People Who Tweet Are More Likely to Masturbate...

...at least if those people have a profile on OKcupid. :)

Everyone is probably not as data-obsessive as I am. Even though it's almost antithetical to most of my personality -- I'm a hippie with a high tolerance for ambiguity and an artistic streak -- years of school and conducting research has somehow trained me to become super excited about data. There's nothing like an unexpected correlation to spark my intellectual curiosity.

Anyway, the folks who run OKCupid apparently love data, too. There are 7 million people signed up to OKCupid who freely submit information about themselves. It is a huge, gigantic, enormous data set ripe for mining. So these folks run correlations for fun and come up with some really interesting data. Granted, this isn't a random sampling of any population, so you can't generalize it and there's some methological weaknesses here. (I'm happy to explain all of this, if you're curious but haven't taken a behavioral/social sciences stats/methods course recently). 

They ran some crazy correlations on sex, like crossing religion and masturbation responses, women's body type by sex drive by self-confidence, and per capital national GDPs by people looking for random hook ups. Ha. I wish I was on this team, sitting around and thinking up this shit. I mean, what a fun job. 

Check it out - 10 Charts About Sex at OKTrends.


On a related side note, do you know why there's an increase in the murder rate in Chicago when there's an increase in ice cream sales?

(you're welcome to guess in the comments)