April 04, 2007
Using word counts to sex robots
Jim Cameron wrote in with a link to today's Freefall cartoon, whose last two panels are relevant to the Female Brain words-per-day meme:
Jim also sent a link to a forum post by the cartoonist, Mark Stanley, who explains:
This is based on one of those lovely little stories that gains a lot of press without evidence. It’s documented in Sex on the Brain. [...]
I’ve heard variants of "Women use more words per day than men" at least a dozen times. Seemed to be an easy thing to turn it on its head with the robots. Instead of sex determining number of words, number of words determine sex.
Hopefully, I'm not the only cartoonist out there who researches his jokes.
Alas, it seems that he researches his jokes better than some people research their science writing.
Here's the strip with the first panel restored:
