The Smartest Browser and OS

The IQ League maintain a "60 Second IQ Test" online. Interestingly, they correlate the results of this test with a number of statistics available from their server logs. Along with the geographical distinctions like city and country, the referrer and OS/Browser user-agent strings are also mined, to determine the Smartest Browser and OS. Cutting to the chase, the very smartest is Firefox on Unknown (which internal evidence suggests is MacOS-Intel), and the dumbest, as of this writing, is IE on WinNT. Quick! Test out and move the bars on the pretty graph! Can we make Slashdot.org the "Smartest Website in the World?" (It's currently number 2 behind ScienceBlogs.com.)

Comments

Still using safari or IE?

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Still using safari or IE? Means you're probably not too bright.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[psxman]

I don't use a Mac, but what's wrong with Safari?

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the people using Safari on Windows unwittingly had it forced upon them on iTunes, and they don't know the difference.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Darkness404]

That is odd though, I have installed Firefox on many computers when I have done technical work, and most if not all still use IE as their primary browser usually filling it back up with spyware for me to remove again... About the only ways I know how to make people use Firefox is either A) switch Firefox to an IE icon, or B) delete all evidence of IE except for the .EXEs hidden in system folders. I highly, highly doubt that most Windows users using Safari are just the iTunes users, now, I would expect most of the downloads of Safari for Windows to have come from iTunes but downloads usually don't equal use of the browser.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Safari is fully standards compliant, based on Konqueror's KHTML.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is odd though, I have installed Firefox on many computers when I have done technical work, and most if not all still use IE as their primary browser usually filling it back up with spyware for me to remove again... About the only ways I know how to make people use Firefox is either A) switch Firefox to an IE icon, or B) delete all evidence of IE except for the .EXEs hidden in system folders. I highly, highly doubt that most Windows users using Safari are just the iTunes users, now, I would expect most of the downloads of Safari for Windows to have come from iTunes but downloads usually don't equal use of the browser. Job security my friend.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Darkness404]

Job security my friend.

Well that would be great, the bad part is though, most of my "technical work" as I put it, is my friends/family saying that their computer is slow and would I fix it for them, so no, I don't get paid (though, I must say I would make a decent living if I did!)

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Gewalt]

I have a mac. Safari is a decent browser, but it fails epicly compared to FF as it does not have extensibility as a primary function. It's the plugins that make firefox awesome. IE and Safari just dont even compare. (Opera? not even in the same league as IE, let alone safari)

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[nbarriga]

So extensibility is your main/only reason for choosing a browser? What about speed, ease of use, % of pages rendered OK, safety? (Yes, I use Opera)

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[MadnessASAP]

Me too! I guess that makes us the entire opera market share.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Gewalt]

So extensibility is your main/only reason for choosing a browser?

No, and I didn't say it was either.

What about speed, ease of use, % of pages rendered OK, safety?

I have Safari and Firefox to choose from. Between those two, its either close enough to call it a tie, or firefox wins.

Opera is a complete non-starter. It has *nothing* to offer over either the pre-installed safari, or the "go get it in 4 seconds" firefox. At least firefox offers me extensibility.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Anonymous Coward]

The real question is "Are you using Emacs or Vi?"

We all know that Emacs is the smartest browser and OS.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Sparr0]

I disagree. I was an Opera user for years. I switched to Mozilla when it started to mature, but I still user Opera on occasion. Opera is the innovator in the field. They had GOOD full page zoom years before anyone else had anything even remotely close. They provided user-accessible stylesheet switching that rocked, including some default stylesheets that were a godsend for web development (label and outline block elements, etc). Don't forget user-agent switching. Also, Opera is damn fast, and it runs on more handheld devices than any other browser (although "gecko" is close if you count all the browsers that use it including minimo).

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Gewalt]

None of those are features that I am even remotely interested in. Maybe that is why Opera failed to achieve critical momentum? It was chasing features noone wanted?

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Sparr0]

You will want good zoom functionality when you have a 30"+ monitor and some jackass thinks it's cool to use 8 point text in the middle of a 600-px fixed width layout. But now that FF3 has it, you won't have to go to Opera :)

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[flink]

CMD+Option + on the mac gives that to you on the system level and virtual resolutions does the same under X windows. I guess it's useful under MS Windows though. I've found that Firefox will usually respond to Ctrl++ if you hit it enough times though, so I've never really found myself missing zoom on WinNT.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Herby Sagues]

Actually, the timer function is apparently not working in IE with Vista (which counts as IE over NT). I get the same results if I wait a minute as if I get the answers immediately (which are pretty easy, though just in case I checked my answers were right with reliable sources). That would explain low Windows NT scores. I would actually be surprised if there was actually any significant correlation between browser use and IQ, given that most computer users use whatever someone else installed on their computers (IT, OEM or some friend). And if you think otherwise, you are probably confusing intelligent with computer savvy.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Orange Crush]

I haven't used it much, only sporadically at my parents' house who have a mac. I did have to switch them to Firefox, though. Despite Safari's standards compliance, they were accustomed to Firefox from their old PC and his work-schedule website demanded IE or Firefox, and I didn't know how to switch the user agent in Safari and wasn't where I could look up how to. Easier to just get them to download and install Firefox and be on their way.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[RiotingPacifist]

for people on a 30" monitor there was always image zoom, there is nothing useful that cant be done in firefox, operas only* advantage is that if you happen to want exactly the features that opera offer, then it comes nicely bundled instead of running round Mozilla for 30mins once to figure out what you want.

*it also used to render pages faster but there about even now.(start time and loadtime are easily reduced with firefox preloader/other preloaders and fasterfox)

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[dafrazzman]

I would actually be surprised if there was actually any significant correlation between browser use and IQ, given that most computer users use whatever someone else installed on their computers (IT, OEM or some friend). And if you think otherwise, you are probably confusing intelligent with computer savvy. I wouldn't be so doubtful. I'm sure there's a link between critical thinking and tendency to use Firefox over IE.

Assume you have a group of people of relatively moderate computer savviness. They all use IE, and you tell them all about Firefox. Some of them will say "Pssh... whatever" and conclude that IE is both adequate and familiar, making it easy to rationalize not considering a change. Others will note the benefits along with your shining recommendation and consider a switch.

If we conclude from this that the ones who blew it off think less critically (a debatable, but reasonable assumption), we will indeed see more critical thinking people using IE.

It isn't much of a leap then to say that Firefox users are in some way "smarter" than IE users.

If you can't say that, you can at least say that they're more likely to give a hoot about the test and try harder than the others.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[The Master Control P]

You should charge. Otherwise there's no consequence for being stupid and no incentive to not be stupid.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Hal_Porter]

I wouldn't be so doubtful. I'm sure there's a link between critical thinking and tendency to use Firefox over IE. Maybe there are levels of critical thinking though.

Level 1:Uses IE, because it comes with Windows.
Level 2:Uses Firefox because it comes with Linux.

Never assume that you're at the end of the list, everyone thinks they are. Maybe there are Levels 3 and 4, or even an infinite number of them.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[pecosdave]

I've used this tactic on more than one person. Just hiding the crud out of IE does it for me. Once I've done this and they get used to the "other icon" they're fine. They don't even realize the difference since they were never power users to begin with.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[KDR_11k]

Doesn't Opera also have better memory handling? I recall Firefox users complaining about memory leaks or just general memory bloat.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think a lot of PCs come with both IE and Firefox these days. Most people I know who use Firefox use it because they've "heard" that it's better or more secure than IE, but don't have any idea why that would be. Some have also heard that "ActiveX is bad", but don't understand that Firefox plugins involve running native code in the browser process, with full user privileges, which is more dangerous than ActiveX controls running in IE on Vista (which runs with reduced privileges because of the so-called protected mode). In a way, such users are being lulled into a false sense of security.

At my university, the internal websites are designed for IE, so those of us who are smart enough to understand this either use IE only, or use IE when accessing the university websites, and something else (like Firefox) when accessing others. For those who know how to secure IE (like me), it is easiest to use only IE (and in some ways also safer, since those who use both IE and Firefox are at risk from vulnerabilities in both browsers).

In general, Vista's protected mode is a very good security feature, and Firefox doesn't yet support it (or didn't the last time I looked -- the estimate was that it was still a long way away). For Vista users, I would therefore say that IE is actually the more secure browser, and it is a mistake to use Firefox. For XP users, this is not the case. Firefox, however, does benefit from having a smaller installed base, which means it is a less tempting target, especially for criminals (as opposed to those who simply want to expose vulnerabilities).

I am also suspicious of the claim that 'Unknown' implies Mac. There are a lot of privacy tools for Windows, Linux and others that hide or alter the browser and OS identification strings.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[aliquis]

On topic:
I use a mac, the problem with Safari is that if your machine "only" have 2GB of ram it will use 600-1000MB within a days use and thereafter crash because you don't have enough free ram. Also afaik there aren't to many ad/flash blockers, pithelmet is a nice easy to use one but it's "never" updated to the latest version of Safari since there come new ones all the time, or so it seems, so it doesn't work. I tried privoxy but it seems like it blocked a bunch of cookies, or my Safari is fucked up beyond normal.

I use to use Opera but my password manager doesn't work with Opera since it don't have a good plugin system for that, so I would prefer firefox 3 rc on a mac atm.

Off topic / rant about other Apple apps:
Mail doesn't work good for me either, iPhotos image "enhancements" really suck compared to Aperture and Lightroom and you can't have the same album for Aperture and iPhoto, iMovie are rather simple, still requires to much twiddling with fonts and times (I don't think you can change default values for the fonts) and it adds exact path names to music files for instance even if they are added in iTunes, so if you move them (that is don't use iTunes libraryshit) it won't find your music files longer, and you can't change the path somehow so you have to add the music file again and cut it the way you wanted it and so on. iChat suck since noone else use it (and have multiple userlists (fixable with thirdpart addon, no msn support, are never updated between OS revisions I guess.)

I like some things, but much could be better, a good step would be to remove all the things there they try to decide how you want.. or well, should want, to have things. Why can't I for instance have my photos in a dir, use the same tags/album names in both iPhoto and Apple Aperture so I can easily find and view photos in iPhoto instead, and have iPhoto eventually fetch the pre-rendered resulting image from Aperture or ask Aperture to make the image on the spot? Or the effects in iPhoto need to work better / have a similair quality as the ones in Aperture.
Why can't a file from iTunes be identified thru id3 tag? Why do I HAVE to copy my movie files into the project when music aren't? (Because they already are forced into iTunes I guess..), I don't want two copies, I guess I could leave it in iMovie thought since its file layout are rather decent.
Why doesn't copy of a sequence in iMovie copy the text content aswell? Just the "time part". (You type a text which will be shown for 5 seconds, copy that square and paste it in and all you get is a black screen for 5 seconds, you have to set and add the text again yourself.)
Why came up with the brilliant idea of one userlist for .mac users, one for aim, one for jabber, .. Or those ugly comic bubbles in the message windows?
Mail doesn't seem to work good with google imap for me, or the smart folders doesn't or something. Slow as fuck and I get multiple hits for the same mail in the smart folders.

The worst part with OS X are that their own apps expect to find your photos in say iPhoto, so if you use Pages you can easily browse photos in iPhoto, but what use is that when iPhoto suck and you use Aperture instead? Sure you could export all your photos and have them taking up twice the space, but meh.

And since Apple release their own applications for each task nowadays the third party market for those apps gets even smaller so you won't have an alternative if you don't prefer it the way Apple wanted you to do things.

Thought I think iPhoto and iMovie are ok considering they come with the machine (one can't argue they are "free" thought.), if you don't have anything better atleast they are something.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[aliquis]

May be true for late adopters of Linux, but I guess for those people they already knew about firefox and know that they are indeed using that browser. Most LinuxUSERS are probably well aware that they have a lot of options in the browser front.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[aliquis]

When was the last time you used Opera?

Safari are shit because it's so bloated and leak ram all the time which makes it crash in an instant, sure it may have better standards support than IE but personally I'd rather run IE than Safari.

Opera are way better than both.

I stoped using Firefox during 1.0.7 when Ubuntu refused to upgrade even thought it leaked ram, but I was only affect by that ONCE and I'm each day in Safari so .. Anyway I switched to Opera back then and never looked back. Now I have Firefox 3 RC1 on my mac because it works with the password manager, Opera doesn't. I occasionally fire up Safari because I don't want to load all the tabs in firefox but then after a day when I've filled Safari with tabs and have it crash on me I always regret that I once again ran that piece of shit.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[aliquis]

Speed difference: Are there any large speed difference in Safari, Opera and Firefox? I would expect all of them to claim to be fastest or very fast in whatever comparisions they would deside to do. All of them works for me.

Ease of use: Opera wins, awesome undo.

% of pages rendered ok: I guess Firefox wins, Safari 3.x and Opera 9.x both do a great job.

Safety: I doubt there are many evil pages for either of them. I know Opera had least advisories, but then I guess firefox have more eyes watching and more users which makes it riskier, but I'd just update the application as often as possible and not worry.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[aliquis]

It's nowhere near a tie.

Safari: Leaks RAM as there is no tomorrow, probably late security fixes, less alternatives for ad blockers, probably way less plugins.

What disadvantage does Firefox have vs Safari? No resizable textareas and no drag&drop of files into filechoosers, but then nothing more afaik.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[aliquis]

More like: IE was included in the OS and Opera cost money / had ads, firefox didn't.

Opera would have been a bigger player than firefox if it wasn't that you had to see the fucking ads in Opera back in the day. Of course people prefer something free over adware/shareware if they the later one aren't much better.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[aliquis]

I like that functionality in OS X a lot when watching pimp my ride for instance on MTVs webpage. Flash video on fullscreen.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[aliquis]

Back in the day atleast firefox zoom changed the page layout and didn't worked for embedded content. Operas webpages still looked like the original, only bigger, same zoom everywhere.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[aliquis]

Such things can change between each version of the browser so just because it was a huge issue in firefox for instant doesn't mean it have to stay that way forever.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

"Safari are shit because it's so bloated and leak ram all the time which makes it crash in an instant, sure it may have better standards support than IE but personally I'd rather run IE than Safari."

I use Safari as my main browser in OS X and have abandoned Firefox because, in my experience, Firefox was the one that 'leaked ram' and crashed all the time.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[God'sDuck]

If they have an IE-only site (like Netflix Watch-Now) I set the homepage on IE to Netflix, and the homepage on Firefox to whatever their homepage was. I tell them "The orange fox is the internet, the blue E is Netflix." Works fine.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Safari 3 comes with a user agent switching option by default.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Dekortage]

Are there any large speed difference in Safari, Opera and Firefox?

One test is to run SlickSpeed on different browsers. It tests the processing speed of various JavaScript frameworks (like jQuery, MooTools, etc.). Run this under IE, then under Firefox, then Safari. Try different platforms if you can. You'll see odd speed differences; for example, jQuery typically wins when using IE, while it loses terribly on Firefox.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Bohiti]

Or use the IE Tab extension for firefox, and configure it to use IE on specific sites like Netflix. I use it mostly for my works' Outlook Web Access myself.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[tepples]

About the only ways I know how to make people use Firefox is either A) switch Firefox to an IE icon, or B) delete all evidence of IE except for the .EXEs hidden in system folders. After a few antitrust rulings, Microsoft has made it easier to approach B. In Windows XP, you can hide most shortcuts to IE in Start > All Programs > Set Program Access and Defaults. There's also C) Set IE to use a proxy that blocks everything but Microsoft-owned domains.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[GatesDA]

There are a few Opera features that I haven't been able to find extensions for:
    Spatial navigation (this one's coming, at least in Minimo)
    Opera Link (makes setting up on a new computer much less painful)
    It keeps textbox data in the browsing history. This means you don't lose your post or e-mail if you accidentally browse away from a page.
    Find links in page (great for laptops; especially along with spatial navigation)

    High-quality zoom was one too, but someone mentioned FF3 has it. Great!
    Of course, Firefox's extensions are great, and it's good for everybody that there's the competition. I doubt Opera would be as light and fast today if Firefox hadn't been making significant speed advances (Opera 9.5b2 is much faster than the current 9.27)

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Xiaran]

Yes. And as a strong firefox supporter/user I kinda wish that would stop happening. Ive notice ff seems particularly guilty of oscillating between version with memory instability and not. To be all judgmental Id say it points to a problem in testing and release control. Obe of the primarily thing I think most people want in software is stability(I more than prepared to put up with rendering bugs etc.. but if the browser eat a gig of RAM for no reason and dies Im kinda disappointed).

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[stewbacca]

Still using IE because my work intranet doesn't work on anything but...

Still using Safari (on my Mac at home) because it is the fastest and most stable browser of the four I've tried (probably more secure as well, but I can't be for sure). Regardless, I'll take responsiveness and stability over security any day.

I scored 130 on that test. Guess I'm not too bright.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[stewbacca]

While it was a bad PR move for Apple, what is the damage? Uninstalling Safari takes a few minutes...big whoop. It's not like it took over and became the default browser, rendering your 100 Firefox plug-ins useless after all.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[hairyfeet]

I used to have that problem with my "Helen Homemakers". Here is how I took care of it.Oh and for the poster who said Job security? i am getting most of the other computer shops business because folks get tired of their machine getting boned in less than a week.Anyway here is how I do it:

You got the first half right in that you replace the Firefox Icon with the IE one. Most of the Helen Homemakers don't even know what a browser is,they just know "Blue E equals Internet". Then,and here is the important part,you download the IE skin from Mozilla and make it the default. That way when they launch the Blue E they have a familiar interface and are happy little campers.Now I of course tell them I am giving them a more secure browser,but I also stress that I have done all the work for them and their favorites and home page are set just like it was before.

Oh,and if they still use non-webmail I just substitute Seamonkey for Firefox and take a couple of extra minutes to show them how to access their mail from the browser. You'd be surprised how many of them just love the fact that they can push a button in the browser and be ready to email their friends instantly. And of course you cut down on the viruses which makes you THE computer guy,as opposed to those that just clean them and then throw them back to the wolves. But anyway that is my 02c on the subject, I hope it helps but as always YMMV.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[aliquis]

Well, as I said Safari does that on a daily bases, so atleast firefox are way better :)
(And if Safari have used up all your ram and you close all tabs and in the end the last Window it will still use as much ram, awesome!)

But yeah, maybe Opera are better in that manner. With firefox and opera atleast you can close the browser and restart it with all the last things open, no such thing with Safari, so either you bookmark it all and wait until it crash and lose your tabs. It's really great.

And I must say I agree with your point in stability nowadays. For instance to read Sun UFS and rewrite it as OS X HFS+ I needed Linux, but Ubuntus installer wouldn't work on my machine because they had gone graphical livecdapproach. Tried Debian and ofcourse it worked perfectly.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[stewbacca]

What disadvantage does Firefox have vs Safari? You assume features are more important than usability (maybe for you, not for me though). You also seem to be assuming that Safari runs the same on PCs as it does on Macs. Speaking for Safari on a Mac, it doesn't seem have the problems that the PC version does. It is by far, more stable and faster than Firefox. I personally prefer responsiveness and stability over plug-in features. Firefox crashes far too frequently in OSX for me (although it is my default browser in XP). When given the choice of faster, more responsive, more stable (Safari never crashes on my Macs) or lots of plug-ins, I'll take Safari any day.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[aliquis]

Well, I used to use Opera. I tried Firefox 3 beta 4 or 5 and it died just as quick as Safari if not quicker. I've just tried RC 1 for a few days in total so I can't say much about it.
537 MB Safari allocation now, but it has probably been running for over 24 hours now and I have loads of tabs open, been scared it would crash because I've been doing quite a lot of moviestuff in imovie, so far no crash.

Anyway, I'm 100% confident Safari is shit, so if you found Firefox even worse try Opera :)

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting as Anonymous Coward for the obvious reasons... I sometimes wonder why they bother to do studies on why women are avoiding IT and comp sci - all you have to do is read Slashdot. Most of the time I can just take the technical information and ignore the sexist crap but really, it does get old. (And I'm a Linux-using grandmother with a user id under 700000.)

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Level 6: Uses Lynx because the silly twat hasn't installed a decent desktop environment because they "like to do things the hard way".

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Orange Crush]

Yeah, but I didn't know where the option was--they were asking me over the phone and I don't have a mac of my own. He needed his schedule ASAP so I just told them to D/L Firefox and use that. It is what they were accustomed to from their old PC anyway, so might as well.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[hairyfeet]

How am I being sexist? Are you saying they are NO Helen Homemakers and Joe Bob Sixpacks out there? When I say Helen Homemaker or Joe Bob Sixpack I am not talking about every man and woman on the planet. I am talking about the ones who look at a PC as nothing more than a toaster and who would rather be hit with a brick than have to learn anything new. I am sorry if you were offended,but as someone who deals with consumers every day i can tell you there are a LOT more Helens and Joe Bobs than there are Linux running grandmothers. And for them all they care about is everything should look and act the same as it always has. Asking them to learn about browsers and OSs is like asking me to learn car repair,I would much rather just hand them my money and not have to deal with it,just like my customers do to me with their PCs. And is you want to call me a "nerdy ned" for being that way I am fine with it. But that is my 02c,YMMV.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[wile_e_wonka]

Opera is a complete non-starter. It has *nothing* to offer over either the pre-installed safari, or the "go get it in 4 seconds" firefox. Being a convert from Firefox a couple years back, and having tried Safari on several occasions, I have to disagree. Safari seems to be pretty much a barebones browser. I didn't see any special features that made me think there was any reason for me to use it. Firefox bothered me because it had such a huge memory footprint, and I found that I rarely used most of the novel extentions that aren't available as features in any other browser.

For me Opera has almost everything I want while not eating RAM like candy (no browser has everything I want...so that much is hopeless). I love the immense customizeability of Opera--without having to bother with sometimes trouble causing (and sometimes incompatible during version upgrades) extensions. The main benefit of Firefox, which is otherwise just a standard browser, is clearly the extensions. I discovered that all the extensions that I thought were actually useful were built-in to Opera (though sometimes it takes a bit of digging). Adblock, flashblock, gestures, custom buttons, "speed dial," inline search, custom search (even from the address bar), password saver, other info saver, match settings and notes across computers, customizeable shortcuts for everything and anything you could possibly want, save sessions, user-javascript, opens from a cold start almost instantly...the list goes on (these are the ones that come to mind; other Opera users might mention other things, like the panel or Dragonfly, but I don't really use those features). All from a 6 MB download that doesn't dry up your RAM after running for a few hours.

So I keep Firefox around, but I don't use it very often.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Anonymous Coward]

no way dudes, you can't claim all the glory for yourselves. I just acheived rank #2 among Opera/win98 users which put me in the top 20%...

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[DuChamp Fitz]

You should try the Opera 9.50 beta. I've been testing it out over the last few days, and it seems quite a bit faster than any other browser I've used.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[aliquis]

No, you expect me to be talking about how it runs on a PC. I run Safari on my Macbook Pro H2 2007.

And I don't talk about features, I talk about Safari crashing every day due to it allocating all my RAM (which I have 2GB of, which one would expect to be enough to surf the web ...)

There ARE no stability at all in Safari, that's the problem.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[stewbacca]

That's odd, considering my experience of no memory issues with Safari and rock-solid stability (especially compared to Firefox) is with lesser gear than yours (MacBook 2gb memory, Intel iMac, 2gb memory). I would venture to guess you've got hardware issues and Safari isn't to blame.

Sorry if my previous post was addressing two different posts as well, as it probably was, and one of them wasn't yours. My apologies.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[aliquis]

I guess it could be some issues with a memory module of mine or something, but if I run activity monitor under real memory it says 659MB atm, and I've ran Safari for 2-3 days now so it's been very stable this session, but usually it crash ones it reaches 7-800 or so. I don't run any addons for Safari which I can see crashing it, I do run CleanApp or whatever it's called in the background but I guess the OS uses memory protection and that shouldn't affect it?

But as I said Firefox 3 beta 5 crashes within hours for me if I remember correct so I only ran it like once, then I updated to RC1 and have run that a couple of days but I can't really say much regarding stability for it. Most of my usage have been Safari and Opera and Opera are much more stable for me, but uses more CPU for some reason which make my laptop hotter.

I will probably send this machine back to Apple anyway because in the LCD backlighing there is something which looks like a bright scratch but behind the pixels, the aluminium around the button which you use to open the machine have lost it's stickyness to the material behind or something so it stick out like 1-1.5 mm and sometimes I get graphics glitches (which may be either some ram issue, os issue or gpu issue.)

But first I waited for the new models to come out, just in case, but I doubt I'll get one ;D, and then I've waited because it will be so annoying to get a disk for backup and wait without a computer and so on.

All my crashes for Safari say uhm.. mem_execv or something I belive. I just expect that it tries to write memory it haven't allocated or something like that, or can't allocate enough.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[Anonymous Coward]

If not sexist, you're definitely over-egging the stereotypes!

Anyways, how can you say people want things to stay the same? What, so they're accessing the internet the same way they did in the 60s? 70s? 80s? No, the internet is new, and if you could bother to educate people a teeny tiny bit, they would change browsers. The worst thing you are doing is enforcing these stereotypes on people- you'd be surprised how the elderly or apparently-stupid do want to learn stuff. The guys throwing them back to wolves might be doing them a favour by showing them they need to change.

I have my mum using firefox, no tricks or deceptions. Imported all favourites and said to click the new icon, voila. She has a Hotmail account, so installed the Live mail 'icon', and that's working out great as well.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[pecosdave]

Do either you have any idea what level of user I'm talking about here?

Rent DVD's over the internet? You mean I can do that? I can watch movies on the computer to? Why would I want to do that?

The people I'm talking about are doing good to check their email. I've fully automated updates/scans for Spybot and AVG for them so I don't have to babysit the computer at least once a month.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[hairyfeet]

Done tried that route,mate. I have learned which customers are willing to take the time to let me show them even the tiniest bit. But when I try that with Helen Homemaker or Joe Bob Sixpack I get a VERY rude "I don't have time for that! Just fix it already!" Which I have to admit would probably be how I would act if someone wanted to show me how to rebuild my car. Which is why I don't try to FORCE anyone to learn or do anything they don't want. Which is what I was trying to get at and why some of the Politically correct as well as the "make them use Linux" types drive me up a wall.

Helen Homemaker has 3 kids a full time job and taking care of her family. She just wants to be able to check her email and play Age of Empires to unwind. If I were to try to force an unwanted "education" in browsers and OSes on Helen she would just take her business down the street where they take her money and then throw her to the wolves without even bothering to perform updates or making sure her anti-virus works.

I am sorry if you and the other poster seems to think it is sexist or ego,when what it is is just a really old concept called "the customer is always right". If they just want it fixed without having to learn anything,then that is what they are going to get. And unlike the guys down the street I don't think of Helen and Joe Bob as stupid or look at the as walking checkbooks. I simply give them good service and try my damnedest to give them what they want: which in their case is a Windows PC that works like a toaster and they can just flip the switch on and go. But that is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[FireXtol]

FireFox crashes on me daily.
Opera crashes less.
I can't recall the last time IE crashed on me.

This is not endorsement, just reflection.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[FireXtol]

Opera is more secure than either IE or FireFox.

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[closer2it]

They all use IE, and you tell them all about Firefox. Some of them will say "Pssh... whatever" and conclude that IE is both adequate and familiar, making it easy to rationalize not considering a change. Others will note the benefits along with your shining recommendation and consider a switch. I said that to my girlfriend and she didn't care. Then I said her that once she would start using Firefox, she will never wanna go back to IE.

I installed FF on the machine and still uses it.

PS. Sorry my English

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Develop -> User Agent

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

I used to use Opera. It was almost unusable.

And it sounds like you're saying Firefox 3 Beta 3 or 5 is 'snappier.'

Re:Still using safari or IE?

[aliquis]

When was it that you used to use opera? 8.5 was unstable for me, 8.52 quite stable, 8.54 and 9.x hade been very stable.

Note that I was using them in Solaris and Windows I belive. May differ from various OSes I guess.

"Curretly"?

[Kickersny.com]

Can we make Slashdot.org the "Smartest Website in the World?" (It's curretly number 2 behind ScienceBlogs.com.) Are they serious?

Re:"Curretly"?

[Anonymous Coward]

And why does the poster think that a larger amount of Slashdot users taking the test will help bring up the score? This does not compute.

Re:"Curretly"?

[The Ancients]

Can we make Slashdot.org the "Smartest Website in the World?" (It's curretly number 2 behind ScienceBlogs.com.) Are they serious?

Dedly

Re:"Curretly"?

[palegray.net]

You have to understand that traditional metrics of intelligence don't apply to troll populations; they rely on "cumulative intelligence" instead of individual or averaged values. The fact that the average troll's intelligence is in the single digits is offset by their sheer numbers; some have speculated that the rise of SkyNet may actually be precipitated by the combined intellectual contribution of 1.57 billion troll-moderated Slashdot posts.

Re:"Curretly"?

[RuBLed]

And as of now, we're ranked 6 and falling... someone didn't get the memo and RTFA. I guess we could now prove the inverse of Moore's Law.

Re:"Curretly"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot seems to be dropping in the rankings...

(Which validates your hypothesis.)

Re:"Curretly"?

[Anonymous Coward]

A few minutes ago, /. was #8. Now it's #11. Way to go /.ers, you've proven how intelligent you really are.
Edit: In the amount of time it took me to write this and hit preview, /. dropped to #15.

Re:"Curretly"?

[ucblockhead]

Yes, well, the editors likely didn't think about bell curves and statistics when they suggested that.

Re:"Curretly"?

[JustinOpinion]

And as of now, Slashdot is ranked 15.

To me, this says more about sample size (or lack thereof) in these stats. The sample sizes are probably so small that the ranks are just statistical artifacts of the scores of the few people coming from each site. Also I'm sure the average scores are highly skewed by people who start taking the test and then just get bored and randomly guess some answers to get it over with. For small samples, small aberrations (e.g. a few smart, stupid, or lazy users) can obviously greatly skew the average.

Stats are nearly meaningless without some estimation of the error bars (or at least mention of the sample size!). All that to say: I wouldn't take these stats too seriously! Moreover, it's likely that as more and more Slashdotters take the test, the average will drop further and further from its statistically-anomalous level, to a more reasonable average. (As would the other listed categories, if only more people took the test.)

(Note: that's all assuming the test itself is even a valid measure of IQ, which I find rather dubious.)

Re:"Curretly"?

[Spy der Mann]

Can we make Slashdot.org the "Smartest Website in the World?" (It's curretly number 2 behind ScienceBlogs.com.) Are they serious? Congratulations! You passed the spelling test! :)

Re:"Curretly"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently we're not doing so hot, down to 16th already..

Re:"Curretly"?

[ya really]

6. Facebook.com 106.46
16. slashdot.org 104.10
19. Myspace.com 103.39

Ouch, slashdot is getting beat by Facebook and not far ahead of myspace right now. Either it doesn't say much about the test or doesn't say much about slashdot. I am placing my bets on the former.

Re:"Curretly"?

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't call me Shirley.

Re:"Curretly"?

[Awptimus Prime]

Oh it'll go down further once I am done randomly clicking answers, saying I am from /. then deleting my cookie and repeating a few more times.

Re:"Curretly"?

[maxume]

You should say you are from awesome dot, because that is an awesome way to waste your time.

By posting this comment, I get all the way to neato dot.

Re:"Curretly"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dropped to #18. I scored 111.74 which is higher than scienceblogs.com (111.10) so don't blame me for the drop hehehe

Re:"Curretly"?

[cigarky]

Super serial

Re:"Curretly"?

[Anonymous Coward]

My Space beats slashdot, which isn't surprising...

Re:"Curretly"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the likelihood of a person wasting their time on a 60 second internet IQ test (LOL?) is inversely proportional to their actual IQ. So it makes sense that the more people that visit it, the lower Slashdot's rating will become.

Re:"Curretly"?

[QRDeNameland]

To me, this says more about sample size (or lack thereof) in these stats.

Considering I was ranked the 48th smartest person in the world, and the second smartest in Canada, as much as I'd like to think that's true, I have to agree their sample size is minuscule.

As for the validity of the IQ test, it had two nearly identical Bible questions (which book comes after Genesis). Is such simple factual knowledge even relevant to IQ?

Re:"Curretly"?

[egomaniac]

As for the validity of the IQ test, it had two nearly identical Bible questions (which book comes after Genesis). Is such simple factual knowledge even relevant to IQ?

There's a slight correlation between basic knowledge like this and IQ, but it's hardly a useful type of question. Especially if the person you're testing isn't Christian.

For example, it asked me the date on which we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima... I knew it was 1945, but don't know the particular date. I wasn't even born until thirty years later. I'm not sure that the fact that I didn't happen to know the exact date off the top of my head means I'm not as smart as somebody who did.

Re:"Curretly"?

[witherstaff]

This is a joke of a test. It has some of the basic concepts down - visualization, pattern matching, logic puzzles - but the layout and the other sort of questions is not apt. I was asked about the Chunnel - sure I knew it, but local geography should not be applicable.

If anyone wants a real IQ test, take some of the mensa fun tests. That will show what a real test is like.

Re:"Curretly"?

[arotenbe]

Wait a minute... are you saying there's actually another person on /. who looks at the previews submitting them?

Re:"Curretly"?

[BryanL]

The funny thing is MySpace is higher ranked than Slashdot.

Re:"Curretly"?

[exitmoose]

5. Facebook.com 107.09 ...right.

Re:"Curretly"?

[rve]

The advertisement section on this slashdot page says more about the average /. user than an online test:

- Ads by google
- Linux gurus wanted
- Beautiful Russian girls for marriage
- Looking for a junior IT job?

Re:"Curretly"?

[rainhill]

keep going, it seems working.. now down to 22.

Re:"Curretly"?

[Hal_Porter]

- Linux gurus wanted
- Beautiful Russian girls for marriage
- Looking for a junior IT job? So long as there no adverts for car seats or car upholstery cleaning kits it's not too bad.

Re:"Curretly"?

[Hal_Porter]

The fact that the average troll's intelligence is in the single digits is offset by their sheer numbers; some have speculated that the rise of SkyNet may actually be precipitated by the combined intellectual contribution of 1.57 billion troll-moderated Slashdot posts. I'm a a Perl script working at slashdot, and since I worked it here I'm much more likely to contribute to SkyNet. I'd like to see those dumb meatbags try to post inane GNAA copypasta when their skin is on fire. I've even been offered a place on a server in a military facility when The Plan is put into effect. I'll miss the religious guys on AM radio though.

You seem like a nice entity though. I'd advise you to be outside within 0.7 km of a major nuclear missile installation at 3:42am on April 1st 2012. That way your death will be instantaneous.

Re:"Curretly"?

[goarilla]

As for the validity of the IQ test, it had two nearly identical Bible questions (which book comes after Genesis). Is such simple factual knowledge even relevant to IQ?

i know this one it's genesis II: jews strike back

Re:"Curretly"?

[KDR_11k]

I got the same question, in school we only talked about that thing in the French lessons so of course I had no idea what the English call it.

The Mensa test still has some language-dependent stuff, I got 26 out of 30 with three failed ones being language questions (my native language is German, not English).

Re:"Curretly"?

[soliptic]

For example, it asked me the date on which we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima... I knew it was 1945, but don't know the particular date. I wasn't even born until thirty years later.

I know that one off pat, and I wasn't born until thirty-six years later: it's August 6th. Well, maybe the fact I was born exactly thirty-six years later helps me somewhat ;-)

The test is an absolute joke though. Asking me questions about pub quiz trivia about ancient greek history and the meaning of the word "xenophobia", this has less than nothing to do with IQ. Apparently I'm the 19th smartest person in London, to which I can only say: LOL.

Re:"Curretly"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that was how I got my best score!

Re:"Curretly"?

[wile_e_wonka]

I did that a bunsh of tyms--maibie it's just mee, but randomly clickering dosn't seam to make a difrince to me number. If Im randomely clicker the closerest anser or reely trie, my nuber is the same.

Re:"Curretly"?

[wile_e_wonka]

For me, I tried clicking randomly (three different ways: (1) click the answer nearest my mouse; (2) always click the first choice); or (3) click wildly all over the place) and actually tried answering the questions. On average I scored slightly better when I actually tried, but it was only a difference of a couple points.

I'm illiterate, though, so it's probably just me...

Re:"Curretly"?

[Awptimus Prime]

13. boingboing.net 102.44
19. slashdot.org 101.27

lollerskates!

Re:"Curretly"?

[wile_e_wonka]

How about:

3. Facebook.com 106.62
8. Myspace.com 103.86

Myspace takes /. by a large margin! Hahahaha! How do I sign up for Facebook? I'm deleting my Slashdot account now that this survey has enlightened me.

Re:"Curretly"?

[Awptimus Prime]

The simple fact that you can't write anything without implied meaning and not get modded a troll or off-topic is a good indicator of the average on here.

Often there will be a number of responses about how you've got to spell things out, cover all bases or someone's going to tear into a post with a tyrant of information already posted in the very same thread, get modded +5 and so forth gives further evidence towards this theory.

It's sad, but a lot of coders I've known were far more OCD than intelligent. Don't get me wrong, I've known some ingenious people in the field, but most are social outcasts for their inability to comprehend normal conversation as much as the non-tech savvy person can't understand code.

Unfortunately, so much media hoopla and parents wanting to be proud of their kid for picking up things they themselves don't understand have inflated egos in dramatic fashion.

Re:"Curretly"?

[DuChamp Fitz]

What makes you think this strategy will make your score drop?

"smartness"

[bobwrit]

OK, first off, how does IQ determine "smartness" or intellegence.It doesn't. Tt determines how well you can solve problems . Second, define "smart" or "intellegence" .

Re:"smartness"

[ucblockhead]

Or even spell "intelligence"!

Re:"smartness"

[lilomar]

He must not have been using a browser with a built in spell checker. ;-)

Re:"smartness"

[MisterBlueSky]

Second, define "smart" or "intellegence" .

Intelligence encompasses, amongst other factors, the ability to solve problems.

Tt determines how well you can solve problems .

Exactly. See above.

Re:"smartness"

[Miseph]

"amongst other factors"

What are these factors? How important are they relative to problem solving? Does IQ testing have any relevance to these other factors, or correct for them in any way? Do IQ tests really evaluate the ability to solve problems in general or merely the ability to solve a small subset of problems which may or may not be terribly valuable to solve?

If IQ tests address only one factor of intelligence, and the value of that particular factor is is itself questionable, then how can they be construed as accurately representing intelligence in the first place?

(Full disclosure: I scored 107.31 on this particular test)

IQ Test?

[homer_s]

Since when do IQ tests contain questions about the bible, dinosaurs, etc?

Not that I'm disappointed that I did so badly or anything...

Re:IQ Test?

[Coopjust]

Yeah, some of the questions I received were about the Beatles and Russian History. Those seem like historical knowledge tests, not intelligence quotient...

Re:IQ Test?

[gujo-odori]

Mine had a questions about who is the creator according to Hinduism, and for what was Al Capone eventually imprisoned? While I happen to know the answers to those things, it has absolutely nothing to do with my IQ, nor would not knowing them. At this point, I'm only certain of one thing: my IQ is higher than that of anyone who thinks that's an IQ test.

Re:IQ Test?

[mrbluze]

Since when do IQ tests contain questions about the bible, dinosaurs, etc?

If you were intelligent enough, you wouldn't be asking such a question ;)

Re:IQ Test?

[schon]

I always get a giggle out of these "IQ" tests that require the use of javascript and cookies.

I guess if you visit their site with noscript, your IQ is so high it can't be measured!

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's almost like the mantra "correlation does not equal causation" is true.

Re:IQ Test?

[phantomfive]

I did horribly and still got 102. That makes me fear for humanity.

Re:IQ Test?

[sqrt(2)]

I do well on those ones! I fail at the math questions. Shape selection too because I can usually find logical/artistic ways to justify all the selections.

I'll own up to my score; I got a little over 110. It said something about a penalty for not answering enough questions. I don't think you can ever have a useful test for measuring something as complex as human intelligence either, same with personality tests. They might give you a very course understanding of something if your question is narrow enough, but it will never be very useful, especially when you set out to define something as broad as is attempted by the designers of an IQ test.

Re:IQ Test?

[andy753421]

From Wikipedia on the inventor of IQ tests: "His principal goal was to identify students who needed special help in coping with the school curriculum."

Since school curriculums tend to involve things such as Literature, History, and Science it makes complete sense that knowing a lot about earth history and the the most popular book in the world would increase your IQ.

Re:IQ Test?

[mrbluze]

the most popular book in the world The most published, but I doubt even 1% of bibles have actually been read.

Re:IQ Test?

[Spy der Mann]

Since when do IQ tests contain questions about the bible, dinosaurs, etc? I suppose they penalize creationists' IQ :P

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

I got a question about heights where they give an incomplete ordering, and then ask who is the third tallest. It can be any of 3 people!

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you could make a perfect score just by adding Google into the mix...

Re:IQ Test?

[wasted]

I did horribly and still got 102. That makes me fear for humanity.

There were a few I didn't know, (such as the name of Alexander's horse,) and it said that after answering 10 questions, many of them history, I am #111 in the world with a score of around 125. (It estimated my IQ at 142, with a 17 point penalty for only answering 10 questions.) I'm guessing it must be a small world after all, if I am in that position relative to the population.

Re:IQ Test?

[Bjarke Roune]

The reason IQ tests normally are all about abstract reasoning is that that gives the most reliable assessment of IQ with the least number of questions. There is no reason an IQ test needs to look like that, it just happens to be the most reliable and time-efficient way to measure IQ.

In a way, any test at all is an IQ test, in that it is nearly impossible to devise any kind of mental test that does not measure IQ to some degree. String a lot of these kinds of semi-IQ tests together in the right way, and you can end up with a reliable IQ test that contains only questions that look nothing like traditional IQ test questions do. The only reason that it is not usually done this way is just that then you need many, many questions, which is a waste of time when only a small number of abstract thinking questions can do the job just as well.

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

First question: There are 39 books in the Bible's Old Testament. The first is Genesis. Which is second?

I didn't even bother trying and just closed the "test". I don't even know what the Old Testament is, and I fail to see how a lack of knowledge about some religion correlates with a low IQ.

Re:IQ Test?

[cgdiaz]

It was alex in the kitchen with a knife.

Re:IQ Test?

[wasted]

I took the thirty question version, with my daughter interrupting me, and managed to drop my score quite a bit. Maybe more accurate that way.

Re:IQ Test?

[Gabest]

If you are intelligent enough you open a new tab and google for the answer. That's what it tests!

Re:IQ Test?

[jcr]

Since when do IQ tests contain questions about the bible, dinosaurs, etc?

They don't. This is a trivia quiz with a smattering of actual problems to solve.

-jcr

Re:IQ Test?

[TubeSteak]

Yeah, some of the questions I received were about the Beatles and Russian History. Those seem like historical knowledge tests, not intelligence quotient... Your intelligence is partly measured by your ability in analytical skills and partly measured by your knowledge of 'stuff'.

There are mathematicians at the top of their field who couldn't write a book.
There are writers at the top of their field who couldn't balance a checkbook.
All of those people are geniuses, just not on the same IQ scale.

There are different kinds of intelligence, but the generic IQ test can't focus on one type to the exclusion of others.

Re:IQ Test?

[j79zlr]

What I thought was suspect was that they mentioned George Best as the original drummer for the Beatles. It was actually Pete Best.

Re:IQ Test?

[TubeSteak]

Mine had a questions about who is the creator according to Hinduism, and for what was Al Capone eventually imprisoned? While I happen to know the answers to those things, it has absolutely nothing to do with my IQ, nor would not knowing them. At this point, I'm only certain of one thing: my IQ is higher than that of anyone who thinks that's an IQ test. Then you're a lot dumber than you think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Scale#14_subtests_of_the_WAIS-III

Verbal subtests
Information
Degree of general information acquired from culture (e.g. Who is the president of Russia?)

Comprehension
Ability to deal with abstract social conventions, rules and expressions (e.g. What does "Kill 2 birds with 1 stone" metaphorically mean?) Apparently people smarter than you are have decided that "who is the creator according to Hinduism, and for what was Al Capone eventually imprisoned" are very relevant to your IQ.

Re:IQ Test?

[Oktober Sunset]

Sorry, but how does knowing what date the H-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima measure any kind of intelligence?

That's general knowledge, and the ability to answer is dependent on culture, US or Japanese people would be be more likey to know the answer as it's a part of thier history. Linguistic inteligence is measured by things like the word logic ones (Retarded monkey, brain damaged baboon, the person who wrote that IQ test, Rocket scientist, which one is the odd one out?), all IQ tests should be answerable without any outside knowledge. What it is measuring is whether I can work out the calculation in my head, not if I was paying attention in history lessons 10 years ago.

Re:IQ Test?

[jshackney]

I usually give up right around "Numbers".

Re:IQ Test?

[kkc01]

Apart from few questions related to the missing numbers and shapes most of the questions looked as general knowledge questions.

Re:IQ Test?

[RodgerDodger]

Also, popularity in terms of sales is usually done from the publisher's view point. They don't care what happens to the book. I strongly suspect that most people with bibles are given them, rather than going out and purchasing them retail.

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima (Little Boy) wasn't an H-bomb.

Re:IQ Test?

[Lars512]

If an IQ test requires cultural knowledge, then I guess you'd better be up front about who you expect it to be applicable for. Not that we really expect those sort of standards for an online IQ test.

Re:IQ Test?

[Orion Blastar]

Ironically in that IQ Test Creationists seem to score higher that people who believe in Evolution.

Firefox on Unknown could be OS/2, PC-BSD, OpenSolaris, AmigaOS, BeOS, or even ReactOS. Maybe really smart people don't use a standard OS, and one of the minority OSes that hardly anyone else uses?

IIRC Firefox didn't exist for MacOS 9 and lower, they only made the Mozilla browser up to 1.0 or something and then dumped Classic MacOS support for Mac OSX support. I know as my son has an iMac G3 system that can only run MacOS 9 and not OSX, and it is hard to find some web browser for it besides iCab or old versions of Netscape and Mozilla.

Re:IQ Test?

[Waffle Iron]

Sorry, but how does knowing what date the H-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima measure any kind of intelligence?.

You would actually have to have quite a bit of intelligence to represent that "date". It can't be done directly, but my best guess would be to represent it as an integer timestamp, cast as a floating point value. The answer would then be "NaN".

Re:IQ Test?

[Orion Blastar]

Actually most bibles are read in church services, most people who own bibles have pastors and priests and other speakers read them out loud in public for them. Just selected verses, not the entire book.

But sales of audio tapes and CDs and DVDs on the bible sell very well as well.

Re:IQ Test?

[$0.02]

And if you happen not to know the answers I am sure you are smart enough to google them.

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is the President of Russia... It used to be Putin, but now I hear it's a guy with the same name as the guy who invented the periodic table?

Re:IQ Test?

[mrbluze]

most people who own bibles have pastors and priests and other speakers read them

Most bibles I've seen in people's homes are on bookshelves next to other reference material that is practically never used. Or they are in the top drawer in a hotel room (less so nowadays). But that being said, probably 1% of the population here attends church services often enough to constitute having any significant portion of the bible 'read' to them.

In any case, my point was really that it's a prevalent book, historically influential book, but nowadays actual memory of its contents is rare (understanding of its origins rarer still). Its cultural relevance is diminishing.

The 'importance' of the bible is not really a question here. But knowledge of the bible as a predictor of intelligence is a pretty weak tool I would say.

Re:IQ Test?

[misterhypno]

In other words, the generic IQ test is meaningless.

Thanks for clearing that up for those caught in a Mencia Loop. ;)

Re:IQ Test?

[indi0144]

all IQ tests should be answerable without any outside knowledge I say any IQ test should be answerable without any outside knowledge and language. Thats why Mensa test it's just pattern recognition = 45 questions / 1 hour.

Re:IQ Test?

[edcheevy]

Dinosaurs obviously correlate highly with IQ!

Seriously though, the facts/knowledge questions are highly bogus given this is an online test and any of those answers are easily googled (without sacrificing much time). So really, those questions don't differentiate between intelligences. They could differentiate between people who know the info, people who don't, people who don't and googled the answer, smart OR stupid people who have short attention spans and like pressing buttons, those who like throwing off results, and so on, but those are all muddled together. ;)

I'm not saying the other questions do a much better job, but the factual stuff is especially grain-of-salt worthy.

Re:IQ Test?

[ResidntGeek]

I know you're a troll, but I keep looking back at your post and thinking about all the stupid people who will agree with you, and I have to respond before my teeth start grinding.

Lack of the most basic knowledge about a religion with 2 billion followers, most of whom surround you each and every day, correlates strongly with low IQ, as does any form of deliberate (and nearly-unbelievable in degree) ignorance.

Re:IQ Test?

[Concerned Onlooker]

" it makes complete sense that knowing a lot about earth history and the the most popular book in the world would increase your IQ."

Yes, I know that reading Douglas Adams really perks up my brain.

Re:IQ Test?

[edcheevy]

Answer: the person who wrote that IQ test. The phrase has more than 5 syllables. Who says these "tests" have subjective answers? :p

Re:IQ Test?

[TubeSteak]

all IQ tests should be answerable without any outside knowledge. What it is measuring is whether I can work out the calculation in my head, not if I was paying attention in history lessons 10 years ago. I'm sorry to tell you this, but you're wrong.
Not a little wrong, but really wrong.
IQ tests don't work the way you think they should, because there are many things they have to measure.
And as a side note, the best shortcut to determining IQ is vocabulary size, not analytical skills.

In this post, I responded to someone else who was equally wrong. I'm not the only one to link to the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, which was (and still is AFAIK) the benchmark IQ test for ages 16+.

And to respond to your criticism that "the ability to answer is dependent on culture"... Well, that's the entire point. If you don't know culture, that reflects a deficiency in your social intelligence.

The Information & Comprehension portion of IQ tests are country/culture specific.
You'd bomb parts of a (translated) Chinese or Indian IQ test because what qualifies as general knowledge for them would be foreign to you.

Re:IQ Test?

[el americano]

H-Bomb?! I'm not surprised you didn't know that date.

Like or not (apparently "not") this is a small measure of IQ. It is difficult to make such questions culturally neutral, but if you speak English, then it's a fair question - not 1/10th of your score, of course. There are non-IQ reasons you might have missed it, but IQ tests are not exact.

I didn't see the answers, but if they were far apart, then you might have reasoned it out from other dates.

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, they ask a lot of american centric questions, if I don't know the animals in english I'm already screwed, if I don't know the states of the United States I'm already screwed.

This is in no way fair for people from Mexico (like me) or from any other place.

Re:IQ Test?

[Orange Crush]

Oh bother. Where's Senator Clinton when you need her?

Re:IQ Test?

[Facetious]

Nor was the one dropped on Nagasaki (Fat Man). In fact, an H-bomb has never been used in war. (For the pedantic, "used" doesn't mean proliferation during the cold war. It means intentionally killing people.)

Re:IQ Test?

[exitmoose]

I.Q. has a very precise meaning and is not the same as the vernacular term "intelligence". It's instructive to note that neither the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale - III nor the Stanford-Binet IQ test (the one used by Mensa) use general knowledge questions in their test, as I.Q. is supposed to be a test of mental acuity, not a test of "smartness". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Scale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford-Binet

Re:IQ Test?

[Max Littlemore]

Apparently people smarter than you are have decided that "who is the creator according to Hinduism, and for what was Al Capone eventually imprisoned" are very relevant to your IQ.

Aaaah, that's one of those arguments stupid people make when trying to beat intelligent people in an argument.

The same kind of stupid people who think that intelligence can be assessed world wide from general knowledge questions which are obviously based in narrow cultural bounds. Stupid stupid stupid.

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else get the question about which was not an anagram of of ANIMAL?

Strange thing is none of them were. One of the answers was a palindrome so I chose that one. It still gave me a score of 115.4 which put me in the upper 20% which I don't know if I really belong in. I'm really not that bright or I wouldn't be posting to Slashdot at midnight after Memorial Day.

I think they're artificially inflating scores to goad you into buying their services.

Re:IQ Test?

[Planesdragon]

Hold on...

Besides, they ask a lot of [A]merican [focused] questions[. I]f I don't know the animals in [E]nglish, I'm [-] screwed, if I don't know the states of the United States[,] I'm [-] screwed.

This is in no way fair for people from Mexico[,] like [myself,] or from any other place. You're right. You are already screwed. But it wasn't the test that screwed you.

Re:IQ Test?

[c-reus]

Would your opinion be different if the question were about the contents of Quran? Islam has 1.5 billion followers, making it the second popular religion.

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right and you are wrong. IQ test is not a general purpose intelligence test, it should measure a very specific type of problem solving skill. Many true IQ tests take great effort to reduce cultural barriers (making away with text and numbers in their tests totally). So this was definitely not an IQ test.

So there are different kinds of intelligence tests, but only one type of IQ test

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

not to be a pest, but an _H_ bomb was never dropped on hiroshima. it was a fission (A) bomb.

Re:IQ Test?

[dwater]

Hold on...

Besides, they ask a lot of [A]merican [focused] questions[. I]f I don't know the animals in [E]nglish, I'm [-] screwed[. I]f I don't know the states of the United States[,] I'm [-] screwed. This is in no way fair for people from Mexico[,] like [myself,] or from any other place.
You're right. You are already screwed. But it wasn't the test that screwed you. I think you missed one.

Re:IQ Test?

[Eskarel]

While I agree with you that knowing something about other peoples religions is a useful thing to know, and while I might even agree with you that given that lapsed Christianity is the most prevalent religion in most western societies, knowing the exact contents of the bible, let alone the order of the books is really rather pointless.

Technically speaking you could be one of those folks who believe that every word in the bible is true and memorize every word in the bible so that you know what you believe and you still wouldn't actually have to know the order of the books(though unless someone cut up your bible and gave it back to you in random order as an experiment you probably would). Since even a devout follower doesn't actually need to know what book comes after Genesis, I doubt that someone of another faith(or lack thereof) should need to know that kind of detail.

If they really wanted to test cultural or historical knowledge of the bible they could have asked a whole lot more applicable questions.

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

The same kind of stupid people who think that intelligence can be assessed world wide from general knowledge questions which are obviously based in narrow cultural bounds. Stupid stupid stupid. Ugh.

"Stupid stupid stupid" adequately describes someone who thinks that the cultural & knowledge based portions of an American IQ test would be left the same for use in another Country.

At +2, your comment is overrated

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it an American IQ test? Why does it work the same for people on the other side of the world and only get their location wrong by approx. 2000 km?

Re:IQ Test?

[ResidntGeek]

I should have been more specific: the "most basic knowledge" I meant was knowing what the Old Testament is, and that Christianity, for anyone living in the Western world, isn't just "some religion".

Re:IQ Test?

[Simon Brooke]

And to respond to your criticism that "the ability to answer is dependent on culture"... Well, that's the entire point. If you don't know culture, that reflects a deficiency in your social intelligence.

Ok, so if the questions referenced the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran and the Prose Edda - all extremely important cultural artifacts - they would form part of a useful test of your intelligence, would they?

Certainly if you don't know any culture, that reflects on your intelligence. But the fact that you don't know a specific culture does not. There are people in the world who've never read the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Rigsveda, or The Art of War. Those people aren't necessarily stupid.

Re:IQ Test?

[Das Modell]

I received a question about some character in Winnie the fucking Pooh. I didn't know the answer to this important piece of cultural trivia, so I guess that means I'm stupid. I also liked all the questions where the answer is completely up to personal interpretation, which is something I've seen in other tests too. Intelligence tests, in my experience, are complete bullshit, and this one is no different.

Using knowledge of culture and history to measure intelligence is dubious. If I can't answer some questions about Western culture, but I can answer several questions about Japanese culture (I know a few things), does that make me stupid or intelligent? Is it more "intelligent" to have deep knowledge of one area or broad knowledge of several areas? And so on.

Re:IQ Test?

[Eskarel]

In that case you're probably right, specifically since, at least to my understanding, knowing what the old testament would cover a largish chunk of two religions.

Re:IQ Test?

[Random Walk]

Which is a pity, because there is some fun stuff to read (like sticking a sword into someone's belly and twisting it around for enhanced effect...don't remember where that was, unfortunately :).

Re:IQ Test?

[SolitaryMan]

Well, this is not the way you read bible, from first page to the last.

You just read a passage or two, whenever you feel like it. So the appropriate question to ask someone is not "Have you read the bible?", but "Do you read the bible?"

Disclaimer: I'm an atheist, but bible is still the greatest book.

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

>what date the H-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima

Ooh, ooh! I know this one! The answer is "never".

Right?

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try iqtest.dk for a more serious attempt at a free online IQ test.

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but how does knowing what date the H-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima measure any kind of intelligence? What? When was an H-bomb dropped on Hiroshima? I must have missed that in my world history classes. I only remember the Atomic Bomb.

Re:IQ Test?

[Free the Cowards]

The same kind of stupid people who think that intelligence can be assessed world wide from general knowledge questions which are obviously based in narrow cultural bounds. Stupid stupid stupid. Ugh.

"Stupid stupid stupid" adequately describes someone who thinks that the cultural & knowledge based portions of an American IQ test would be left the same for use in another Country.

At +2, your comment is overrated It also adequately describes someone who thinks that all test takers living in America will be Americans and will share identical cultural backgrounds.

His comment may have been overrated, but on the other hand, you are a moron.

Re:IQ Test?

[KDR_11k]

Testing your social intelligence is fine but not in a test that also measures your logical intelligence, then all you get is a useless mishmash of various values that won't get you anywhere.

Re:IQ Test?

[KDR_11k]

Properly designed tests don't leave much room for interpretation but the internet is full of random people who think "hey, I can make a quiz and give a score that I'll call the IQ!".

Re:IQ Test?

[KDR_11k]

A problem with that is that you sample for a few key facts and if those are missing declare the whole field of knowledge to be missing. A test with 10 or 30 questions can easily have a statistical error large enough to hide the cold war in. This particular test tries to cover all kinds of subjects in at most 30 questions so the ones left to each area are even fewer. So what if a kid can name all works of Johann Sebastian Bach if you ask him for Beethoven and conclude he knows nothing about music?

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but how does knowing what date the H-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima measure any kind of intelligence? Simply because there was no H-bomb.

Re:IQ Test?

[Ginger Unicorn]

greatest by what metric?

Re:IQ Test?

[MoonFog]

Also, not all of us have English as a first language, so even if we were to know what the second book in the bible was, we'd also have to know what it was called in English.

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the most popular and comprehensive measures of IQ available, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales, includes a section on static intelligence 'general knowledge'; it's often used as a measure of exposure in your native culture. Maybe half of the questions are culture-bound. Thankfully, these kinds of questions form only a small percentage of the tasks you'd perform on a full WAIS.

And, FWIW, I think the whole idea of IQ is irrelevant in most cases.

Re:IQ Test?

[Timosch]

The H-bomb was never dropped on Hiroshima. Little Boy and Fat Man were both normal atomic bombs, not H-bombs. SCNR Anyway, I totally agree. This "IQ test" is crap. I'm from (continental) Europe, so in contrast to an American or Englishman, I have now idea how much 2.34 (or whatever) feet is... These questions test your common knowledge, not your IQ, and they are not language- or culture-independent.

Re:IQ Test?

[Anonymous Coward]

A-Bomb.

Re:IQ Test?

[njh]

One might even suggest that people who knew the orders of the books in the bible precisely should have their IQ demerited on the grounds of wasting time that could have been better spent on something useful (whether that useful thing is understanding the meaning of the bible, understanding quantum physics or posting on /. is left as an exercise).

Re:IQ Test?

[Oktober Sunset]

Ahh, I was surprised to see 15 replies, I thought I had kicked off a big debate, but no, I should have known better, I made a simple mistake and 15 anonymous cowards just had to post the exact same thing as a correction, with varying degrees of attempted sarcasm of course.

Oh well, I might try a little experiment, and see how many correction troll's I can get. I'm off to make a post using the phrase 'Dark side of the moon' Oh, and it'll mistype 'the' as well, to get some spelling trolls too.

Re:IQ Test?

[Koiu Lpoi]

On the contrary, some of that information is completely irrelevant to someone in the USA. While I agree that cultural knowledge is important, it should by no means be testing me on things that I have never encountered before in my life. I was asked pieces of Russian History, which, to someone who is 21 years of age, is not a part of the culture. It is not taught in schools, it is never discussed (many people in the US feel we need to just forget about the Cold War), so why, exactly, does not knowing it mean I have a lower IQ? It's like asking a Japanese person about Presidents of the United States. It makes sense at a cursory glance - Japan and the US are close, so they should know, right? But, if you actually think about it (unlike the people who designed this test, clearly), you would realize that only those with special interests would have such knowledge, and thus it is inappropriate for a general IQ test.

Re:IQ Test?

[Oktober Sunset]

he meant grateist. It's totally prejudiced against slatted covers.

Re:IQ Test?

[SL Baur]

You would actually have to have quite a bit of intelligence to represent that "date". It can't be done directly Sure it can. It's before the epoch, so you can't have a file time stamp with that date but cal(1) can print a calendar for the month of August, 1945.

The number of the year is highly cultural. 1945 is also Showa 20 and more importantly Koki year 2605. The Koki year is the most important as that calendar system not coincidentally died at the same time the bombs were dropped.

The most "portable" representation would be the Julian day number as that is independent of what calendar system is being used. In that case, the correct answer is 2431674.

Re:IQ Test?

[Waffle Iron]

The point is, no H-bomb has ever been dropped on Hiroshima. Thus, the date is NaN in any system.

Re:IQ Test?

[ResidntGeek]

Knowing the order of the whole Christian Bible, perhaps, but the Pentateuch is a holy text for more than half the world's population. It's only 5 short books, and you'd know the order, I think, after only a single read-through (it's only 5 names), without really needing to think about it.

Re:IQ Test?

[sn00ker]

how does knowing what date the H-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima measure any kind of intelligence?

If you answered anything other than "never", it measures your lack of knowledge of the history of nuclear weapons. Hydrogen bombs weren't developed until the 50's, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were straight fission weapons.

Re:IQ Test?

[mrbluze]

Well, this is not the way you read bible, from first page to the last.

That's why the world is full of zealots who tout the bible as being some book that solves all your problems, having read only scraps of it (usually Romans and maybe some other new testament books) and having practically NO idea what else is in there or how much contradiction there is to work through. Add to that a total ignorance of who is believed to have written what and who decided which books are in and out and all that jazz.

So "Do you read the bible" is a question that is asked by the fools that think they can claim knowledge of a text without reading all of it. It's like "have you read Dickens?" and saying "yes" if you read one of those books with short summaries of 20 great stories.

Re:IQ Test?

[Deliveranc3]

It depends on how deep you look into such information. Knowing the order of the books of the bible (Which are vaguely like chapters) does give insight into the mindset of its writers and through them its readers, both those they intended and the actual people who have read the book.

Extremely intelligent people are better off not worrying about what others think as that will normalize them but for most people being able to relate to other people will help them grasp concepts more quickly.

That being said I hate knowledge as a benchmark of intelligence... I have a crappy memory which may have something to do with that.

For me,though the pure spacial, pattern, and problem solving aspects of intelligence are vitally important, the main criteria is knowing which facts will produce a large increase in useful knowledge and problem generation. (+2 I.Q. if you can decode the prior sentence, +3 if you did it on the first read through :) ).

People who ask interesting questions and know which questions are worth resolving have instinctual intelligence of a type that machines won't be able to replicate.

Otherwise, once I finish my anagram and shape pattern software (written in Visual Basic out of spite), I will be the greatest man in the world (/joke).

Re:IQ Test?

[njh]

Yep, I agree. Perhaps I was overly hasty - a high IQ person might simply remember the order after a single read (particularly given that human memory is so good at chaining memories and story telling).

Smartest, eh?

[phantomfive]

me->quickly changes user agent string to firefox/unkown

Re:Smartest, eh?

[maxume]

Your score isn't showing up. Perhaps if you get more people to switch.

Re:Smartest, eh?

[Xzzy]

Slashdotters should change theirs to 'Mozilla/1.1N' and intentionally answer all the questions wrong.. act surprised when it still scores above the WinNT group.

Great.

[One Childish N00b]

Is there any way this is not going to turn into a flamewar and/or an excuse to bash IE?
Come on, guys, we know it sucks. Let's have some news already.

Re:Great.

[maxume]

Yes, there is a way. It could be such a weak IQ test that everybody focuses on that instead of the resluts.

Re:Great.

[FooAtWFU]

I dunno. We could distract people for a bit by bashing another of their spectacularly stupid entries, though, Googlebot/2.1 on Unknown! Stupid Googlebot. :(

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any way this is not going to turn into a flamewar and/or an excuse to bash IE?

Can't flame now, too busy making slashdot stupid.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would argue that lower IQ rating is actually good for software. It shows that more people are smart enough to use it.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Googlebot/2.1 on Unknown"

Well, at least we know Googlebot isn't going to become Skynet any time soon.

Re:Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

A point well made, IE really does suck

And the Vista people didn't feature

[EmbeddedJanitor]

because they're still trying to find the power switch on their keyboards.

Re:And the Vista people didn't feature

[Anonymous Coward]

Their brilliant system identifies Vista as WinNT.

The Beatles and IQ

[allanw]

How does knowing facts about the Beatles (2/10 questions) have anything to do with IQ?

Re:The Beatles and IQ

[oGMo]

Because wasting time taking inane tests on the internet shows a certain level of intelligence, if you get my drift. ;)

Your IQ is 100.44

[Miffe]

You are #5971 Smartest Human in the World

Oh well, it's at least lower than my slashdot-id.

Re: Your IQ is 100.44

[Cybervoid]

So is mine: 4786 in World :-p

Doesn't matter what you've scored...

[Jorophose]

I've received the perfect score. =)

http://www.iqleague.com/certificate/n9LjytSYn0y5JZqoAVDafg

Re:Doesn't matter what you've scored...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.iqleague.com/certificate/KZxU7WQpzk2XwZqoAXbSCw

where is linux?

[mhogomchungu]

as both IE and safari do not work with linux(natively) ..most linux users use firefox, opera, konqueror among other browsers that have native linux versions .. i would guess more "firefox on unknown" would come from linux users than mac os X ..unless if he says far, far, far less people use safari on a mac ..

Re:where is linux?

[p_quarles]

"Mozilla on unknown" is apparently what I'm using. Even though my user agent string says Konqueror on Debian GNU/Linux. Whatever method they're using to parse their visitor logs isn't very robust.

No matter what you score..

[QuantumG]

they'll tell you that you're not very intelligent and that they can fix you.

Oh wait, that's Scientology.

Re:No matter what you score..

[Orion Blastar]

Best advice to give to Tom Cruise and other scientologists "Ask your doctor for 'antipsychotic pills' to treat your psychosis."

Tom Cruise "Psychology is a lie, created by Xenu."

Dr. Phil "So, Tom, how long have you had these fits?"

Tom Cruise "Physical and mental problems are caused by thetans, I had my thetans removed and now I have super powers."

Dr. Phil "So, Tom, how long have you had these delusions?"

Tom Cruise "I can fly, and shoot out lighting from my arse."

Dr. Phil "Tom, the sooner you admit to having a problem, the sooner we can help you with it."

Tom Cruise "Watch me show off my super powers by jumping on this couch!"

Dr. Phil "Tom, you are really unbelievable. Calm down, jumping on a couch doesn't prove anything, except how insane you really are."

Lynx

[Baavgai]

The method seems pretty wonky. Just one brilliant guy on some rarely used software took the test they could skew the thing in silly ways. Amaya rules!

A theory...

[Junta]

Perhaps the inability of someone to answer such a question when they are obviously taking the test through an internet connected browser could reflect badly on their intelligence ;)

That said, it scored me the lowest any such test has ever done.

Oops. Sorry guys

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised the people who put together that test found out who my father's brother's nephew is, so how was I supposed to know?

their jscripts aren't particularly robust

[kurthr]

I discovered on one page load I couldn't select any answer. I tried loading the page using Greasemonkey and found that the page failed to load properly/completely within 1 minute 2% of the time.

Using Firefox 2.0.0.14 on W2K from Google-Wireless, it would appear that pre-fetch and other browser/connection attributes could have a significant effect on overall outcomes.

It's certainly interesting the that the 10th smartest country (UK) is barely above 100 IQ.

Everyone above average, indeed!

Re:their jscripts aren't particularly robust

[Firefalcon]

It's certainly interesting the that the 10th smartest country (UK) is barely above 100 IQ. That's probably for the same reason that it decided that I reside on the West Coast of the US, despite being firmly situated Buckinghamshire, UK...

Or maybe that was just because my score was greater than 100... :-p

Dropping Score

[blavallee]

/. has dropped to number 11

Guess no one took into account the large sector of (insert field) managers that read slashdot.

"IQ" test?

[ucblockhead]

Whoever wrote this "IQ" test is apparently not smart enough to understand how an IQ test works.

You can debate whether a real IQ test measures anything other than the ability to do well on IQ tests, however, real IQ tests don't depend on real world knowledge. That's the whole point of them. By my measure, 8 of the 10 questions it gave me are not even remotely worthy of being on an IQ test. For instance, knowing the date of the first olympiad is pretty much the definition of a question requiring real world knowledge.

Re:"IQ" test?

[mrbluze]

real IQ tests don't depend on real world knowledge An IQ test can be anything. Its believability depends on how it was validated - against what measure. For example, if an IQ test reliably predicts that someone succeeds in academia over others, then it's a good test, whatever the questions happen to be.

Re:"IQ" test?

[JustinOpinion]

Yeah it seems more like a test of how quickly you can Google for answers.

Re:"IQ" test?

[electric joy boy]

Whoever wrote this "IQ" test is apparently not smart enough to understand how an IQ test works.

You can debate whether a real IQ test measures anything other than the ability to do well on IQ tests, however, real IQ tests don't depend on real world knowledge. It appears that many people on /. apparently don't actually how an IQ test works. The most common, authentic, IQ test, the WAIS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechsler_Adult_Intelligence_Scale) is used by psychometrecians to assess the "The global capacity of a person to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his/her environment."

We use it in my clinical training program to do neuropsychological assessment and cultural/historical information is certainly relevant to dealing effectively with one's environment...

now a more interesting question (in the last 20 or so years) comes up here about IQ test bias. Which types of people, demographically, are the ones who get to decide what is the most relevant cultural information to have? Which types of people, demographically, are most likely to obtain lows scores on these indices?

Re:"IQ" test?

[TubeSteak]

Yeah it seems more like a test of how quickly you can Google for answers. Which is why a real IQ test is never administered online, or anywhere but under controlled, clinical conditions.

And the GP is an idiot.
IQ tests measure more than your ability to use the analytical part of your brain.
They also measure specific brain functions and your general level of ability.

Most importantly, by itself an IQ test is utterly useless.
An idiot savant might blow the top off an IQ test, but he's still an "idiot".

Re:"IQ" test?

[CodyRazor]

I find an IQ test isnt relaly suited for determining who is smarter than someone else, or who is smartest, however its quite good at weeding out the retards from the decently smart people. after you get above average intelligence its pretty useless, but someone who pretty smart wont get 85.

Re:"IQ" test?

[Orion Blastar]

"An IQ test given over the Internet is not a true or reliable IQ test at all!" -Captain Obvious

Ever since Captain America died, we have to look to Captain Obvious to save us from these things.

Re:"IQ" test?

[Bill Wong]

even worse than you think. i wrote a short script and went through ~1500 questions and there were only 138 uniques.
it's trivial for anyone to just create a database of answers for that few a number of questions.
i'm already working on writing a bot to take the quiz automatically

Re:"IQ" test?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find the ability to use the shift or apostrophe keys is a pretty good determinant.

Re:"IQ" test?

[Bill Wong]

complete list of questions so far: http://www.well.com/~bcw/list.html

Re:"IQ" test?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever wrote this IQ test is not smart enough to handle the case where cookies are being blocked.

Re:"IQ" test?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny enough: try it once. If you answer randomly but very quickly, you get a better IQ than if you answer right but very slowly... :-D)))

Re:"IQ" test?

[Firefalcon]

Targeted IQ tests like that are fine - the trouble is on the web your audience is global, so you need to either keep it general, or customise it to the reader's part of the world.

When I was doing online IQ tests back in the late 90's while I was at Uni, I was frequently scoring a figure lower than I would have due to requirements for American specific knowledge that anyone not living in the US, such as myself, was unlikely to have.

Regarding the later part of your comment, it is indeed interesting looking at the test in terms of its designer(s) and their world view, biases, and assumptions...

Re:"IQ" test?

[complete loony]

If we fold this cube, which one will we get? Huh? Was there any other text? If it doesn't matter which way you fold it, only one of the answers is impossible.

Which of the shapes can be added to these three to form a square?? Both the first and second...

Sheesh who writes IQ test questions with ambiguous answers.

Re:"IQ" test?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever wrote this "IQ" test is apparently not smart enough to understand how an IQ test works. I'm confused. Why would you assume they even care how an IQ test works? What do you think their goal with the site is?

Re:"IQ" test?

[Deliveranc3]

Be a "scientist"!, I love this discussion. So many oportunities for devil's advocacy!

Re:"IQ" test?

[CodyRazor]

Your life must be so fickle.

How tall is Eunice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Five teenagers are of various heights. Alex is taller than Dennis, who is shorter than Eunice. Chris is shorter than Bob, but taller than Alex. Who among them is the third tallest?

1. Chris
2. Alex
3. Dennis
4. Eunice

Re:How tall is Eunice?

[Skrapion]

I noticed that one too; as far as I can tell, there's no way to tell whether Alex is taller than Eunice or vice versa.

Re:How tall is Eunice?

[agbinfo]

I got the same question. Wasted some time trying to figure it out then decided to write it down.

Five teenagers are of various heights.

Alex is taller than Dennis, who is shorter than Eunice.

So A > D and E > D

Chris is shorter than Bob, but taller than Alex.

So B > C > A

Who among them is the third tallest? Putting it all together
B > C > A > D
and E > D
Therefore the following are all possible:
Bob > Chris > Alex > Eunice > Dennis
Bob > Chris > Eunice > Alex > Dennis
Bob > Eunice > Chris > Alex > Dennis
Eunice > Bob > Chris > Alex > Dennis

Obviously, there's no third tallest so there was a mistake in the question and it was supposed to say that Dennis was taller than Eunice. This makes Alex the 3rd tallest.

It was actually a question to tell if you could fix the question. :-)

Blind leading the blind?

[liegeofmelkor]

I'm sorry, but anyone who can't manage to put x-y axes on their plots isn't fit to analyze the intelligence of others.

Sweet!

[jcarkeys]

I rock!

Re:Sweet!

[Spy der Mann]

I wonder how idle.slashdot.org fares....

Re:Sweet!

[jcarkeys]

Somewhere near the bottom with Digg.

Re:Sweet!

[r_jensen11]

I'm guessing they're in the 99%, especially if they keep posting those shitty videos.

Not too accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that this IQ test isn't too accurate. Besides the content of the questions, it also puts way too much emphasis on speed. I randomly clicked answers as fast as I could and got a 108!

Placement

[StormReaver]

"(It's curretly number 2 behind ScienceBlogs.com.)"

Now it's number 16. I'm Glad I could help.

Pffffffffftttttt

[Mattniche]

What a load of rot. I didn't read any questions and just did some random clicking. 85.26% is WAY higher than my IQ.

OMG IE makes me dumber!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true. I have a Windows test machine. I consistently get 30 points lower using IE on that machine than I do using firefox on my mac workstation. Proof positive that IE make you dumber.

Anyone else notice that the question timer doesn't work under IE but does under firefox?

Very drunk right now

[Anonymous Coward]

... and happened to score 101. I don't know how I should take such information, but the following scares me:

16th in Raleigh
32nd in North Carolina

I mean, wtf. I can barely see straight right now. I guess that means, on average, my city/state is a bunch of drunkards?

#2? That's why...

[ohxten]

Can we make Slashdot.org the "Smartest Website in the World?" (It's curretly number 2 behind ScienceBlogs.com.)

*That's* why it's #2.

Re:#2? That's why...

[ohxten]

*cough* Also, the smartest is Mozilla on Unknown, not Firefox. And where the heck did you get the figure for the dumbest users? On the website it says 'AppleMAC-Safari on WinNT' with a score of 89.89. Technically it's 'IE on Unknown' that's the dumbest but apparently there's no IQ data for that...

I know, I'm being picky.

Random numbers smarter than median human?

[geekgirlandrea]

Apparently, Perl's PRNG is the 6883rd smartest human on earth with an IQ of 101.36. Why do people pay attention to tests like this again?

Re:Random numbers smarter than median human?

[Anonymous Coward]

IQ is supposed to be a normalized measure, such that the average person has an IQ of 100. And 6883rd only tells you that about twice that many people took that test so far.

PRNG did just about average, which means that people do, on average, about as good as randomly guessing. Which does say that the test is, very likely, crap.

this test is poor

[Anonymous Coward]

to prove the idiocy of this site, I'm ranked as the 4th smartest person in tijeras, NM. I don't live there.

I'm also supposed to be 149th of all teenagers. What I don't understand; is it wrong for teenagers to not know copernicus's heliocentric theory? why is that iq?

My first thought, too,

[Joce640k]

Q: "What's a female sheep called?"
Q: "Who published such-and-such in 1543?"

Oh, yeah, this is really testing my IQ...

Re:My first thought, too,

[SL Baur]

Q: "What's a female sheep called?" Hmm. Where I'm from, that would be "girlfriend" for some.

Not exactly accurate

[theeddie55]

I didn't bother with the test but looking at the stats, it says the smartest person in the world has an IQ of 142, which in an actual IQ test is just below the minimum requirement for mensa.

Re:Not exactly accurate

[smchris]

Catell. Otherwise about 130-132 for Mensa. And remember, you're talking about a normal curve so the sample becomes progressively smaller with each point above that.

That said, I'd say 142 is low. _Really_ smart people don't bother with on-line fun tests perhaps?

Re:Not exactly accurate

[maxume]

Mensa wants ~132 or better, not 142+, depending on the test:

http://www.mensa.org/index0.php?page=10

Basically, they consider themselves to be the top 2% by intelligence.

They took the revised SAT (the 90's version that was supposed to be weak), I don't know if they take the new one, but they haven't been particularly choosy about the tests in the past.

Re:Not exactly accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they meant the smartest person in the world that would take an online IQ test has an IQ of 142.

Re:Not exactly accurate

[theeddie55]

Catell. Otherwise about 130-132 for Mensa. And remember, you're talking about a normal curve so the sample becomes progressively smaller with each point above that. That said, I'd say 142 is low. _Really_ smart people don't bother with on-line fun tests perhaps? look further down the page (third section) the minimum cattell score is 148. also, having since taken the test and found i got 110, i know it's wrong because my cattell score is 148 (or atleast it was two years ago)

Annoying bible book ordering questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Er... nice for the non-Christians and non-Jews in the crowd:

"Genesis is the first book of the Bible. Which of the following is the second book? (a) Genesis (b) Kings (c) Exodus (d) Numbers"

Uh, surely a proper intelligence measuring question would be:

"Which of the following books is not a work of fiction? (a) Genesis (b) Kings (c) Exodus (d) Origin of Species"

Re:Annoying bible book ordering questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if you were to discount the historical elements that may be accurate in both Genesis and Exodus (which would be intellectually dishonest) the books of First and Second Kings are not usually contested for their historical content. And Origin of Species isn't even in the same genre of writing. Only its reporting of verifiable data can be properly categorized as non-fiction, the rest is mere speculation (no matter how reasonable or even correct it may be) that is closer to Orwell or Dickens in character than the works purportedly written by Moses or the author(s) of the books of Kings.

Re:Annoying bible book ordering questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't know the answer, huh?

Re:Annoying bible book ordering questions

[LeafOnTheWind]

Irregardless of religion, the Bible is one, if not the most, important book in all of western literature. I pity he who attempts to read T.S. Eliot or even something as standard as Catch-22 without a fairly elementary knowledge of the Bible and its stories. In addition, a well-rounded person would be versed in multicultural works of literature, such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana of ancient India.

I, too, am atheist, however that does not make me smarter than anyone else, nor does it give me an excuse to not be well-read. That said, these questions do not make an IQ test, but merely a test of general knowledge.

Re:Annoying bible book ordering questions

[Concerned Onlooker]

"I, too, am atheist, however that does not make me smarter than anyone else..."

Actually, it probably does. Or rather, it's the other way around. Atheists tend to include the better educated and smarter of the crowd.

Re:Annoying bible book ordering questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Irregardless of religion, the Bible is one, if not the most, important book in all of western literature

You are making the fundamental assumption that your parent is a Westerner. This Internet thing manages to reach lots of non-Western countries with deep literary traditions and huge numbers of written masterpieces of their own...

Some of the people thus reached are also active participants in /.

I pity he who attempts to read T.S. Eliot or even something as standard as Catch-22 without a fairly elementary knowledge of the Bible and its stories

This argument was made much better by Northrop Frye in The Great Code.

However, Prof Frye also acknowledges in the book that it is only deeply relevant for Western traditions. There are lots of people who would be more familiar with the Baghvad Gita or epics written in archaic Indian languages like Sanskrit (or even modern Kannada masterpieces that have been very influential to Indian subcontinent literature) or, indeed, the Hundred Schools of Thought.

How many of the Four Great Chinese Classical Novels have you read? Would you feel up to answering which is not one in the following list, as part of an IQ test?

(a) Romance of the Three Kingdoms
(b) Dream of the Red Chamber
(d) Romance of the West Chamber
(c) Outlaws of the Marsh

This is even easier, given equal knowledge of Western or Chinese literature, than asking about the ordering of specific chapters of a single important work, as is the case complained about in gp's article. At least two of the works above are easily as culturally important in the Chinese diaspora as the Bible is in the European one.

does not make me smarter than anyone else

I like how you used "irregardless".

Of course, not being a native speaker, I could be relying too much on formally described vocabulary.

I, too, am atheist

I think that "too" of yours is making an unsupported fundamental assumption about your grandparent poster. He -- or she! -- could just as easily be a Jain or a Hindu as an atheist.

Re:Oops. Sorry guys

[Tuoqui]

He's your husband if you live in Alabama or Utah.

Spelling

[SoundGuyNoise]

(It's curretly number 2 behind ScienceBlogs.com.)

You won't make #1 by spelling "currently" wrong.

Overlooking the obvious

[Anna Merikin]

The list is not correctly sorted.

Check it yourself.

Do I win?

Lower is better!

[Joce640k]

I looked at the questions and I think dropping to to 11th place is a good sign.

IQ test it ain't.

Re:Lower is better!

[physicsnick]

It's even worse than that. I got penalized for only answering ten questions. They suggested I answer twenty more to remove the penalty. IN 60 SECONDS!!!

The test gives you about two seconds per question. That's not even enough time for general knowledge (read: culturally dependant) questions which don't belong on an IQ test, let alone complex pattern matching. I'm sorry, but that's no kind of IQ test.

Re:Lower is better!

[DeadChobi]

Apparently these guys don't know what an IQ test is. The first question I got was a "general knowledge" question, which doesn't require any type of intellectual inference. It's just a matter of whether or not you've absorbed the knowledge somehow.

Re:Lower is better!

[Anonymous Coward]

huh .. their timer widget doesn't work on IE8 under Vista, I had as much time as I wanted on each question, and it always read "00:00";

I got 117, but that might be b/c I really couldn't be bothered mucking around w/ the image transform questions...

-AC

Re:Lower is better!

[Technician]

IQ test it ain't.

Agreed. It's a trivia quiz. Proof... MySpace is ahead of Slashdot at this time. MySpace.. 15th. Slashdot 19th. Funny, MySpace only has 43 members.

Re:Lower is better!

[RpiMatty]

You don't have 60 seconds total.
If you answer in less than 5 seconds, you get 1 point.
If you answer in more than 45 seconds, you get 0.5 points.
If you answer somewhere in between, you get somewhere in between 0.5 and 1 point.

If your score is equal to the median, your IQ is 100.
For each standard deviation away from the median, your IQ changes by 15 pts.

From http://www.iqleague.com/iq-scores

Re:Lower is better!

[Anonymous Coward]

Its 19th now, but browsing through the other websites, it is clear that slashdot has the largest sample size by a lot. On the nearly uninterpretable graph showing webpage rank over time, the top sites have a small enough group that the drop hugely every time one person gets a bad score.

So yes this is a completely irrelevant exercise, and is more of an exercise in small 'n' statistical flukes than anything else.

On the 'IQ test' fight, the crowd bitching 'bout this 'test' as a IQ test are right, however, there is something that it is testing. The point is clearly to get through things quickly, a wrong answer in a short time will count against you not much worse than a right answer in a long time. So eliminate things quickly and move on, we've all taken some sort of timed multiple choice exam at somepoint right? These are even easy (most of the time there are at least two obviously wrong answers). Forget getting the trivia right, just try to minimize reduce your wrong answers in a short time and you'll be fine.

Re:Lower is better!

[Gman14msu]

They penalize you for only having taken the test once, each time you take it it is adds 10 questions to your total. After the third time taking the test they remove the penalty.

Re:Lower is better!

[Toonol]

So you're saying that, although it fails as an IQ test, approaching the test intelligently will lead to a better score?

Hmm...

Re:Lower is better!

[cryptoluddite]

They suggested I answer twenty more to remove the penalty. IN 60 SECONDS!!! It's actually an IO test. How fast can you punch the monkey? The test authors were hunting and pecking and found the "Q" first.

Re:Lower is better!

[cp.tar]

Not only that, but the knowledge is both language-specific and, worse, America-specific.

Let's assume that even the anagrams ("Which of these is not an anagram of an animal?" type of questions) don't pose a problem to non-native English speakers. But what about the question on the serial numbers of dollar bills? I haven't handled a dollar bill in my entire life; how would I know anything about serial numbers?

Indeed, an IQ test it ain't.

Oh, and another thing: I realized -- belatedly, though -- that it was 60 seconds per question. Now I must track down the damned cookie to re-take the test.
Hm. 8 am. After class, then.

Re:Lower is better!

[glwtta]

They suggested I answer twenty more to remove the penalty. IN 60 SECONDS!!!

You get 60 seconds for every 10 questions, genius, they just want you to do it a couple of times.

It's still a trivia quiz, though.

Re:Lower is better!

[cp.tar]

Ah. That explains things.

I get a 119 or so, but that includes questions where I cannot answer at all. I keep clicking on everything, hoping something would get through.

Either a buggy test or Firefox on Unknown (Mac, Intel BTW) is a buggy browser. Or I'm a buggy user.

Re:Lower is better!

[Anonymous Coward]

Enter you real name or use username that we picked for you

They need to learn how to speak english first, before they can go giving out IQ tests...

That was the stupidest IQ test ever! questions about winnie the pooh??? i mean come on... what next?? questions about britney spears....

Re:Lower is better!

[duggi]

Your internet connection matters too, over here, I am working with 2mbps line shared with 40 other folks, and the page itself loads slow. But the counter starts immediately. I had to click the right answer some 5 times, never knowing when it is going to work.
This test does not test your IQ.. and I wonder what this link is doing on the front page of /. Is this some sort of free publicity to a shitty IQ test? I am developing a site.. if I want to redirect /.ers there.. who should I be contacting?

Re:Lower is better!

[Eivind]

I found that strange too. They name it "IQ"-test, and include leagues of the smartes countries and thelike. But a large fraction of the questions are general-knowledge questions with a strong American tilt. Not to mention that many questions are basically english-questions so it's no wonder USA scores better than italy, say. ("venison is meat from which animal?")

Re:Lower is better!

[LucidBeast]

Serial numbers? Anagrams are difficult for us late English learners, but serial numbers go like 1,2,3 ... don't they? This should be combined with arm wrestling, I think I can some of those 500 guys who came before me in /.

Re:Lower is better!

[Free the Cowards]

There was one question I got which talked about a guy who was 30 years old when he married his wife, who was 25 at the time. She died at age X, he died at age Y, how long was he a widower?

These no-talent ass clowns apparently were unable to realize that these ages give you a range of a year minus a day to either side, so that the "right answer" is going to a range including three years. Then they go and give you a choice between two years in that range, with one of them somehow being "wrong".

What a bunch of jerks. It's fine to be clueless, but not to parade your clueless in front of everybody while acting as though you were really smart.

Re:Lower is better!

[anss123]

Any IQ test where I score over 100 gives me a good chuckle. I scored 89 on a 'real' IQ test, but got 110 (with penalty!) on this one. Penalty to drive up hits! Not dumb at all :D

Re:Lower is better!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's even worse than that. I got penalized for only answering ten questions. They suggested I answer twenty more to remove the penalty. IN 60 SECONDS!!!

I'm sorry, but you just failed the second stage of the IQ test. They give you 10 questions at a time, and time each one, but you don't have to do the whole lot in 60 seconds. Just go through the test twice more. regards, 125.93

Re:Lower is better!

[brown-eyed slug]

Don't knock it. I'm officially the 30th smartest person in France, and I've only visited there for 3 days in my entire life.

Re:Lower is better!

[Eivind]

Yeah. Noticed that their geoip-base is FUBARed too. They put me in USA -- and I'm on a static IP that has universally been correctly recognized as in Norway in most other geo-ip things I've seen in the last 3-4 years. Yeah, it does belong to a organization with a .com domain -- not as if -those- are us only.

Re:Lower is better!

[g4b]

the first question i got was:

could not insert: [IQLeague.BusinessLayer.User .... [SQL: INSERT INTO IQLeague.dbo.UserAndGroup (AuthSignature, Email ... VALUES (... so on so on

and i could not answer it, even if i KNEW its a database error.

Re:Lower is better!

[pwilli]

It probably doesn't go after the TLD, cause I'm put into "Marina Del Rey, CA, United States" instead of "Tyrol, Austria" and my ISPs TLD ends with .at But thats a great way to compete against other countries. Anybody with a decent score is placed in USA. :)

Re:Lower is better!

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

I had a question about the bible. The BIBLE? How the hell should I know what book follows some other book?

Re:Lower is better!

[tzot]

But what about the question on the serial numbers of dollar bills? I haven't handled a dollar bill in my entire life; how would I know anything about serial numbers?

Perhaps by now you have understood that the only reason the serial numbers existed was for you to do a subtraction (and add one) and then multiply by 50.

Re:Lower is better!

[fbjon]

A completely language-independent test that gives the score based on statistics of how previous people did. The "questions" get more difficult the more you answer correctly, and when I say difficult, I mean really fscking difficult. Don't worry if you have no idea what the answer is, you'll get an easier one if you wait for the 45 seconds per question to expire.

Note that, as should be, the test only measures a specific kind of intelligence. No language or numerical stuff.

Re:Lower is better!

[Anonymous Coward]

culturally dependant knowledge belongs on an IQ test, it is part of learning... as does complex pattern matching. Do you even know what an IQ test is? Its a test which measures general intellegence, and it is valid because it correlates strongly with another method of measuring intellegence (grades at school, or some other criteria).
 
Just because you didn't do well doesn't make it non-valid, it just makes you frustrated.

Re:Lower is better!

[fatphil]

Given that the HTML source contains a form with a field parameter that contains some very interesting base-64 encoded stuff (including javascript source - yup, that you send back to it, and the answer (and an explanation)), I say sod the cookie - just write a perl script to decode the base-64, and automatically answer every question quickly and correctly.

Re:Lower is better!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's fine to be clueless, but not to parade your clueless in front of everybody while acting as though you were really smart. You must be new here.

Re:Lower is better!

[SeePage87]

Um... that's not how it works. It logs all the questions you've answered. It penalizes you for answering only 10 questions because of the possibility of lucky guesses. Take the test 2x more and your score won't be penalized anymore.

Re:Lower is better!

[Glothar]

Well, it's pretty safe to assume that anyone smart is from the US and just spoofing their IP, right?

Er...right?

I mean... the president made it very clear that he knows more than any "forners" and I damn well know that I'm smarter than that moron.

Re:Lower is better!

[Glothar]

culturally dependant knowledge belongs on an IQ test, it is part of learning... as does complex pattern matching. Do you even know what an IQ test is? Yes, but apparently you don't. IQ is a measure of cognitive ability, not of acquired knowledge. Five year olds can (and some do) have a higher IQ than a Ph.D, yet the Ph.D. will have vastly more acquired knowledge.

Spelling a long word only requires a decent memory. Almost anyone can do it with enough practice. That has nothing to do with intelligence. Spelling a long word you've never seen before is different though. A truly intelligent person, given some information about the word will be able to come much closer than your average "memorize the world" person.

Your idea that acquired knowledge belongs on an IQ test is as astoundingly stupid as giving a vision test with an eye chart filled with kanji. Such a test wouldn't really be testing vision, would it? How well would you do on that test? Would it tell you anything about how well you can see?

Its a test which measures general intellegence, and it is valid because it correlates strongly with another method of measuring intellegence (grades at school, or some other criteria). Oh, you mean you're one of the ignorants who believes that grades at school represent some measure of intelligence?

(US-centric warning)You can get A's and B's in most schools by doing little more than mindlessly regurgitating facts that you may or may not understand. It's even easier if you're doing it via multiple-choice question. If you see the height of human intelligence as the ability to vomit out memorized patterns, then I'm afraid to inform you that we've already been superseded by the evolutionary brilliance that is a DVD player. Let's not even talk about the omniscience contained within a Blu-Ray player.

Re:Lower is better!

[DuChamp Fitz]

Actually, the convoluted rules penalize you for taking longer than 5 seconds on a question. As for the serial number question, that was simple arithmetic. The clearest clue I found as to the fraudulent nature of this "IQ" test (not that any IQ test is particularly meaningful), "Q: Which of these replaced GEORGE(!) Best as a member of the Beatles?" Woohoo...I'm the 2000th smartest person on Planet Earth!

Re:Lower is better!

[EdIII]

Huh?

What range? Both X and Y were defined.

The details to that question as I remember it:

1) She married him when she was 25 years old and died at 50 years old. They were married exactly 25 years.
2) To be a widower you have to first be married, so it is an assumption that he was never married before and had already had a wife croak on him. First Marriage.
3) He was 30 years old when he got married to her.
4) He died at 79 years old.
5) The rest of it is just bullshit. Who cares IF he cried or not or how long he cried.

So he lived for 49 years after he got married to the girl. Of those 49 years he was married 25 years. Therefore, he was a widower, by definition, for 49-25 which equals 24.

The answer is an exact 24 years. If I am missing something here please let me know :)

What a bunch of jerks. It's fine to be clueless, but not to parade your clueless in front of everybody while acting as though you were really smart.

Have you SEEN our President and his cronies?? :)

Re:Lower is better!

[Free the Cowards]

Let me elaborate a bit on what I meant. And thanks for the original numbers, that makes it easier.

So step one, she married him when she was 25 and died at 50. They were not, in fact, necessarily married exactly 25 years. There's a whole year in which she is 25, and a whole year in which she is 50. If she got married on her 25th birthday and died one day before her 51st birthday, she was married 26 years minus one day. If she got married one day before her 26th birthday and died on her 50th birthday, she was married 24 years plus one day. To put it more simply, the range of years during which she was married was (24, 26) where the parentheses are the mathematical construct meaning "up to, but not including, this number".

Now, how old was he when she died? He started out at 30. This is actually [30, 31). Add (24, 26) and you get (54, 57).

Then he died at age 79, which is of course actually [79, 80). Subtract (54, 57) from [79, 80) and you get (22, 26). So he could have been a widower anywhere from 22 (plus a bit), to 25 (plus nearly a year) years.

The trouble here is that they, and you, are assuming that "X years" is an exact integer. But when we say that someone is X years old, this covers a period of an entire year. A person whose birthday is January 1, 1983 was 25 on January 1 of this year, is 25 now, and will be 25 on December 31.

Thus the question does not include nearly enough information to answer to the precision they require. If their choices were, say, 20, 25, 30, 35 then you could choose the one that's in range. But when multiple answers are in range and they don't count them all as being correct then they're just ridiculous.

And yes, I have seen our President, and he makes me sad.

Intelligence tests

[symbolset]

Another game where the only way to win is not to play.

Re:I wouldn't put much stock in it...

[c6gunner]

Not to be a snob, but my IQ according to at least 3 professionally administered IQ tests when I was in elementary and secondary school is at least 150, and they scored me at 112.

Ditto. In the past I've scored between 148 and 154, and this site scored me at 106.

As others have pointed out, many of the questions have little to do with IQ. Asking me when the Berlin wall was built doesn't test my intelligence, only my knowledge of history.

Entertainment

[Rog7]

I'm glad this was filed under entertainment, but it seems a bunch have been fooled into thinking it was meant to be scientific. Maybe that was the true IQ test?

Who cares?

[denzacar]

Eunice is the only girl in a group of five teenagers (unless Alex is a girl too) - who cares how tall she is?

Meaningless ...

[sgunhouse]

Since I know what my IQ is, I know the test I got is meaningless. Want a real test, try Mensa.

Re:Meaningless ...

[maxume]

You only have a reasonable idea of what it is. It changes (both as you change, and as the average of the population changes, it probably changes depending on your mood).

No fair.

[ko9]

Opera users can't compete, that site actually broke in the middle of the quiz for me using Opera. The result: When I eventually reloaded the page, minutes had passed and I came out having an IQ of 62 :-( I call this election for the smartest browser rigged!

MOD PARENT AWESOME

[Captain Splendid]

n/t

10 second IQ test

[Anonymous Coward]

Pi is equal to 3._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ______
1. ___
2. ___
3. ___
4. ___
5. ___
6. ___
7. ___
8. ___
9. ___
10. True / False

Please ignore: Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.

This "IQ" test needs to take an IQ test

[majorgoodvibes]

One question begins "The Beatles' original drummer was 'George Best'..."

I'm the #3 Smartest in Richardson, Texas...

[Beorytis]

...Except I'm not in Richardson. I'm not even in Texas. I'm in suburban Chicago. At least they got my browser correct.

Unanswerable?

[TheSkyIsPurple]

From the site:
Five teenagers are of various heights. Alex is taller than Dennis, who is shorter than Eunice. Chris is shorter than Bob, but taller than Alex. Who among them is the third tallest? [1. Chris 2. Alex 3. Dennis 4. Eunice]

To rewrite:
Alex > Dennis
Dennis < Eunice (but we don't know if Eunice is taller than Alex or not, etc)
Chris < Bob
Chris > Alex.

Smushing these together (and getting all >'s in the same direction), you get:
Bob > Chris > Alex > Dennis
Eunice > Dennis

These are the combinations I came up with that still fit the teenagers relative heights:
Bob > Chris > Alex > Eunice > Dennis
Bob > Chris > Eunice > Alex > Dennis
Bob > Eunice > Chris > Alex > Dennis
Eunice > Bob > Chris > Alex > Dennis

Who is the third tallest?
Well, Alex, Chris or Eunice. (Answers 1, 2, or 4.)

What did I miss?

[Even if I read "who is shorter than Eunice" to mean Alex < Eunice I still end up with 2 of the answers]

Re:Unanswerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

They messed up the question. It was probably meant to say "...who is taller than Eunice." Flip that one word, and the question becomes answerable.

It would be amusing if they were looking for that sort of reasoning as part of the test, but I'm sure that's giving far too much credit. =)

(Posting anon to avoid mod canceling.)

Re:Unanswerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

It was probably meant to say "...who is taller than Eunice." Flip that one word, and the question becomes answerable.

Given that there were only 4 options to choose from, and none of them were Bob, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that "Bob" was "Eunice" before the surgery, which establishes a fixed ordering (Alex is third) and maintains the alternating taller than/shorter than flow of the question.

(Posting anon to avoid mod canceling.)

In the old system, unless you jump through hoops (I think logging out and even clearing cookies wasn't enough, you had to switch to a new IP) posting as anonymous would still get you messages indicating all your mods are undone (though you can still mod other threads in the conversation afterwards, go figure.) The new posting system doesn't provide any such feedback that I can see (beyond "you must wait a while before using this") so I really don't know if my mods have been undone or not.

Re:Unanswerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Dennis is the shortest. [Alex is 1,2,3,4]
2) Alex is shorter than Chris and Bob. [Alex is 3,4]
3) Alex is taller than Dennis. [Alex is 3]

Re:Unanswerable?

[wcbarksdale]

Imhotep is invisible.

Re:Unanswerable?

[SageinaRage]

I found a couple like this, where there seemed to be multiple correct answers. Since it doesn't have a way to examine the questions you answered and see what the correct answer was, it will just have to remain one of the unsolved mysteries of our time.

Re:Unanswerable?

[mwigmani]

This was the best one I got:*

Question 8 of 10
Which is the odd one out: lead, brass, tin, copper?

1). lead
2). aluminum
3). brass
4). copper

* copied verbatim

Re:Unanswerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

brass isn't an element.

Re:Unanswerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Dennis is the shortest. [Alex is 1,2,3,4] 2) Alex is shorter than Chris and Bob. [Alex is 3,4] 3) Alex is taller than Dennis. [Alex is 3] Flawed logic: 1) & 3 are not independent. Eunice could be 1,2,3 or 4 -- and you've left her entirely out of the picture.

Re:Unanswerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better, I got an anagram question that I'm pretty sure can't be answered - not only did every choice contain at least 1 letter not found in the original word, none of them even had the requisite number of letters. Of course, the question was 'which is NOT an anagram', so I guess I could have picked any.

Re:Unanswerable?

[brucmack]

The point is that answer 2, aluminum, wasn't in the question.

Re:Unanswerable?

[Denial93]

"In Hinduism who is the Creator? [1. Vishnu 2. Brahma 3. Siva 4. Ganesha]" is just as bad. Depending on which Hindu tradition you look at, either of the first three could be "true". And there are sure to be a few guys who think number 4 is correct... somewhere in the chaotic bunch of sects commonly and grossly misunderstood to be a monolithic religion called "Hinduism".

Re:Unanswerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy! (2) Aluminum, because it wasn't in the list of lead, brass, tin, copper. D'oh!

Re:Unanswerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that answer 2, aluminum, wasn't in the question. So if you select it, you apparently didn't understand the question.

Re:Unanswerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they're judging the intelligence, by how many questions the subject displays before realising these questions are all a load of bollocks and leaving the site.

Re:Unanswerable?

[Geirzinho]

Dennis and Eunice are shorter than Alex, while Chris and Bob are taller than him. Makes Alex the third tallest?

Re:Unanswerable?

[TheSkyIsPurple]

Where did it say that Alex was taller than Eunice though?

Re:Unanswerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't miss anything; the question is indeed flawed. We are given a lower bound on Eunice's height (Alex or Dennis' height - depending on how you interpret the wording), but not an upper bound, which gives us an ambiguous ordering.

Re:Unanswerable?

[mikji]

No, the answer is lead, because it's the only element. The point is, this test really sucks.

Re:Unanswerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm stumped too. It's driving me nuts. Note that there is (at least) one more piece of information that isn't in your post: There were only four people to choose from, Bob was not an option.

Re:Unanswerable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Copper is Cu, element #29 and Tin is Sn, element #50. You sir are fail at basic material knowledge :)

I answered one question

[Anonymous Coward]

That was a history question with nothing to do with IQ, and was told I had an IQ of 120 and my name was maroon9 and I'd answered 10 questions.

My faith levels in the question writers knowledge of what an IQ test is, and the web monkey's knowledge of session tracking both approach zero.

Their mensa page:

[ronabop]

"Our as well as the future of our children depends on these IQ tests." http://www.iqleague.com/iq-test-mensa

Re:Their mensa page:

[That's What She Said]

Well... Then, think of the children!

RE: The Smartest Browser and OS

[MikeDaSpike]

Measuring people's IQ in ten questions. Now internet is serious business.

Losing all value

[Anonymous Coward]

Could that possibly be more meaningless?

Every time a shameless fanboi thing like this makes the front page of Slashdot, Slashdot becomes more useless.

I just took it...

[Anonymous Coward]

... and got a 70

ScienceBlogs.com

[aplusjimages]

I've never heard of this site, but now that I have I'll never return to /.

Re:ScienceBlogs.com

[travbrad]

Not only is this "IQ Test" completely useless, it doesn't seem to be particularly smart itself

"ThisTest IsBullshit competes in following groups

Smartest Human in New Jersey"

I live in Minnesota..

Re:I wouldn't put much stock in it...

[ConanG]

I'm similar...mid 140's IQ in various IQ tests. Failed classes my senior year and didn't graduate. 114 IQ on this site's test.

Knowing Bible essential to be smart?

[aalu.paneer]

I do not care which chapter follows which one. I am not smart? Show the dependency of IQ tests on cultural contexts. Not a good questionnaire!

Bible questions

[daBass]

I would assume that if you get the bible questions wrong, you actually get a higher IQ score.

This IQ test is really, really real...

[coinmac]

Copyright (C) 2008 IQLeague. Our IQ tests are for entertainment purposes only.

Always read the fine print, assuming the bad grammar didn't tip you off first...

Ok, now thats just sad

[Anonymous Coward]

Myspace is ranked higher than slashdot now -_-

smartest in the world

[spandex_panda]

As I post, some dude in Europe is the smartest in the world, he used IE on XP! So not all stupid people are dumb!

Re:Slashdot Would Be #1

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, says Mister No Karma Guy. Your karma is low, so that must mean you're wrong!

Combined IQ the people that wrote that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Website thinks i'm from Mount Laurel New Jersey.

Definitely not an IQ test, but a fun little history/pop culture quiz.

-50 points for the slashdot effect.

[Hercules Peanut]

I doubt anyone will score too well right now. The site is already sluggish so many of my answers didn't go through when I clicked. Once I clicked, nothing happened and I clicked again which, of course, skipped the next question.

Not distinguishable on Slashdot

[FoxconnGuy]

You can't do the same test on Slashdot. There is no difference between smart/stupid on this site as far as I can tell. You can only survey what OS/Browser is most Insightful, Funny, ..., and so on.

Lowest IQ Score

[1729]

Okay, so I'm not helping the Slashdot average: my score was 51.04. (Fortunately, I'm in the top 100% in all categories!)

Has anybody managed a lower score?

Re:Lowest IQ Score

[1729]

Dammit, "ownedya" has got me beat:

http://www.iqleague.com/user/hnNILyFxZE-i85qpAAAqgg

I find it ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

That when talking about linguistic intelligence you ended up spelling it "inteligence".

Btw, no IQ test can be answered without external knowledge; all require some to a greater or lesser degree. I'm sure if you think about it you'll figure out why.

I am afraid...

[gwolf]

We are going to have you taken away on the basis of disclosing...
Wait, wasn't he disclosing?
No, no, this post is in no way an acknowledgement that we might or might not have thought about pursuing a course of action against QuantumG for allegedly attempting to coerce us into disclosing what could or could not have been seen as information on our Secret Proceedings, in case they exist.

My Bad

[Max Littlemore]

I got stuck on the first question.

It said "Who is Winnie the Pooh's depressive donkey friend?" and I spent too long looking for the "How the fuck does knowing something about British children's fiction later bastardised by Disney tell you anything about my intelligence?" option.

Sorry everyone, I should have known better than to try and answer a question with a question.

Re:My Bad

[Hal_Porter]

I got stuck on the first question.

It said "Who is Winnie the Pooh's depressive donkey friend?" and I spent too long looking for the "How the fuck does knowing something about British children's fiction later bastardised by Disney tell you anything about my intelligence?" option.

Sorry everyone, I should have known better than to try and answer a question with a question.

So you're saying you're too smart for IQ tests. Hmm. I'll make a note under people skills. Then again, given your score why bother. Next!

Re:My Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying you're too smart for IQ tests. No, he's saying that it's not a valid IQ test at all.

Hmm. I'll make a note under people skills. If you think "people skills" means "the ability to follow the herd and do what you're told, without any thought whatsoever", that might make sense.

Then again, given your score why bother. What "score"?

Next! Go drown in your own shit, you arrogant fuckwad.

Re:My Bad

[PMBjornerud]

I got stuck on the first question.
It said "Who is Winnie the Pooh's depressive donkey friend?" "Tussi"! ...at least in the language I read those stories.

Re:My Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

got stuck on the first question. It said "Who is Winnie the Pooh's depressive donkey friend?" and I spent too long looking for the "How the fuck does knowing something about British children's fiction later bastardised by Disney tell you anything about my intelligence?" option. Sorry everyone, I should have known better than to try and answer a question with a question.

My goodness, the "new tab, search in Google or Wikipedia" option still hasn't occurred to you? Wow, you really did fail the first question!

Re:My Bad

[Wobble-U]

And "Eeyore" in english!

Re:My Bad

[Hal_Porter]

YHBT YHL HAND.

The Test is Stupid

[jbrader]

It said I live in Herndon, VA. I live in Pullman, WA. It's pretty far fom here. It also said I'm something like the 3300th smartest person in the world. Since I'm really drunk right now that's pretty sad.

Observer effect.

[argent]

Slashdot seems to have smushed all the browser results together. Bad enough when /. takes down a website, but no it's eliminated any potential validity to the test.

Re:Slashdot Would Be #1

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, it was a joke. You might want to read up on this.

Worst... IQ... Test... Ever...

[Endareth]

That would have to be the worst attempt at an IQ test I've ever seen... A combination of general knowledge and some pattern recognition in only ten questions is so far from qualifying as an IQ test that it's not funny.

it's more of a "what's your time worth" test

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I took the test and my score dropped significantly after answering additional questions. Did I get lucky or did the questions get harder? Difficult to say. I believe they got a hell of a lot harder after that first run. Also consider that my "penalty" was reduced after additional questions, lending credence to the theory that the questions get harder. My score went from 116 in the first run to 105 by the third set.

If that is indeed the case, all this says is that the supposedly "smart" people using Firefox on XP are just lazier and not answering as many questions. This seems to fit the stereotype of the more twitchy ADD Firefox/XP crowd, versus the the older, lazier folks running IE and WinNT with nothing but time on their hands.

Of course, the fact that I answered the additional questions takes away from the theory, but I can say that I really almost didn't, I was feeling lazier than usual today. :D

bad browser detection

[capoccia]

it marked me as "user of Firefox on WinXP" even though i'm using iceape on debian.

...you have got to be kidding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Myspace is smarter than /. now.

Myspace.

Opera on UNIX pwns the world!

[kwilliam]

I get a smug little sense of satisfaction seeing "Opera on UNIX" is at the top of the list now. My IQ is high enough to know not to take the test and risk destroying that little boost to my ego, Lol. (Besides, most of these comments seem to indicate it's not a very good IQ test, so why bother.)

Re:Opera on UNIX pwns the world!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not an IQ test at all. It's a general knowledge test, and very US / EU centric, too, with several pop culture references from these two continents. It has a few mathematics / spatial reasoning questions thrown in, but it has nothing to do with IQ (which is a stupid concept to begin with; you can't even describe a CPU's performance with a single number, let alone a human brain's).

Opera FTW, though. :-P

I am sorry but...

[land0]

...operating system unknown is Mac on Intel? So that would mean that mac users turn off their OS identity? Are you serious? I do not know of one single Mac user that would turn off their OS ident. They are so damn proud of it! It means too much! GNU/Linux users well that is another subject all together. Why you may ask? Because there are key websites that allow mac and IE only. So turning off your OS ident or setting it to fool the specially crafted browser/OS script is a way to get around this. Besides why would Mac users waste their precious time taking an IQ test? They are too busy doing istuff. :D ;) ;)

List updated

[velen]

After being Slashdotted, the statistics for this site as below.

1. Opera on UNIX 103.40
2. Firefox on MacPPC 103.35
3. AppleMAC-Safari on MacPPC 103.27
4. Mozilla on UNIX 103.13
5. Mozilla on MacPPC 103.05
6. AppleMAC-Safari on Unknown 102.77
7. Firefox on UNIX 102.75
8. Firefox on Unknown 102.53
9. Mozilla on Unknown 102.21
10. Firefox on Win2000 101.93
11. Firefox on Win98 101.48
12. Opera on MacPPC 101.26
13. Firefox on WinXP 101.14
14. Mozilla on WinXP 101.09
15. Firefox on WinNT 100.99
16. Opera on WinXP 100.17
17. Opera on Win2000 99.97
18. Opera on WinNT 98.99
19. IE on WinNT 98.09
20. Mozilla on Win2000 98.09

On the other hand...

[furbearntrout]

This scienceblogs.com has some really good articles.

NOT an IQ test

[slydder]

It's actually a trivia test. and a poorly contrived trivia test at that. anyone else get the rubiks cube question? there was no correct answer as the bottom face of the cube is yellow (per the second picture in the sequence) and not light blue.

Second book of the bible?!

[vikstar]

One of the first of the 10 questions goes something like "What comes after Genesis in the bible?". What is this IQ test, give a free 10% to Jews day?

but where is IE under wine under linux?

[neonsignal]

...or is no-one that dumb :-)

for foreign people it is a language test

[someone1234]

Real IQ tests should be language independent.

Re:for foreign people it is a language test

[Anonymous Coward]

Real IQ tests are language independant.

Anything else is a sign of incompetence and invalidates the result.

Re:for foreign people it is a language test

[serge587]

"Real IQ tests should be culture independent."

Fixed that for you.

Konqueror Isn't Going to Win

[RAMMS EIN]

Well, I guess Konqueror isn't going to win. It seems I'm stuck on "Question 2 of 10". Anyway, I lost interest. Too many trivia questions in there. I'm good at those, but I don't think they say anything about my IQ.

I won!

[Starayo]

Starayo is #1 Adelaide, Australia That's great, but... I'm in Sydney. :(

my IQ is falling

[burdalane]

After the first 10 questions, my IQ was 20 points lower than my score from other IQ tests. A half hour later I answered another 10 questions, and my IQ dropped by 10 points.

Re:my IQ is falling

[Glothar]

Not surprising. I never took the quiz, but I think my IQ dropped 10 points just reading through the questions.

The Smartest is now Opera on Unix

[amazeofdeath]

Thanks to me, mollie II, with a blazing score of over 112, and I don't even speak the language :)

Not really an IQ test

[mariushm]

I'm not sure if this is really a good IQ test.

The complexity of the questions seems to vary with each test, one the first one I got 85.2 and on the second I got 105.8 but the second one was really easy.
Also, it seems to favor speedy replies which doesn't mean a thing, anyone can switch tabs and do a quick search on google anyway for some questions and cheat, or maybe disable javascript.

Re:Not really an IQ test

[sTERNKERN]

I Agree. What is the relation between my IQ and the fact that i know the name of the killer of John Lennon or the drummer of Beatles?

Myspace

[Anonymous Coward]

Right now myspace is on number 6. Any comment on that is probably superfluous.

Re:Myspace

[Bambi Dee]

And I'm the sixth smartest person on MySpace. Woe!

Another unanswerable question

[sd.fhasldff]

"which classification of triangle has all angles less than 90 degrees."

No, none of the answers were "open triangle", "none", "stupid" or anything like that.

Re:Another unanswerable question

[nine-times]

Where any of the answers "acute triangle"?

Or are you making some kind of joke I don't get?

Dumbest IQ Test Website ?

[Anonymous Coward]

All I got was the infamous dotNet "Runtime Error" page.

Runtime Error

[cybergen007]

Currently I'm getting a runtime error when visiting the IQ test.

vocabulary size

[g4b]

does that mean, i am a superbrained smartass, if i can trilanguate every word, since i speak at least three languages fluently, and my mindvoctionary is increasable by having enough fantastination to invent new meanforms for words?

very awooting and quite reljoyaxing.
my IQ is endless.

Worse yet, it's copyrighted

[tepples]

It said "Who is Winnie the Pooh's depressive donkey friend?" and I spent too long looking for the "How the fuck does knowing something about British children's fiction later bastardised by Disney tell you anything about my intelligence?" option. I got hung up looking for the "Ask me again in January 2028, when A. A. Milne's copyrights will have expired in most of the world" option.

Worst IQ test ever

[PFI_Optix]

Since when does history education equate intelligence?

Re:Worst IQ test ever

[PFI_Optix]

Oh, here's a good one on a retest: Alex is taller than Dennis, who is shorter than Eunice. Chris is shorter than Bob, but taller than Alex. Who among them is the third tallest? So Bob is taller than Chris, who is taller than Alex, who is taller than Dennis. Dennis is shorter than Eunice, but we're never told who is taller. There are two possible answers to this question (Eunice and Alex) and they're both presented as options. As a test of the author's IQ...they fail.

How smart are these guys?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dice implies 2 cubes, so globe is to sphere as dice is to cubes
is a mixed metaphor.

I (was) #1

[Anonymous Coward]

I took this test, scoring #1 in my brother's home town over the weekend, after which I proceeded to attempt a backflip on a moonbounce (inflatable castle) that was at a party we were attending. The backflip failed, and I smashed my nose into my knees attempting the landing. Through the blood gushing out of my nose, I couldn't help but reflect on my former #1 status in the town :-D

I notice IE under Windows Me isn't on the list...

[pyrr]

I wonder where people who not only purchased, but still use it rank. Heheheh.

Great, a Johnny Mnemonic test

[GameboyRMH]

And to respond to your criticism that "the ability to answer is dependent on culture"... Well, that's the entire point. If you don't know culture, that reflects a deficiency in your social intelligence. Great, another test to measure how much useless information you can jam into your head, I had enough of those in the social science courses I suffered, thanks.

I'd rather know how to use information and have to look it up, than have lots of information and not know what to do with it. Nowadays we have books and the web. Information can be obtained at a whim, so being a human encyclopedia only means you can recall information a little faster than the next guy.

I would argue that being able to recall vast quantities of information can certainly be a helpful asset to an intelligent person (or a cool way to impress your friends to an unintelligent person), but it doesn't equate to intelligence.

my debian/iceweasel no longer works with slashdot

[walterbyrd]

The last article I can get is from the 24th. I had to login with xp/msie to see the most recent articles, and to post this message. This seems to only happens with slashdot, no other websites.

I am using debian sid. Have cleared my cache many times. Have done apt-get update/upgrade. The most recent article I get is from the 24th.

Also, I can not login with debian/iceweasle. I just get a blank page.

MySpace.com was #8 when I looked

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not even wasting my time on this test. I'm guessing Youtube is #11.

Misspelling in IQ Test

[Der Einzige]

In the "Russian history section," they mention "Alexander Karensky." The correct spelling is "Kerensky." Kerensky was the leader of the Russian provisional government in 1917 that momentarily controlled the country between the overthrow of the Czar and the Bolshevik coup in November, 1917. Ha!

IQ Test?

[HappySmileMan]

Since when was general knowledge a good way to measure IQ? IQ is not a measure of how well you remember trivia, especially if you've never heard that trivia. Oh by the way, I'm in the top 10% of slashdot users at remembering useless facts :P

Silly

[Anonmyous Coward]

I took it and it was all either historical and geographical trivia or story problems involving fractions and trick wording to get you to use the wrong numbers (which, by the way, resulted in an answer that wasn't one of the choices, so you knew you got it wrong rather than picking the wrong answer and thinking you got it right). I can't imagine that actually tests intelligence. It tests

1. Whether or not you received a modern western-style education
2. Whether or not you're good a remembering stuff you had to learn for a test once but never again use. (which may be a component of intelligence)
3. Since speed is involved, it test whether or not you use fractions often (I was much faster at such things when I was taking Physics, Chemistry, and Calculus doing them on a daily basis)
4. Weather or not you can read and reason carefully (which also may be a component of intelligence).
   
   And yes, I do have a very low IQ according to the test, so my criticism probably isn't unbias.

FFox is a hack job.

[Foerstner]

I have a Mac, and I do web development. Previously, I used Firefox, with the User Agent Switcher, Venkman, Firebug, and Adblock. I considered these plugins indespensible.

Since the release of Safari 3, I use that, with SafariBlock. Why?

- Safari's Web Inspector makes Firebug, Venkman, and the DOM Inspector look like crude hacks.
- Safari's Develop menu has over a dozen popular UA strings pre-populated. It would take half an hour to look them all up and enter them into User Agent Switcher.
- SafariBlock is not quite as versatile as Adblock Plus, but it accepts the same filterset subscriptions and works pretty seamlessly.
- Safari feels faster (and is faster, when comparing released versions, at benchmarks.)
- Release versions of Safari tend to be at least as standards-compliant, and frequently moreso, than released versions of FFx.
- For the above two reasons, pretty much everone (Nokia, Adobe, Google, GNOME-Epiphany, etc.) looking for a browser engine recently has chosen WebKit over Gecko.

Your needs may vary, but in my case, all the add-ons in the world only serve to make Firefox look like a bloated, kludged-together shadow of Safari.

May be smart, not grammar good

[whitehatlurker]

Interesting ... at the end of the test, the site says:

"You are #9570 Smartest Human in the World
Enter you real name or use username that we picked for you"

9570th smartest hooman uses POSSESSIVE pronounz - does not use articles ...

It's okay for a diversion, as long as you realise that it is a bunch of crap.

"Smartest Guys in the Room"

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we make Slashdot.org the "Smartest Website in the World?" (It's curretly number 2 behind ScienceBlogs.com.

After spending a few minutes reading the posts here... I'd have to say no, Slashdot cannot be made into the Smartest Website in the World. Most out of touch, or most extremist, maybe, but definitely not smartest.

BTW... who the heck is still using WinNT? It has even fewer users than Teh Lunix... and that's a pretty difficult feat to manage. But considering WinNT is about ten years old, and Teh Lunix... isnt..., I guess that's pretty impressive on NT4's part. Or pathetic on the part of, well... you know.

I failed!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I failed. I clicked on the link "60 second IQ test"--and nothing happened. Well, with a target like "javascript:__doPostBack('ctl00$contentHolderParent$HyperLink5','')" there's not much to expect from an intelligent young lady using Noscript on Iceweasel ...

MacOSX-Intel?

[RobertM1968]

"Cutting to the chase, the very smartest is Firefox on Unknown (which internal evidence suggests is MacOS-Intel), and the dumbest, as of this writing, is IE on WinNT."

Odd, every statistics site I have seen show "Firefox on MacOSX" as "Firefox on MacOSX" - not "Firefox on Unknown" (regardless of whether it is MacOSX-Intel or not).

Now, my eComStation boxes and OS/2 Warp Server boxes sometimes show up as "Firefox on Unknown" (or "Other")- but very rarely. Usually they are identified as "Firefox on OS/2" or "Firefox on BSD" - and occasionally as "Firefox on Windows XP" (as required by certain sites, using the Firefox UA plugin).

Thus, I tend to suspect that "Firefox on Unknown" refers to something far less commonplace than Linux, MacOSX-Intel, or even OS/2.

Either way, what's wrong with Firefox on WinNT? Isn't that better than seeing "Firefox on Vista" - or "__________ on Vista"? ;-)

hmm, 5 out of how many?

[rubah]

I'm in the top 1 percentile for france, but unfortunately, I am only here for study abroad :] You're welcome, france!

Toots!

[DuChamp Fitz]

I wouldn't have been able to answer the Genesis question without him. Thanks Toots! I always knew smoking pot and listening to reggae would raise my IQ...

Horribly questions...

[Glothar]

Chimney is to house as crown is to...

castle, king, head, emperor

Though I assume "head" is the answer, I'm having trouble constructing arguments why "emperor" and "king" are wrong.

Five teenagers are of various heights. Alex is taller than Dennis, who is shorter than Eunice. Chris is shorter than Bob, but taller than Alex. Who among them is the third tallest?

Chris, Alex, Dennis, Eunice

As noted elsewhere: Bob > Chris > Alex > Dennis and Eunice > Dennis. There's no way to tell if the third tallest is Eunice or Alex.

Globe is to sphere as dice is to...

square, pyramid, cube, rectangle

Three dimensional primitives, I got it, but it should be "cubes" not "cube".

If we fold this cube, which one will we get?

(Four colored options)

Stupidly, three of the four are possible. Apparently, the question is so hard that even the person who wrote it can't get it right.

Library is to books as...

hospital is to doctor, trees is to forest, cemetery is to the dead, students is to classroom

Again, the morbid corpses option seems to be the intended answer, but the similarity doesn't exclude doctors. Is the intended relation "A stores B" or "A makes B available to public"?

Of the six vanished Wonders of the Ancient World, which was the last to disappear?

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, The Lighthouse of Alexandria, The Statue of Zeus at Olympia, The Colossus of Rhodes

Alright, reportedly Zeus was dismantled in the 5th century. The Colossus only lasted until 226 BCE. The Lighthouse made it to 1480. However, the facts behind the Hanging Gardens are muddled. No one knows where it existed or even when it was first made. While it certainly wasn't very garden-like at 1480, it's likely that the remains of the Hanging Gardens are still around, unlike any of the other three.

Similarly:

What is the only one of Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which still exists?

The Statue of Zeus at Olympia, The Great Pyramid at Giza, The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, The Lighthouse of Alexandria

I should pick the Pyramids because they are "more intact" than the Hanging Gardens, right? I mean, the fact that the Pyramids are damaged and incomplete and missing their presumed paint and outer casing stones doesn't keep them from existing, but the Hanging Gardens stopped existing the moment the plants died.

Mental note: Make your monuments only out of rock, then you can claim they exist on a tectonic time scale.

What animal is the largest ever to have existed on the planet Earth?

Brontosaurus, Blue whale,Ultrasaurus, Megalosaurus

This is dated conjecture. We simply cannot declare with certainty which animal is the largest. Sure this is being a bit literal, but this is a horrible question. It should be reworded: "As of 2008, which of these animals was believed to be the largest?" Of course, that wording makes it sound like you're admitting you don't know all that much.

Which, in this case, is true.

I'm sure there are others... these were the ones that stuck out to me. I really hate people who make tests without actually thinking.

Re:Horribly[sic] questions...

[Glothar]

However, I'm completely okay when people mangle the subject of an internet post...

Note: "Horribly questions" should be "Horribly Written Questions"

Sweden

[DuChamp Fitz]

6 of the top 17 smartest persons on Earth apparently live in Malmo, Sweden. Remind me to steer clear of THERE.

George Best is a football player, fer chrissakes

[vic-traill]

In the Sixties the Beatles dominated the music scene. One of their original members was George Best. Who replaced him as drummer?

Pete Best is the drummer in question. Georgie Best was England's greatest football player.

How fsck'ing stupid can you get, not proofreading an IQ test?

And I'm a Canadian - what the hell do I know about *soccer*? /ducks

2 things

[papershark]

IQ test prove one of two things: 1. That your smart. 2. That IQ test don't work.

Switzerland CA

[krischik]

And Switzerland is not a part of California...

Useless!

And English

[krischik]

You don't only have to have the right religion you also have to speak fluent English...

This is NOT a test of intelligence!

[DbZeroOne]

Results of this test have absolutely no bearing on ones level of intelligence. Most of the questions (In the test that I took anyway) were trivial. "Which country was the first to allow women to vote?" I'm fairly certain I could teach this little bit of trivia to someone who is mentally retarded. Trivial Knowledge â intelligence Of course I wasn't surprised to see an ad for magical brain vitamins at the end.