pop-test: gay or straight? check your fingers.

here we are in ann arbor MI, we just got back from east lansing interviewing the professor who studied finger length as a marker for pre-natal testosterone. his research has been re-appropriated into pop-culture: "give me your hand or the hand of your two year old. i'll compare the length of your pointing finger and your ring finger, and i'll be able to tell you if you're gay or straight." or so you might think. unfortunately a little thing called statistics is in the way of the mighty pop-brain. this mis-interpretation is akin, statistically, to saying if you are over five foot seven you are a man and if you are under five foot seven you are a woman. all the study really found was that on average women whose pointing finger length to ring finger length ratio is smaller than average are more likely to be lesbian. on average means some of the time, but not all of the time or even most of the time. there is a better test to see if a woman is a lesbian that's at least 90% accurate. assume she is straight. and there's an even better test that's 99.9% accurate. if she feels safe enough to answer, ask her.