Foul thoughts

There was a thing in the Daily Telegraph yesterday that claimed the average cappuccino is about 400 Calories. And if one cup costs about £3, and you have one every day (not including weekends), that comes to £783 a year or £786 if it's a leap year and 29 Feb is a weekday. More to the point, it's 104,400 Calories, or 104,800 if you had that extra one on 29 Feb, which is clearly quite disgusting. I wonder how much saturated fat that would equate to. Foul anyway. I only drink black coffee. I wonder how much caffein I have. I bet it's too much. I should think I have about 5 or 6 cups a day. I don't want to think about it. It must be worse if you have those cappuccino mocha things, and much much worse if you add sugar. I don't have sugar. That must make it OK.

There is a great report in the Telegraph today about students having sex and how it affects their academic performance. I don't have any strong feelings. I don't care whether students are bonking or not. The story is however quite hysterical. I think I'm going to take this point by point, my comments in bold:

The headline is "Sex bad for grades, Cambridge survey shows". I'll come back to this, but it's completely subjective.

"It questioned more than 1,000 undergraduates and found that students at poorly performing colleges slept around the most". You mean it found that studenmts who told you they were sleeping around a lot were performing badly. People lie about sex more than any other topic in the universe. You get false positives and false negatives.

"The online poll, published in the student magazine Varsity, found that students studying medicine had the most number of sexual partners (eight) while those reading theology had the fewest (two)". Well, quelle suprize, the holy rollers were less willing to admit promiscuity than the students studying medicine.

"Ed Cumming, the magazine's associate editor, said: 'Some results confirm long-held stereotypes. Those involved in postgraduate study are less likely to have had sex than their undergraduate counterparts'. What are you talking about Ed? All your postgrads must have been undergrads in the last 4 or 5 years at the most. Some of them will only have stopped being undergrads a matter of weeks ago. Do they get a letter from the dean reinstating them as virgins when they get their bachelors degree? I don't remember getting mine. Perhaps it only happens at Cambridge.

OK, as I promised, back to the headline, "Sex bad for grades, Cambridge survey shows". Lets assume for one moment, that in some weird parallel universe, it can actually be demonstrated that students who bonk the least get the best grades, where is the causal link? Couldn't you just as easily state, "Good academics lack sex drive", or "Academic failure causes students to seek comfort in sexual relationships", or perhaps, "Promiscuity is caused by lack of confidence stemming from academic failure", or even, "Ink used by university on pass certificates damages sex drive".

In short, unless you can prove somehow that those students who do badly, do better when they cut out the sex, or the other way round, you can't make any conclusion at all regarding which one causes the other.