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In the ‘mess with your own head’ category, http://implicit.harvard.edu/. It presents a series of what are essentially relative-speed tests to expose implicit bias. (With the notable aside that these are snap-judgment attitudes, not thoughtful tendencies.) Normally, I find such tests a trifle banal; they take far too long to do for the little bit of meaning they offer, and with Meyers-Briggs and Big-5 indexes, too easily thought through. (Would you like to be an Extrovert today?)
IATs, however, are interesting in that they’re fast (well under ~5 mins) and they gauge not speed or accuracy but relative speed and accuracy. They’re testing you against yourself, by asking first that you associate two pairs of categories as fast as you can, then switching the pairs. Your relative speed/accuracy is intended to show your tendencies;apparently, you’re roughly half as fast/accurate when matching pairs you don’t inherently associate.
Accurate? Who knows. But entertaining, and (according to the studies) often totally contrary to concious atittudes and expressions. If it makes you think, it was probably worth the time.
-N. Noctis
You’d think that, for a large public display, they’d ensure that it was a reliable platform, before hooking up the 5-year old Dell running XP. Apparently not.
(I wonder if anyone told Microsoft?)
-N. Noctis
(No, it’s not mine, but very funny.)
Three men were standing in line to get into heaven one day. Apparently it had been a pretty busy day, though, so Peter had to tell the first one, “Heaven’s getting pretty close to full today, and I’ve been asked to admit only people who have had particularly horrible deaths. So what’s your story?”So the first man replies: “Well, for a while I’ve suspected my wife has been cheating on me, so today I came home early to try to catch her red-handed. As I came into my 25th floor apartment, I could tell something was wrong, but all my searching around didn’t reveal where this other guy could have been hiding. Finally, I went out to the balcony, and sure enough, there was this man hanging off the railing, 25 floors above ground! By now I was really mad, so I started beating on him and kicking him, but wouldn’t you know it, he wouldn’t fall off. So finally I went back into my apartment and got a hammer and starting hammering on his fingers. Of course, he couldn’t stand that for long, so he let go and fell-but even after 25 stories, he fell into the bushes, stunned but okay. I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I ran into the kitchen, grabbed the fridge and threw it over the edge where it landed on him, killing him instantly. But all the stress and anger got to me, and I had a heart attack and died there on the balcony.”
“That sounds like a pretty bad day to me,” said Peter, and let the man in. The second man comes up and Peter explains to him about heaven being full, and again asks for his story. “It’s been a very strange day. You see, I live on the 26th floor of my apartment building, and every morning I do my exercises out on my balcony. Well, this morning I must have slipped or something, because I fell over the edge. But I got lucky, and caught the railing of the balcony on the floor below me. I knew I couldn’t hang on for very long, when suddenly this man burst out onto the balcony. I thought for sure I was saved, when he started beating on me and kicking me. I held on the best I could until he ran into the apartment and grabbed a hammer and started pounding on my hands. Finally I just let go, but again I got lucky and fell into the bushes below, stunned but all right. Just when I was thinking I was going to be okay, this refrigerator comes falling out of the sky and crushes me instantly, and now I’m here.”
Once again, St. Peter had to concede that that sounded like a pretty horrible death. The third man came to the front of the line, and again the whole process was repeated. Peter explained that heaven was over-full and asked for his story.
“Picture this,” says the third man, “I’m hiding naked inside a refrigerator…”
- N. Noctis
An Irish redhead, a massive fight and gambling priests. What more could you want?
-N. Noctis
Trolling along the other day, I ran into a truly horrible joke, and so, I felt the need to share it here.
Q: Why do programmers get Christmas and Hallowe’en mixed up?
A: Because Oct(31) = Dec(25)
(I’m sure this one is covered by the nerdity test.)
-N. Noctis
After the last two long posts, a little brief something about Windows:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1123221217782777472 (“Speech Recognition, Sort of…”)
And a truly instructional page:
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ (“How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates”)
-N. Noctis
