From: jfh@rpp386.lonestar.org (John F. Haugh II)
Newsgroups: tx.politics
Subject: Re: fetus vs. baby
Date: 14 Aug 92 02:20:16 GMT
Reply-To: jfh@rpp386.cactus.org (John F. Haugh II)
Distribution: tx
Organization: River Parishes Programming, Austin, Republic of Texas

In article <1992Aug12.200605.20461@watson.ibm.com> johniac@hwperform.austin.ibm.com (John Iacoletti) writes:
>I came up with two scenarios:  She might not get pregnant in the
>first place or they might get married before the baby is born.  
>I don't have to prove a negative.  If you want to claim that there is
>a one-to-one correspondence between premarital sex acts and
>illegitimate births, you have to claim that the above two scenarios
>have never happened.  One example is enough to disprove it. 

No, your "example" doesn't prove anything.  Again, we have evidence
TODAY that if you have sex at some rate <X> and you aren't using
birth control, that you will ON AVERAGE get pregnant at some rate <Y>.

The "Law of Big Numbers" (it's a real law of probability and statistics,
just like "Gravity" is a law in physics) says that as the sample population
grows, it behaves more like the overall population.  Applying it here, it
says that as the sample number of women having sex increases, the number of
pregnancies that those women have will approach the overall average for the
population.  Thus a single coin flip will produce very skewed results, but
100 or 100,000 flips will tend to approach 50% heads.  Likewise, if a
large number of women are having sex, and we call this sample "The set of
women who are not married and having sex", the pregnancy rate within that
sample will approach the pregnancy rate for the entire population of women
who are having sex, both married and unmarried.

It is UNREASONABLE to claim that some magical property exists which would
cause an unmarried women to become pregnant when no factor other than her
marital status distinguishers her from her married counterpart.  This
isn't just Haugh Logic.  Unless "Marriage" somehow causes fertility to
increase, there is no justification for an assumption that not being
married and having sex DOESN'T result in the same probability of having a
child.

>Maybe because there's no such thing as a "sibbling", so nobody had one
>at all. :-)

I'm testing my spelling checker.

>Usenet polls are so scientific.  Would you care to tell us how many
>responses you got and what your margin of error was?  Remember I only
>have to find ONE example.

About a dozen.  Not being a scientific poll, the margin of error is
+/- 100%.  Again, you have yet to produce the 35% population group that
you claim was getting married right after the woman got pregnant.  And
lest I remind you of statistics, if you select a random sample, you will
find the ratio within that sample approaches the ratio in the overall
population as the sample size increases.

>There you go changing your story again.  You said that 78% of all
>teenagers are VIRGINS, not 78% of all teenagers don't have sex.  If
>you have intercourse ONE TIME, you are no longer a virgin.  By the way,
>you still haven't said where you got your 78% number.

Duh.  If they aren't having sex, they aren't having sex.  But just so
you are happy, 78% are STILL VIRGINS.

>Look up "teenager" in your $3.95 Merriam-Webster.  Better yet, I'll
>give you the definition from my $9.99 Webster's New Collegiate:

No, I leave the expensive dictionary in the other room.  It's bad enough
that the desk gets cluttered with a typical days posting without having
USEFUL books drug in here.

>teenager n : a person in his teens
>
>teens n pl 1: the numbers 13 to 19 inclusive; specif : the years 13 to
>              19 in a lifetime or century 
>
>           2: TEENAGERS

Perhaps I should post while awake.

The article dealt with the need for school students to be taught
"sex ed" and the like and was discussing how sexually active "school
children" are.  The age group that was mentioned, as I recall, was
12 to 18.  Being my usually imprecise self, I probably miswrote that
as being "teenagers".  I remember that you said something about 19
year olds, and it struck me as stupid since that wasn't what the
report was about.  Most 19 year olds aren't in high school any more ...

At any rate, since I'm not interested in digging through a stack
of magazines, I'll conceed this point - obviously 10 year olds weren't
what they had in mind and why the hell I pressed the issue about 10
year old being a teenager is beyond me.

But the simple fact remains - "teenage" sex is not as common or as
frequent as you make it out to be.  Even if 53% of 18 year olds have
had sex, 47% haven't, and it is axiomatic that one year earlier, no
more than 53% were.  Eventually that number must reach zero.  Those
of us that understand numerical integration know that the sum of the
area under that line is often less than any single largest value
times the length of that line.  That was my original remark - if
50% of the 18 year olds have had sex, and 40% of the 17 year old
and so on, until you get to 0 at age 13, the total is much more like
78% than 50%.  And if you do the math (0% at age 13, 10% at age 14,
20% at age 15, 30% at age 16, 40% at age 17, and 50% at age 18) you
wind up with 75% of that age group being virgins.  That means,
according to that "example" that 25% aren't virgins.  Which is
quite close to the 22% claimed in the report I cited earlier.

>Let me see if I have this straight.  You honestly believe that
>masturbation causes blindness and baldness?

Of course.  I've seen your hairline, and I happen to know that your
eyeglass perscription is worse than mine.  QED.
-- 
John F. Haugh II                   | Life's Little Instruction Book:
Ma Bell: (512) 251-2151            | "#138.  Learn Spanish.  In a few years,
UUCP: ...!cs.utexas.edu!rpp386!jfh |  more than 35% of all Americans will speak
Domain: jfh@rpp386.cactus.org      |  it as their first language."