Jun 102010
 

According to this article on Sarah Palin’s alleged breast enhancements – which is just foolish speculation anyway – lesbians will apparently spend three times as much time checking out breasts. Maybe so, but the interesting point is the woefully pathetic numerical sanity checking in this article.

Who can spend 111% of their time doing anything ? We are not talking about that foolish “110% effort” which is just innumerate marketing, but a simple bit of statistics. If you spend every second of every day staring at TV, you might get to 100% time spent wasting your time, but no matter how hard you work at it you’ll never get beyond 100% – it just isn’t possible to use more time than is available. A figure of 111% translates as spending a smidgen over 26.5 hours in every 24 hours staring at boobs.

Not only impossible, but frankly the lesbians I have met do not seem any more inclined to turn into drooling idiots in the presence of breasts than ordinary men do. To go on because that could be misunderstood … lesbians seem perfectly capable of holding down jobs, joining a conversation, and doing pretty much everything others are capable of. Something they would find tricky if they were so obsessed with breasts that they spent an impossible 111% of their time staring at boobs.

In case you are thinking that the 111% figure is a simple typo, it is made clear in the article that the figure is “calculated” by taking the figure that straight women spend obsessing about their friends breasts (37%) and multiplying by three because lesbians spend three times as much time obsessed with breasts. Not the way that such a calculation is made!

Perhaps the relevant article author should spent a little less time thinking about breasts and more on basic numeracy. This kind of inaccuracy is the kind of thing that gives the “news” media (and the Internet) a bad name for inaccuracy.