has worked perfectly for teenagers who get to have buckets of pre-marital sex and blame us if it goes badly. But wait for Item 2 - another study says that students are having a lot less sex than they used to have.

How can they both be true? Science will tell you how. Because kids may be book dumber than they used to be, but they are a heck of a lot street smarter.

We can have studies that give opposite results due to the problem of calibration. What do I mean? The second study uses 1991 as the reference year and, as everyone knows, that was the year before the election of President Bill Clinton. Now, this site is about science, not politics, but scientists will go on record as saying they like Bill Clinton for the same reason students taking surveys about sex do; he redefined what sex means. The study says in 1991 54.1% of students were having sex but today, even with all of that music in the first study and free internet porn, only 46.8% of students are having sex.

How is this possible? It must mean that sex education really works, right? Well, no, it means that the one time teenagers listened to their elders, it was when the President told them some kinds of sex weren’t really sex. In the 1991 study, it was sex if it involved two people and orgasms. In the intervening 15 years it changed so that it isn’t sex if you don’t know the girl’s name until your sixth orgasm. That means I was a virgin before I met Lady Scientist.* No wonder Paris Hilton thinks she is celibate.

I know this all sounds a little confusing. Given this new paradigm you probably want to know what the current definition of ’sex’ is, in case you have to take a survey. Well, it depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is.

Conclusion: Not only do I think the future is safe in the hands of such smart kids, I am cashing in my 401K. I think my Social Security will be worth millions in their capable hands and I’d like to buy a big trampoline for the yard right now.

*That’s right, you took my flower. Now bake me a pie.

The August issue of Scientific American tries to figure out why some people are better at things than other people. This, they contend, will help us teach better.

I don’t know why they bothered. I can answer that question in four words: I am smarter than you.* Now, that isn’t a value judgment, it’s just the way it is. We all went to school ( well, most of us, unless you live in a third world country, like Canada ) and we all applied ourselves in ways that we wanted to apply ourselves. Some people concentrated on getting an education, some focused on nailing chicks. Then there’s scientists, who were lucky enough to be skilled in both.

What this study claims they want to accomplish is to improve teaching but what they really want is to try and make equal opportunity mean equal outcomes. Science knows this is not practical because we’re all unique - just like everyone else.

No one can quantify why someone who claims to be a connoisseur in wine is barely more skilled than the average monkey at actually knowing one wine from another or why some truly stupid people are gazillionaires in business so they focus on what they can study; chess. We all know lots of dumb people who are great at chess so clearly expertise in that game can be taught. I am terrible at chess, mostly because it lacks originality these days - there is one, and I mean ONE - opening you can win with today. Unless you’re a grandmaster up against that wine-sipping monkey you aren’t going to win with Giuoco Piano in 2006, and that’s just a shame. I played chess once in 2005 and that was only because it was against this opponent:

For chess, that’s a supermodel. It’s okay, there aren’t many supermodels in science either.** But if studies like this teach us how to teach people better, it means we can teach more people to be better teachers - and that means more teachers who look like this:

Yeah, that Isis always made my little Captain Marvel go Shazam. No wonder I grew up so smart.

*Get it???
**However, should you know a science supermodel, send along a pic and contact info and we will do a special ‘Supermodels Of Science’ posting. If yours gets accepted, you win a free “Jenius” ( see at the top right ) t-shirt.

Or for the sensitive. To wit, I still haven’t cracked the top 50 science blogs but I think it’s mostly because I don’t shriek about evolution or global warming. There are blogs on that list that haven’t been updated since April so how many people link to you can be misleading.

Science … real science,not academia, where people have lots of time to blog … isn’t for the squeamish. If you’ve been in the private sector, you know they expect results.

Take this example. It’s an email I had forwarded to me from one of my applications engineers;

“XXXXXX, I got the inductance results on the subset of our package and your explanation of why they were different than I expected and, I have to tell you, they hit 8.2 on the bullsh*t Richter scale.”

It went downhill from there. Now, to help you calibrate, this guy was a consultant and his whole mission in life was to get a contract at the expense of the people actually employed at the customer’s company.

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