Solipsism Gradient

This seems to be mostly accurate:

Linked to by the J-Walk Blog, as usual… curiously enough, the first version of these pages used nearly exactly this light cyan tint as a background, but I found it slightly tiring.

Winding down from the strains of pushing out a new version, and from the nerve-jangling effects of a late-night wedding party with 130 dB-plus music, I stumbled upon a Digital IQ Test pointed out by the stalwart J-Walk Blog. It turns out that:

You are a digital ace, expert in both practice and theory, and you take full advantage of digital tools. Some might call you a nerd

Wow. You don’t say… really? 😆

Actually, I thought my score was too low because there were several PDA-related questions and I don’t have a PDA (actually, I do have one of the first Palm Pilots around somewhere, but it’s broken) and because some of the questions are somewhat Windows-centric. 43% of test-takers scored in the 110+ category; surprisingly, 14% ranked below 50 (“Are you sure you’re really interested in the digital world?”). It beats me how someone with so low a digital IQ would stumble upon this test – much less being able to click all the way through it.

Also, clicking mindlessly on reply #1 for all 62 questions elicits a score of 175, which shows that the questions weren’t properly designed.

Ha! I need another vacation, ASAP! The Dolphin Stress Test says so.

(link via The Presurfer)

Some further browsing in the J-Walk Blog‘s archives produced a link to The New Sorting Hat. (Skip this entry if you don’t care for Harry Potter stuff.)

Here’s what I got:

Ravenclaw!

My, my, aren’t we a brainy know-it-all? You think being smarter than football-jock Gryffindor, inbred Slytherin, and fall-for-anything Hufflepuff makes you Merlin’s gift to the wizarding world. You probably think you’re smarter than Dumbledore. An arrogant, stuck-up jerk is what you are, and in your heart of hearts you know it. Admit it. It’s prats like you who make school suck for the rest of us.

Well… what do you know? This thing seems to work!

There’s lots of other interesting stuff at John’s Freeloading Home Page, such as The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Cliches, The Evil Henchman’s Guide, several reviews and essays about science fiction, politics and raytracing, and last but not least, The Divine Hotline:

You have reached the Almighty Creator of the Macrocosmic Universe. Please keep the following in mind when seeking resolution for your problems:

* Applications for assistance may be made at any time. I reserve the right to take no action on problems for which no application is made.

…

* My former policy of issuing credentials to select human agents has served its intended purpose and has been permanently discontinued, and all credentialed human agents have been recalled from field service. Any and all credentials presently observable in the field are of human origin; none have been issued by Me.

…

* Rejection of proffered assistance may constitute grounds for non-resolution of the problem for which the assistance was provided.

…

* I reserve the right to do as I please.

I stumbled upon the Intuitor Stupid Movie Physics site (very interesting, by the way) and of course had to take their Physics Savvy test. Hah! Quail before my l33t physicz skillz, I thought… but I ended up with just a humbling 87.5% score. 4 out of 30 wrong!

Analyzing my four mistakes was instructive. One of them (#17) was due to a linguistic error – I simply forgot that “speed” and “velocity” are not synonyms in English. Another (#15) was due a subtle difference between scalar and vector acceleration – I thought they meant one but they meant the other. Another mistake (#14) involved “sensation” which I was unsure how to interpret in physical terms. Finally, there’s one (#23) which I disagree with.

This brings to mind the arguments I had in school with my various physics teachers… in retrospect, they usually hinged on trick questions or definitions of technical terms. I remember one especially complex one, involving acceleration in multiple moving frameworks, where the teacher finally had to invoke Lorentz contraction to fend me off. 😀

Anyway, I suppose the average movie director and/or movie-goer would get the majority of these wrong.

Posted by Renate:
Hahaaa,

I took this “original” IQ test some weeks back. Hark, my result was:

Congratulations, Renate!

Your IQ score is 129

This number … blah blah bla……. we can tell your Intellectual Type is an Insightful Linguist.

This means you are highly intelligent and have the natural fluency of a writer and the visual and spatial strengths of an artist. Those skills contribute to your creative and expressive mind. And that’s just some of what we know about you from your test results.

Well, I’m just insightful enough to not want to shell out the asked price.

However, I gave my e-mail address and have been swamped – until I unsubscribed – with all kind of invitations to take other tests. ….

The subject of IQ tests came up the other day while chatting with a friend – and promptly I found some people linking to The Original IQ Test. It had been many years since my last such test, so I tried it. Some questions were extremely simple, and others were culturally biased – you need to complete some popular sayings, a couple of which were unfamiliar to me.

Soon I was rewarded with the message:

Congratulations, Rainer!

Your IQ score is 133

This number is the result of a formula based on how many questions you answered correctly on Emode’s Ultimate IQ test. Your IQ score is scientifically accurate…

…We also compared your answers with others who have taken the test, and according to the sorts of questions you got correct, we can tell your Intellectual Type is a Facts Curator.

This means you are highly intelligent and have picked up an impressive and unique collection of facts and figures over the years. You’ve got a remarkable vocabulary and exceptional math skills – which puts you in the same class as brainiacs like Bill Gates. And that’s just some of what we know about you from your test results..

They asked for my e-mail address and several demographic data, and offered to e-mail me a 15-page report detailing my results. For $14.95; while I’d like to know which answers I’ve gotten wrong, this is way too much. I also declined an offer to get a newsletter containing horoscopes (!) and information about further tests such as Do You Have a Sixth Sense, What’s Your Superpower and Find Your Ideal Sexual Partner.

While the “133” figure matches about what I expected (an IQ test I took as a child came up 140, and I seem to recall that others I took later also fell into the 130-150 range), the overall tone is extremely phony – the insistence on “scientific”, the gratuitous invention of this “Fact Curator” name, the reference to “brainiac” Bill Gates (with an image, yet!), and the ubiquitous merchandising of other products make this a site not to be taken too seriously.

Doc Searls pointed at the Geek Test and of course I had to go and check it out.

Hmm… it seems I just scored “33.92505% – Total Geek” (the top scorer got “69.82249% – Geek God”). Of course, I had to go back and check where this surprisingly low score came from , and found out:

There’s no item for “takes frequent geek tests”

I checked only one of the “I play X, Y or Z game” options

I checked only one of the “I collect X, Y or Z” options

I checked none of the “I want to be X, Y or Z” options

I checked only two of the “I watch TV/movie” options.