August 27, 2004

• Okay, I've been cycling between MoFi, MeFi, and Crooked Timber this morning and um, this is sorta freaking me out. You too? Anyway, I only scored 23%, and I had thought that was pretty good till I read in the CT comments what other people had achieved. I mean, I'm a merkin and the UK stuff messed me up.
• *shrug* It's a Friday (leastwise, it is here) so what can I say? Actually, I can say I want a taco, and it's lunchtime, so there's exactly a 100% chance that I'm getting me a taco and a shot of espresso (or two) and that should shove my rating up a notch. Mmmm, lunch.
• 31 questions? I would guess that I have about a 90% +/- 10% chance of not making it through it, especially being a Yank.
• Yeah, I thought the pain was going to go one forever....I got 11%, helped significantly by knowing that the how many states the U.S. has exactly.
• I think the hardest part is that because they are about things I don't care about, I don't care about answering 31 questions! Plus the site is slow as mud since so many people are taking it.
• 34%...got only 106 out of a possible 310 marks. = flunked
• At 24%, I did 100% better than I thought I would as I was answering. I was surprised at the ones I got right. Boy, that sure taxed my little brain.......I'm going back to bed.
• wooooo! i scored 78% hell yeah! take THAT, all you feeble-minded losers! well, ok, it was 78% wrong, actually. which works out to 12% right. guess i suck. but you gotta admit you were impressed for a second there, weren't ya?
• 44% right. How very sad. I guess that's what I get for having a trivial mind.
• "...well, ok, it was 78% wrong, actually. which works out to 12% right." I think I've detected part of your difficulty. :)
• 21%, and I was surprised by what I got wrong or right. That was fun.
• I got 25%. I think that people in England would do substantially better. The stuff about when a king was crowned and someone was born and distances between two towns and counties in England I had no idea on. I'd never even heard of the King or the guy who I was asked when he was born. I got dem 50 states right though, by God!
• 18%!! woo-hoo!! I never heard of Tony Benn, so I googled it, and google said "Did you mean: Tony Bennett heh.
• 14%, not much good at estimations unless its something I that directly concerns me. Most of the answers I gave were guesses, I know little about the UK. Yes, its a fun little quiz.
• Wow, suddenly I feel better about my 28%... (50 states! Woooo!!!!)
• 21%, i got screwed on the time-it-takes-light-to-reach-the-earth question by not reading the fine print, where it says your answers don't have to be whole numbers. curse you, "this is the exact answer" checkbox!
• 39% -- nifty quiz -- thanks!
• Number of questions before I stopped caring: 21 +/- 5 Number of questions answered before the boss gets mad: 2 +/- 1
• Excellent stuff! exposed quite shocking gaps in my knowledge, some of which are rather important. I got 18% but I had the feeling that I was doing well. Bah!!!
• woot! 35%. i could have done better but all my answers where the margin of error equaled my guess didn't help.
• 34%. I'm not a British subject.
• 27, and I'm still kicking myself for being off on the lady cosmonaut. Damn commies. And yeah, I said 8 minutes for light to earth, said, it's exact thinking only integers. I guess the lesson is, when you have to guess, get all the information possible.
• 31%. I learned something from my skeletal biology class!
• 28% yay american edukashunal system
• 22%, because I knew some of the famous dates. I would have gotten a higher score if I'd expanded the range of uncertainty for many of them. The best part was when I totally lowballed the number of shopping bags used yearly in Australia, and a message appeared on the screen that perhaps I wanted to guess again because my answer was too low.
• I got ten points on that Australian shopping bag question because I've spent so much time (in my head) in Oz these past two weeks, due to a Mister Ian Thorpe. Population x weeks in year x four = ten points! So who is Tony Benn?
• 18%. I got the famous dates right, too (yay, history major!), but I couldn't figure out how to do the margin of error thingy correctly. Math and I are not friends. In fact, we're no longer speaking.
• 27% surprised i got even that much. so many blind guesses. i guess they were smart blind guesses!
• Tony Benn, British Labour MP (and I'm guessing quite a colorful one, to have made the question). Born 1925, which means I got that one right without knowing who he is (I figured 1925 +- 10 years, assuming from the question that he was most likely an old man today)
• I got 24%. Sadly, I, with a PhD in astrophysics, got 0 on all of the astronomy questions.
• Oh, wait. I think I did get the Sunlight travel time question right. I forgot to check it.
• Tony Benn, Tony Benn, Condemned to oblivion again. Were you the first Or worst of men? Were you famous because of what you might disclose? Time passes. No one knows whether people were foolish asses. Nobody cares. More time passes. Nobody knows. What was the height of your ambition? Were you a decent politician? Did you wish to lead the nation? What was your eventual doom? Were you ever expelled from your party? Were you witty? Were you wrapped in gloom? I ask you again -- Did you take young ladies to a hotel room? Or canoodle young men? Did you do something naughty way back when? Or noble? What went, And how goes it now with our man Tony Benn?
• bees does it again!
• 33%, but only because I often had margins of error nearly as large as my answers.
• I didn't do well, but I got all the history dates right. Which is probably a good thing for a history student, especially as they were all in my field.
• 74%. And were I a little more careful in reading the questions, could have probably picked up a few more points.
• My problem was second-guessing myself. I had the right date for King Harald, but thought I'd gotten mixed up and added a +/- in there. Did that a few more times but that one annoys me now.
• 74 friggen-percent???!!! What-evuuuurrr :( How did you get to be mister smarty-pants? @#$*&%$#@
• 44% which I *thought* wasn't too bad until I see Wolof get 74%. I think he knew the extact number of plastic bags Australians use in a year.
• It was a good reality check for me. I'm not innumerate (this is a reference to the famous book "Innumeracy"...oh, heck, I'll link to it just a sec), and I know a bunch of stuff, but I've always been aware that pesky things like, you know, numbers and reasonably exact quantities and specific facts weren't my forte. I only remember this kind of factual stuff (important dates, quantities) if it's in some qualitative context. That's why I remembered the Sun to Earth light travel time
• The author of the quiz has posted a follow up, showing how well people did.. via Slashdot. Part two
• So, Wolof got an 'A' but the teacher thinks he may have been cheating!! Hahahaha!