A major research breakthrough was announced today by the Raptor Institute for Applied Woohooology. According to an Institute press release, researchers there have discovered that public woohoo in hot tubs, as illustrated here:

photo Simsociated Press / Cox

fulfills the immediate "Public Woohoo" want, but does not produce a corresponding memory trace in the participants, and therefore does not count toward the specific cardinality wants (for public woohoos with 3, 5, 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, 1000, 10000 different individuals).

"While this is only a preliminary result, and requires confirmation by our own and other teams," said Sally Raptor, head of research at the Institute, "we believe that this is a significant breakthrough, and explains much of the confusion on this issue that has existed in the research community. Of course there are still unanswered questions, such as the significance of other parties on the lot, and much more research is needed. Lots and lots of research. Lots and lots of really thorough research. Lots."

(Ha! I knew that Sally had had public woohoos with at least three different Sims, and got the short-term Want credit for them, but the level-3 Want kept coming up anyway, and I could only find one record in her memories. Then I realized that the one memory record was a changing-booth one, whereas the others had been hot tub ones. Turns out that the old saying "a public woohoo is a public woohoo" isn't quite accurate.)