You can't stop the signal

I can't say that either one of the books bring out any particularly strong feelings in me. A Billion Wicked Thoughts  to me is just a sort of unscientific statistical analysis/review article about what we know about human sexuality. The main points of it can be examined by typing in some words in to google trends and looking at Alexa rankings or more simply by visiting a porn site. I still find the book amusing because it combines all of these things in to an easy to read and sometime easy to judge format. I'm not bothered by the very matter of fact know it all tone of the book because the reduction of humans to a simple numbers is pretty much the point of this book and as a student of a discipline that models ideas by reducing whole populations to indifference curves and utility functions I find their data and conclusions useful. There is always that disclaimer that people are unique but a lot of the times Im more concerned with how people are the same. As for a similar type of thinking and its usefulness I have this rather amusing story I stole from r/technology http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/?partner=forbespicks&google_editors_picks=true
My real enjoyment of this book comes from the huge power of the internet, computers , personal data and habits. I find it really interesting how all of this information can be gathered and analyzed to create fairly accurate models of how people behave. There is also a certain beauty to seeing all of the different communities described in the book and how they are brought together by the internet. YAAAAY internet.

As for Sexing the Body, I definitely can't complain about the book it is a very good blend of all around science and information for the purpose of better explaining and examining who we are. However from the very little I have read so far (just the first chapter) it seems that the importance of culture and human interaction is a little bit forced. There is a definite impact but in the various examples we are given of how people are different the end results seems very much the same in terms of how the populations live their sexual lives. In the example of the goat Fausto-Sterling says that neither the genes and environment acted together to make two limbed goat unique, which is very true but without the genetic differences the environment would not have made the goat unique. It is foolish to deny environment as a factor but I feel that it is a bit too over stated in Sexing the Body, it seems to me that too much of an equal duality is given to genes and environment.
For the larger theme of culture and science I would say that Sexing the Body  is obviously the more important and useful work, it gives a more complete and balanced view of gender and sexuality. But my main theme here really is