quiz-a-thon update

this'll help me decide when to start collecting social security, assuming social security stays solvent long enough. a female acquaintance received a time of death estimate of 79 from the same quiz. i'd like to see some more results, for comparison purposes--not that i attach much significance to this result; for instance, it doesn't take into account a nutritional supplement i'm taking that's proven to prolong life in rats.

i sent email to the test makers suggesting 2 enhancements: a median predicted age for each gender, and a correlation computation for fatal test & nerd test scores.

for anyone not math or social science savvy, correlation is a number between -1.0 and 1.0, with -1.0 and 1.0 being perfect negative and positive correlation, respectively, and 0 being no correlation. 0 correlation does not mean that 2 things never happen at the same time, which is perfect negative correlation; rather, it means 2 things happen together 1/2 the time. to conclude with a familiar example, heavy smoking and lung cancer have high correlation, say 0.7 or 0.8, but it couldn't be 1.0, not only because it doesn't always cause cancer, but because a heavy smoker could die from other causes, not just disease, but also accidents, foul play, suicide, and so on, before developing cancer.

incidentally, i found an interesting discussion of the smoking/cancer correlation here:
http://www.journaloftheoretics.com/Editorials/Vol-1/e1-4.htm
the correlation might be lower than i thought; on the other hand, this article overstates things the other way, because a smoker who dies in a car accident at a young age doesn't prove that smoking doesn't cause cancer, yet the statistics he uses includes such people among the ranks of smokers that don't develop cancer.

slightly nerdy

found this on another blog, while indulging my Apprentice fixation. interesting that one of the items on the test you can take by clicking asks you to predict your nerd score, from non-nerd to KING NERD, and slightly nerdy was my prediction, which was fairly accurate. i could have gotten a higher score by not answering all the questions honestly, i think, but i think it's pointless to do so.

incidentally, i was googling a classic remark attributed to brian of street smarts/net worth, that the other team would be "cut by the juggler", when i stumbled upon the nerd score test.

tv

the tv happened to be tuned to the apprentice, so i watched most of it, mostly on account of an over-the-top character by the name of danny kastner--a legend in his own mind, no doubt, and gathering a following if the comments posted to his blog at kastner.com are genuine. i posted some not so gushing commentary there myself; i invite you to take a look and see if you can spot it. if mr. k is the intelligent, albeit deficient in common sense, fellow he appears to be, perhaps i'll get a reply to my comments.

green laser

The blog's been neglected while i attended to more immediate and pressing matters, but I feel compelled to respond to an act of incredible lunacy being perpertrated by the government, to wit, the arrest of a New Jersey man under the Patriot Act for shining a laser at a Cessna and a helicopter. If the FBI had actually tried to verify the man's explanation, that he was using a device purchased on the Internet for $100 to point out stars to his daughter, it should have been immediately apparent, as it is to me, that he's telling the truth. Anybody who's an astronomy buff, as I am, is aware that such devices have been openly sold as observation aids, with warnings not to shine them at planes. The difficulty is in anticipating the arrival of a small plane at an alititude of 3000 feet in time to point the laser elsewhere, if the plane happens to fly into the area of sky where the laser was already pointing at. And for this infraction, a man had to post $150,000 bail and faces a 25 year sentence and a $500,000 fine.