This article talks about surveys that show that men have more partners than women on average. I never thought about the math here, and it is impossible for these surveys to be true unless folks are either lying or including homosexual relationships. (via The Big Picture)

Update: Ugh, is the article getting the math wrong, too??? From the article:

that men had a median of seven partners and women four.

It is entirely possible for the median to be higher while the average stays the same. That just indicates that that there are more men who are at the higher end of the scale than women, which would fit the other conclusions of the studies that show men are more “promiscuous” than women. To be sure, the article uses “average” a number of times, but at least for this one example, it’s clearly not an average but the median.

Update: blowing this out into a normal post instead of a Link post. Via Pandagon, I found a response by the math prof quoted in the article over at Salon.com. He points out that he didn’t attack the median statements, only the averages, and also points out that the raw CDC data is fairly useless because of how unlikely the spreads are. Worth taking a quick look.