The Butt Ugly Weblog

Muistinpa minäkin vihdoin ja viimein käydä tekemässä Tieteen Kuvalehden älykkyystestin, kun Outikin teki. Hassu testi. Ilmeisesti tässä testissä käytetään keskihajontaa 15, eli se ei ole suoraan vertailukelpoinen esim. Suomen Mensan käyttämien lukujen kanssa. Tämän konversiotaulukon mukaan 141 Wechsler-skaalalla vastaa noin 165:ttä Cattell-skaalalla. Joka tapauksessa melko korkea.

Jos ihan rehellisiä ollaan, niin en kyllä olisi laittanut tulosta tähän, jos se olisi ollut alhainen. Tunnustan, etten ole koskaan uskaltanut käydä Mensan testeissä, koska olen hieman irrationaalisesti pelännyt, että saisin huonon tuloksen ja muut olisivatkin oikeasti fiksumpia kuin minä (sen siitä saa kun ainoa asia mitä on jaettu on vähän älliä). Mikä kyllä saa ajattelemaan mitä väliä tämmöisellä oikeasti on? Hassunhassuja testejä täällä on ennenkin tehty, joista on saatu kaikenlaista tosi epäilyttävää tulokseksi ("Olet luonteeltasi kiduttaja"), mutta ei niitä kukaan tietenkään ota mitenkään vakavasti. Sen sijaan jotakin tämmöistä testitulosta saatetaan hyvinkin arastella, vaikka sen merkitys käytännön elämään lienee samaa luokkaa. Korkeintaan sitä voi käyttää elvistelyyn, ja silloinkin lähinnä se herättää katkeruutta, kateutta ja selkäänpuukotushalua kanssaihmisissä. Vähän niinkuin palkka, paitsi että sillä tietenkin on jotain merkitystä käytännön elämään, koska sillä voi ostaa esimerkiksi television, josta voi katsoa tymentäviä ohelmia.

On se ihminen hassu ja heikko otus, jos yksi melko merkityksetön numero huolettaa näin paljon. *huokaus*

Nimi: JJ
Kokonaispistemäärä: 141
Tuloksen luokitustaso: Huipputasoa
Onneksi olkoon! Olet suorittanut Tieteen Kuvalehden älykkyystestin.

Pistemääräsi oli korkeampi kuin 99 %:lla väestöstä keskimäärin.
Kielellisten osioiden pistemäärä: 144
Suoritusosioiden pistemäärä: 137.5

Osioiden pistemäärät

Jokaisen osion korkein mahdollinen pistemäärä on 20. Keskimääräinen pistemäärä on 10.

Kuviopäättelytehtävät
Mitattavat ominaisuudet: ei-sanallinen päättelykyky, usean tekijän samanaikainen käsittely, avaruudellinen hahmottaminen, visuaalinen hahmottaminen
Tuloksesi 18

Sanastotehtävät
Mitattavat ominaisuudet: kielellinen käsitteenmuodostus, merkitysten tunnistaminen, pitkäkestoinen muisti, kasvuympäristön virikkeisyys, älyllinen uteliaisuus
Tuloksesi 20

Muistitehtävät
Mitattavat ominaisuudet: muisti, jaksotuskyky, vertauskuvallisen sisällön ymmärtäminen, keskittymiskyky
Tuloksesi 18

Sanojen keskinäisiä suhteita koskevat tehtävät
Mitattavat ominaisuudet: kielellinen päättelykyky, käsitteenmuodostus, merkityssisällön ymmärtäminen
Tuloksesi 19

Matemaattiset tehtävät
Mitattavat ominaisuudet: muisti, vertauskuvallisen sisällön ymmärtäminen, päättelykyky
Tuloksesi 19

I managed to avoid this game for the longest time, but on Saturday morning I played my first round of golf. As you can see from the result (41 on an course with 18 par) I might still need to train a bit more.

But I have to admit that I did feel the tender touch of the feet of the golf bug, walking on my skin. I can easily see why this is so popular that thousands and thousands acres of perfectly good forests have been turned into playgrounds for the rich people. Even a beginner can - by accident - make a good swing, and experience the joy of hitting from the tee to the green. Golf may be a difficult sport, but it's not too difficult so that you would be discouraged by your first few efforts. And, there are enough moving parts in the process to make it sure that you can keep learning throughout your entire life.

(Of course, I can't actually start playing. It would be too expensive, as I would need to buy a car to drag my butt to the golf courts...)

I don't see these too often, but in our family this has been the secret to cooking for tens of years. It's the hand-cranked potato peeler. Works like a charm, needs no electricity, needs no dishwasher. Just put potatoes and water in, and it'll peel them for you with a few turns of the handle.

Any Finn can find these in your neighbourhood Anttila. Others - I'm not sure.

For some reason, I didn't have my own for a while, but now I bought a new one before the potato season started. Been cranking happily ever since...

Oh, the things you can do with a few flashlights and a camera. Check out also this Sprint commercial.

(Via BB.)

Matt noticed, after turning off his Twitter stream from people outside London, that:

Maybe it's just that Twitter is not interesting for those people who are in town and would have time for coffee. Twitter and Jaiku have been adopted by busy people, the makers of the world. But perhaps it's not been that much used by the laid-back people, the thinkers, who'll happily suspend the afternoon for a stroll in the park with a friend. Twitter is the noise which busy people make to tell everyone that they're still alive, so that they are not forgotten.

Now that I've finished the Potter saga, let me link once more to this flash animation. No spoilers.

I was kinda disappointed. I was hoping a bit more... well-roundedness to the book. Not to the plot itself, but maybe I was just expecting that Rowlings would've developed as a writer the same way as the first few books lead me to believe. Still, a good read for a solid 8 hours, all of which shows that Rowlings had actually planned a big part in advance, and wasn't just building on top of hype. I always like that.

Good to be (still) on vacation :)

Much to nobody's surprise, the new Harry Potter book is already available for download from a multitude of Bittorrent trackers. It's in the form of badly scanned pages, but still, it's available.

In a move which equally fails to surprise anyone, the publishers are demanding that any page which talks about the fact that its available on Bittorrent is infringing their copyrights. The fun thing is that the story in question does not even link to the torrent, it just mentions the name of the site from which you can find a torrent link to the actual download.

So, theoretically, me linking to the story of the takedown notice - which links to the original story, which mentions the name of the site from which you can find a torrent link to the actual download - could be considered, in some twisted universe, a copyright infringement.

Just don't mention in a pub that you saw this entry in an RSS feed on some other site talking about a takedown notice linking to a story which mentions the name of the site from which you can find a torrent link to the actual download. You never know who is listening.

ROFL.

(Via Digg.)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!

I'll let you know later.

Galaxy Zoo is a project in which you - the human - helps the computer to classify galaxies. They've got a simple tutorial, after which you will know quite a lot about galaxies, and then you can just go and start your work. Even if you spend just 15 minutes on the page and never return, that's already very helpful, they say.

(Via Tähdet+Avaruus -lehden blogi. Hyvä blogi, muuten.)

Microsoft Office for Mac updater 11.3.6 completely corrupted my Office installation. Nothing works, and I have to reinstall everything. Once I find the CDs, that is. So you might want to be careful about upgrading.

Oh well, time to update ~NeoOffice and ~OpenOffice... Shame, Office for Mac is actually a decent piece of software. It's just that the guys who wrote the updater should be taken into the woods and shot for being incompetent. After the updater "updated" things, even downloading the direct update installer from Microsoft refuses to run.

An economist has calculate the optimal length of the copyright period, and it appears to be 14 years - the same what it was originally when it was first invented.

I'm not sure whether it's really true for the general case - but I can almost certainly say it's not authors death + 70 years. I'm a big fan of "renewable copyright": the idea that you first get X years automatically (e.g. 14 years, or 28 years, or something fixed), and after that you can register your copyright in the copyright office, for a fee, for another fixed period of time. This allows works that nobody cares about to fall back into public domain after a sane period of time, and it also allows the corporations to renew the stuff they find valuable (solving the Micky Mouse problem). In addition, it would make it always clear who owns the copyright of a particular piece, solving the issues that documentary makers are having.

(Via BB.)

Wa-hey! Vacation starts today! I really, really needed this...

Anyway, everybody and their cousin seems to be excited over the iPhone. Reading through a lot of the stuff made me think that maybe the iPhone is a revolution. But the revolution comes with the Web, not the phone. Many companies are making sure their web sites now work with the iPhone, and quite a few of the movers and shakers of the Web 2.0 world are getting one. This probably means that for the first time, the Web crowd will start to seriously think about mobility. So far the attempts have just been mostly about really crappy downconverters that make me cringe every time I try to use the fully capable web browser I have in my phone.

Even though Nokia S60 phones use the same browser as the iPhone (and have been for a year now), the phones are not carried by the operators in the US in any significant numbers. Therefore the Silicon Valley-centric crowd has not really seen what mobility could really be about. In many ways, the mobility has so far been stuck an pre-Web text era: news, chat, email. If you needed the web, you could always use your Macbook with the nearest Wifi hotspot. Now, you gotta start thinking about accessing the web service while you are truly mobile, which means doing things like turning it into a background thing, something which does not grab your entire attention when you're using it; and really thinking about usability.

I really hope I'm right, because that would mean web services which are actually usable on a small screen and a tiny device. No matter how good Apple's engineering is, those two things they won't be able to bypass. But if it is enough to nudge the web developers into thinking about mobility, then in my book Apple has scored a success, no matter how many (or few) devices they sell.