Obviously, there was a lot of snow this past weekend, courtesy of Storm Jonas. There were 26.8 inches of snow, in fact. Plenty of New Yorkers spent the weekend inside, eating Cup A Noodles, drinking wine, and having sex.
Plenty of drugstores ran out of condoms. Plenty of roommates heard their roommates doing things they never wanted to hear. When Monday morning came, plenty of New Yorkers struggled to get to work after all this debauchery.
So now, we've got to ask the question fresh on everyone's mind: Do blizzards actually cause population booms?
Yeah, in case you forgot, having heterosexual sex could actually result in pregnancy. NPR set out to actually find out whether snowstorms produce more babies.
"With low-level, low-severity storm advisories, we actually found an uptick in births nine months later. So, it was about a 2 percent increase with tropical storm watches," said Richard Evans, professor of economics at Brigham Young University.
Evans joined up with Yingyao Hu and Zhong Zhao to publish the most definitive study yet on how emergency weather conditions affect birth rates.
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"The other thing we found - that is also intuitive, but no one had ever detected this before - was that, with the most severe storm warnings... you get almost an equal decrease in births nine months later," Evans said.
Translation: if you're worried about survival, you don't really have time to make babies.
Still, when we hone in on Storm Jonas, the hot topic blizzard fresh on all our minds, Evans says it's got a good shot at increasing the population.
"I think the blizzard that's hitting the East Coast right now is more like a low-severity storm advisory - in the sense that, for the most part, people are not being asked to evacuate, they're not running. They're just told to hunker down in their houses for the duration of the storm," Evans said.
Which means: Storm Jonas is a prime baby-making storm.
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"If the lights go out and there's no TV, it kind of sets the table for romance, and you get birth nine months later," Evans said.
Evans also had a pretty hilarious quip about his role in compiling data about storms and fertility.
"You get hurricanes and sex, and I am the guy for that - either fortunately or unfortunately," Evans said.
Of course, this only applies to those who spent the storm having straight, heterosexual... sex. If you spent the storm having gay sex, we're guessing the data from Evans' study doesn't apply to you because, you know, science.
The point of all this is, well, to all of you who spent the blizzard doing it like they do on the Discovery channel, we hope you used condoms. Unless you're actually trying to start a family. Then, hopefully it all worked out.
Check out Can You Guess Where NYC Ranked Among the 50 Most Beautiful Cities in the World.
[via NPR] [Feature Image Courtesy Instagram]