Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Detailed "IQ report"

When I logged into Friendster last week, I saw a link for "How smart are you" (or something to that effect), so I clicked on it, and it took me to Tickle.com, from which I had already taken many tests before (last year, I took their "Super IQ Test").

They had a more "in-depth" analysis of my test results, but it was a pay service, so I never bothered with it.

Today, as I logged into my email account that I used to register with Tickle, I found that they had sent me a link for the complete report for free. Since I don't know how long I'll be able to have access to it, I'm going to copy it to my blog for archival purposes.

Your Super IQ Report

Your IQ score is 147. This means that you are smarter than 99.0% of all other Super IQ test takers.

This number is the result of a scientifically-tested formula based on how many questions you answered correctly on the Tickle Super IQ Test.

But there's more to intelligence than a single number, a single score, or a single label. Tickle uses 8 distinguishable dimensions of intelligence in the Super IQ Test. By analyzing your individual scores on those 8 scales, we are able to look beyond the raw IQ score into how you process information, and which intellectual strengths you're best at.

Your test results indicate that the way you process information makes you a Creative Theorist.

You are a highly intelligent, complex person. You process all kinds of information easily, using the power of both your creative and analytic abilities. In any situation, you know how to extract the most valuable details and use them to understand the larger picture. Most people do not have your talent of being able to spot both numerical and visual patterns.

Your highly imaginative mind allows you to be innovative, and conjure up notions of what could be. In some circles this is called "thinking outside the box" and is considered an extremely valuable asset. However, not everyone is prepared for such an active imagination and you may find you have to spend time convincing people of your great ideas. It might behoove you to find others like you, who are able to understand how your mind works.

Here's an example of your Creative Theorist thinking skills at work in a real-life situation:

You go to a symphony with a bunch of friends. The way the conductor moves his arms during the performance makes you think of patterns you have studied in physics. You remember the movement of a pendulum and how a cradle rocks back and forth in the same motion, and you tell yourself that you are going to dig up your old school books just to brush up on other related concepts. When the concert ends, you feel compelled to tell your friends about the beautiful intersection you witnessed between science and art. They'll most likely see what you mean, but they would never have come up with the association on their own. Thank goodness you think the way you do!

Your Super IQ Dimensions

Now that you know about how you process information, let's drill down to see what your specific intellectual strengths are. None of the intellectual abilities is more important than any of the others. And it's your unique scores on each of these scales, that makes you an interesting addition to any group, office, or family.

These intellectual strengths color your world and the way you perceive it, and also allow you to contribute your original perspective when solving problems and coming up with ideas. No one intellectual dimension can define you. It's the original combination of your intellectual strengths that makes you special.
As you can see, your top scores are in the areas of Reasoning, Spatial, and Logical. This is a very unusual combination — only 6 in 1,000 people have it. Want more proof? Then pay attention to the percentages of people who scored higher and lower than you on each of the 8 intellectual strengths.

Abstract Reasoning Ability

Your score is 99 out of 100. With abstract reasoning you can think on multiple levels and see relationships between ideas that are not easily apparent. When you're using your abstract reasoning skills, you draw on both external logical and creative sources of information to come up with your solution.

Here's a question that required high abstract reasoning ability to solve:

What comes next in the sequence?

Here's the answer: The progression from one figure to the next is the addition of 1/2 of the previously added box. So the first figure is one box; the second figure is the first box plus a box 1/2 of its size; the third figure is the previous two boxes plus a box 1/2 of the last added box's size. Therefore the final figure (the question mark) should be the third figure plus a box 1/2 of the last added box. The correct answer is B.

In every-day life, abstract reasoning ability is used to understand complex, multi-layered situations, sometimes involving the associations and relationships between two seemingly different sets of information. For example, imagine someone who has taken piano lessons and was taught that the skill was more easily obtained when she pointed out her struggles to her teacher. She was able to learn from them and improve. This same woman then takes writing lessons and again makes her mistakes obvious so that the instructor can suggest changes and she can improve.

Compared with others, your abstract ability is very high. This means that you have a very strong abstract ability.

Spatial Ability
You scored 99 out of 100. You use spatial ability to judge the relationship between objects and physical space, like a parked car and the width of the road. It is also what helps you visualize a room when you are decorating or rearranging furniture.

Here's a question that required high spatial ability to solve:

Which is the odd one out?

A
B
C
D

Here's the answer: The thunderbolts in A, B, and C are all going in the same way, but the one in D is actually a flipped version of the rest.

In every-day life, you use this ability when you drive or even when you are walking through a packed crowd (so that you don't run into other people!). Some people actually use this ability to help them with non-physical things. If they are trying to understand a situation, they might think of the words as shapes that they need to negotiate.

Compared with others, your spatial abilities are very high. This means that you have a very strong sense of how things exist in physical space.

Logical Ability
Your scored 99 out of 100. Logical ability is what you use when determining whether or not something makes sense. You rely on logic when analyzing an argument, step-by-step. This ability also contributes to your aptitude for recognizing underlying patterns.

Here's a question that required high logical ability to solve:

Mary loved pink flowers more than she loved red ones. She didn't like orange flowers at all, and while she liked yellow flowers, she couldn't say that she really loved them. Which of these is true?

A. She liked red flowers less than orange flowers
B. She liked yellow flowers more than red flowers
C. She liked pink flowers more than yellow flowers
D. She liked orange flowers more than pink flowers

Here's the answer: She liked yellow flowers but didn't love them; however, she did love pink and red ones - pink more than red. Thus far the order of preference is pink, red, yellow. But she liked orange least of all, which means the new order is pink, red, yellow, orange. This means that she liked red more than orange (which makes option A not true). She liked yellow less than red (which makes option B not true). She liked pink more than yellow, which makes option C true, and she liked orange less than any of the flowers, which makes option D not true. Therefore, the correct answer is C.

In every-day life, you might use this ability to figure out the best route to the store, or to figure out the best deal when choosing between a couple items to buy. Everyone has a certain ability to use logic to solve problems. Some are better at it than others, however.

Compared with others, your logical ability is very high. This means that you are an extremely logical person.

Mechanical Ability
You scored 99 out of 100. Mechanical ability is what helps you understand how machines and tools work. Someone with a good amount of mechanical ability probably has an innate understanding of physics. High mechanical skill is also associated with a high degree of precision and practical thinking.

Here's a question that required high mechanical ability to solve:

Which object will fall faster? A 8 x 11 piece of paper or a peanut? Both weight the same amount.

A. The piece of paper
B. The peanut
C. It is impossible to know

The paper will encounter more resistance than will the peanut, and so it will fall more slowly. The peanut will fall faster and so the correct answer is B.

In every-day life, mechanical ability comes in handy when anything in the house breaks, or when you have to purchase something that requires physical assembly. It is also helpful in finding solutions to physical problems, such as determining how to build a pulley to bring water out of a well.

Compared with others, your mechanical abilities are very high. This means that you have a very strong mechanical ability.

Numerical Ability
You scored 99 out of 100. You use numerical ability when you spot a numerical pattern or solve a numerical equation. Here's a question that assessed your numerical ability:

Which number completes the series? 1, 3/2, 2, 5/2, ?

Here's the answer: 3

In every-day life, you use the ability to calculate a tip at a restaurant, or estimate taxes on a purchase. Everyone has this ability to a greater or lesser extent.

Compared with others, your numerical ability is very high. This means that you have no problem processing numbers.

Verbal Ability
Your verbal ability score is 99 out of 100. Verbal ability means having an expansive range of vocabulary, being able to use it, and feeling a desire to add to it. It is also what allows you to comprehend the relationships and subtle difference between words.

Here's a question that required verbal ability:

The opposite of acute is:

A. Severe
B. Incisive
C. Dull
D. Flamboyant

The opposite of the word acute, meaning sharp or finely tuned, is dull, so the correct answer is C.

In every-day life, verbal ability is essential to being able to interpret written materials. It's also valuable for communication — the more vocabulary words you know, the more precisely you may be able to convey your point.

Compared with others, your verbal ability is very high. This means that you have a very strong verbal ability.

Visual Ability
Your score is 99 out of 100. Visual ability allows you to accurately visualize all aspects of an object for the purposes of recreating it, the way painters do. It's also what you use to imagine a scene from a novel or a story someone tells you — the ability to accurately reproduce reality in the mind's eye.

Here's a question that required high visual ability to solve:

Which of the images below is a perfect square?

Here's the answer: Eyeballing it, you can see that image A is the square with identical length and height, and so the correct answer is A.

In every-day life, visual ability is what you use when creating original art. In order to reproduce an object on canvas (as painters do) you have to be able to accurately represent the dimensions of those objects in the picture. Getting the accurate perspective and depth is easiest for someone with a strong visual ability.

Compared with others, your visual ability is very high. This means that you have a very strong visual ability.

Organizational Ability
Your organizational ability score is 88 out of 100. Organizational ability is what allows you to organize and arrange information effectively, be precise, and proofread carefully.

Here's a question that required high organizational ability:

Which of the following character strings is the closest match to 8,392,211,109?

Here's the answer: The correct answer is B. Try reading each of the answer options not as numbers, but rather as a string of characters; when you do so, you will find that B has the fewest mismatches, position for position, in the string of characters. See below (mismatches highlighted in red):

In every-day life, organizational ability is what you use to proofread a paper or organize a messy desk. Coming up with an organizational system for keeping track of things comes easy to those who are high in this ability. It is a highly practical skill.

Compared with others, your organizational ability is high. This means that you have a strong organizational ability.

Tips for Improving your IQ

Want a higher score next time? Here are some activities you can do before taking your next IQ test.

Get more oxygen to your brain. You'll be able to think more clearly. To do this, go for a walk, or simply take deep, long breaths. Practicing yoga is also good. Some even claim you can get more oxygen by swimming underwater, and holding your breath for longer and longer periods of time. This increases the amount of oxygen in your brain and will allow you to focus better on the test.

Take time to relax. If you feel anxious, you'll probably make more mistakes. Practice peaceful visualization, imagining scenes that are calming to you. Meditate or do whatever it is you know calms you down, before taking the test.

Listen to Mozart. It may sound like a stretch, but some researchers have found that listening to Mozart actually increases your spatial IQ. They call it the Mozart Effect and believe that the music stabilizes the neural connections necessary for spatial-temporal abilities

Practice, practice, practice. Take a range of different types of IQ tests. The greater the range of problems, the more ready you'll be to tackle the unexpected on a new IQ test. Why not take Tickle's Ultimate IQ test, if you haven't already.

Monday, February 26, 2007

Friday, February 23, 2007

The gateway crime

You don't wanna mess with the R-I-double-A
They'll sue you if you burn that CD-R
It doesn't matter if you're a grandma
Or a seven-year-old girl
They'll treat like the evil, hard-bitten, criminal scum you are

Thursday, February 22, 2007

You're Pitiful

This has been around for a while, but it's not available in any of Weird Al's albums... because while Al had gotten permission from James Blunt to make a parody of his song, he was later contacted by Atlantic Records, James Blunt's label, which asked Al not to publish the song in his album. So instead of publishing the song in his album, Straight Outta Lynwood, he has the MP3 available for free download on his webpage.

This is why in Al's later video for White & Nerdy, in the part what he sings, "I edit Wikipedia," you can see him editing the entry for Atlantic Records to say "YOU SUCK!"


You're Pitiful
"Weird Al" Yankovic

My life is brilliant...
(What, was I too early? I'm sorry, should I... do you want to start over, or? Keep going? OK. Now? Now?)

My life is brilliant
Your life's a joke
You're just pathetic
You're always broke
Your homemade Star Trek uniform
Really ain't impressing me
You're sufferin' from delusions of adequacy

You're pitiful
You're pitiful
You're pitiful, it's true
Never had a date
That you couldn't inflate
And you smell repulsive, too
What a bummer being you

Well you just can't dance
And forget romance
Everybody you know still calls ya--"farty-pants"
But you'll always have a job, well, I mean
As long as you still can work that Slurpee machine

You're pitiful
You're pitiful
You're pitiful, it's true
You're half undressed
Eating chips off your chest
While you're playing Halo 2
No one's classier than you

La la la la
La la la la
La la la la Loser

You're pitiful
You're pitiful
You're pitiful, it's true
Your dog would much rather
Play fetch by itself
You still live with your mom, and you're 42

Guess you'll never grow a clue
Well, it just sucks to be you

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Happy Singles Awareness Day!

In honor of Valentine's Day, Google has temporarily changed their logo to include a chocolate-covered strawberry. As have many other large sites. (MSN changed their personal page scheme to an ugly red one, for instance.)

Now does that logo look like it says "Google" to you, or "Googe"?
And if you don't know what "googe" means, consider yourself lucky.

Monday, February 12, 2007

Groundhog Day!

No, this is not really about the festival that's celebrated on February 2. It's not about the movie with the same title, either.

Nope. This post is about Day Break, a drama series that began airing on ABC last November, as a midseason replacement for Lost, and deals with the concept of a time loop--that is, the protagonist wakes up each morning to find himself reliving the same day (hence its connection to the Groundhog Day movie). It differs, of course, in that it's a much more serious story. Also, the person experiencing the time loop retains all of his injuries from the previous day.

The show was on hiatus shortly after it began to air, and I had followed each episode that aired. As it turns out, while ABC will no longer air the show on TV, it has decided to continue the series on the web. I only found out about this as I was reading the TV-specific blogs on TV Guide.com.

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Over-the-Air HD programming

So I've picked up this 32" LCD TV from Howard, my brother-in-law, who happens to know someone with a great deal on these TVs. Since our old TV in the livingroom was in dire need of retirement, I decided to take the plunge now, instead of waiting to get a larger one later.

After reading the specs, I realized that this TV has a built-in HD tuner, so I went out to CVS Pharmacy and picked up a $10 antenna (it was late, and they're open 24 hours). I figured it would be a good alternate to the HD programming I'm going to get from Charter--who'll be here to install a HD-DVR next week. I had been talking to Joyce earlier, and checked out her HDTV (with a powered antenna), and it seems she's only getting HD from three networks (NBC, ABC and the CW, plus the several extras you apparently can only pick up with an HD tuner). Imagine my surprise when I found that I could not only pick up all the major networks in HD, but also several others...

1. Channel 2 (CBS), broadcast in 1080i

2. Channel 4 (NBC), 1080i

3. Channel 5 (The CW), 1080i

4. Channel 7 (ABC), 720p

5. Channel 9 (KCAL, local station), 1080i

6. Channel 11 (Fox), 720p

7. Channel 13 (MyNetworkTV), 720p

8. Channel 28 (KCET, PBS), 1080i

9. Channel 50 (KOCE, PBS), 1080i

The TV's autoscan actually found other PBS stations, but when I switched them I either got "no signal" or bad reception, so I don't know if they're sending HD signals or not. It's also picking up a bunch of sub-channels, which cannot be picked up with a standard tuner, although the broadcast signal for those are only 480i.


Since the TV also has picture-in-picture, I decided to see how the HD signal compares to the regular signal I'm getting from Charter. At least for now, it seems that the signal from Charter reaches my home a second or so faster than HD.
(HD in the main picture, cable-SD in the sub-picture.)