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2011 Geek IQ Test
snydeq writes "Active Directory object catalogs, quad-core processors, Debian default configurations, Star Trek TNG guest appearances — find out how much you know where it really counts by taking InfoWorld's 2011 Geek IQ Test."
What geek willingly goes to InfoWorld?
Evidently, they didn't actually take this test... it won't start.
Using the Freedom of Speech while I still have it.
I keep getting "There was a problem loading the quiz. Please try again later". Does that mean I pass?
Ookaaay... exactly what does knowing obscure trivia about shows from 50 years ago have to do with IQ? I could see it as a geek score for bragging rights, or a hint if you might want to have a professional look into whether you've got Asperger's, but IQ? Seriously?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If you get to the results page, you failed the test. No one sits through a painfully slow survey that requires a complete page reload (including new ads) every time you answer a question. I got to 2 questions before I bailed, so I figure I am middle of the pack. If you didn't click the link in the first place, you are a genius. 3-5 questions and you are slow but employable. 6-10 and you should probably stick with help desk duties. 11-19 and you should seek professional help. Go all the way, you should post out for the management opening.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Question 8: In the TV series "Heroes," Hiro flashes forward
doesn't seem to fit in the realm of truly geekworthy
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
The test doesn't show, either because it's Flash or hosted on Facebook or some other ad network. I awarded myself full marks for blocking the crap.
Especially when some geeks avoid memorizing 50-year-old TV shows on principle because they aren't 95 years old.
Question 1: Will a /. post overload my server?
Answer: Yes.
It's a trick.
You fail the test if you actually visit the link.
Star Trek TNG?! OMG you insensitive clod, Start Trek TOS is where it's at!
1. If you are going to post a quiz that will probably end up on slashdot, should you make sure that your server can handle the strain?
2.????
3. Profit?
I'm just here to regulate Funkyness
Segmentation fault
(core dumped)
Got the technical stuff easily, but the contemporary stuff of media creating - meh.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Can't see the quiz. Maybe the quiz doesn't like to play with others (noscript et al)?
"If I have been able to see so far, It is because I went out and bought a damn binoculars" - Ze da Esquina
A post back to the server with fresh page content and new ads etc, for every question? No thanks. For bailing on question 2 I award myself an IQ of infinity.
First part of passing the quiz, is getting the correct url:
http://www.infoworld.com/t/misadventures/the-2011-infoworld-geek-iq-test-178807
Is that ironic, or just sad?
How do we rate your Geek IQ if you didn't find the Print Page?
http://www.infoworld.com/print/178807
1 Page and not an ad in sight!
Print pages are a beautiful thing.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Geek test fails the Geek test.
First question: Are you a good enough programmer to use radio buttons or checkboxes to build a multiple choice quiz?
I like music
I don't even make it onto their scoring chart, and yet somehow I doubt you'd find anyone who knows me that doesn't think I'm a geek.
The problem with being "geeky" is that geekiness involves specialization, and let's face it, I don't know anyone who specializes in the Infoworld direction.
Program Intellivision!
If I fail does it mean I'll get to have sex ...with an actual girl?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Isn't this pretty much the opposite of an Geek IQ test? This tests knowledge (to be nice) or trivia (to not be nice), whereas an IQ test would test reason, logic, problem-solving.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I'll just come back in a while, when there are more comments bitching about the answer choices. Then I can go over there and ace the thing :D
Not really. Or not outside of the bizarro world of Internet marketing.
Actual IQ tests still at least try to measure certain kinds of mental aptitude. While some degree of knowledge are unfortunately inherent in being able to even ask the questions, much less answer them (e.g., someone has to be familiar with rectangular blocks before you can ask them to count blocks in a picture), that was never the focus of actual IQ tests. How much you know about some obscure subject -- be it Star Trek or Victorian novels -- is just not part of the definition of IQ.
However the notion is increasingly MISUSED to basically mean "whatever way we can play on your insecurities and need to reassure yourself, to get a click out of you". This can mean knowledge of trivial things, or even things completely unrelated to intelligence, like optical illusions, deliberately ambiguous pictures, paraeidolia, or whatever.
When you see stuff like "93% of people can't tell whether the ballerina rotates to the left or right" on some "IQ Test" ad (you know the kind I'm talking about), it doesn't really mean that the definition of IQ or of IQ Tests has changed. It just means that some dishonest marketers are aiming exactly for the kind of idiot who'd (A) not realize it's a stupid scam, and (B) is insecure enough to actually want some website to pat him on the head and tell him that he's so smart after all.
It's not really all that different from preying on some people's sexual insecurities to sell them penis enlargement pills.
Don't get me wrong, I'll be the first to say that IQ is pretty meaningless for anything except taking an IQ test. But still, it at least means that. Memorizing trivia that's fully useless to anyone and for anything else than a trivia contest, is just not the same thing as high IQ.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I took the test and scored 3.14159265
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The InfoWorld site is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. Please try again later and thank you for your understanding.
Hehe.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
What's the primary function of the Domain Controller in a Windows Server 2008 network ?
Geek answer: Does not matter. Install Linux to replace obsolete Windows Server.
Yeah, I could live with it being just GQ. Even Geek EQ, I suppose. It's just "IQ" that seems horribly misused IMHO.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Apparently i failed, with a score of only 40. Why do they think a serieus geek has time to watch movies or worse, a TV shows like star trek?
For a number of other questions i admit i just did not know the answer (why would anyone 40+ know who sells D&D right _now_?!). But overall, i blame the strong american cultural influences mixed into certain quiz questions. I suggest infoworld's staff answers 10 geek questions with a european background correctly first before their bits are allowed to cross the atlantic.
15. Related to quantum mechanics, what is the term for the observation that some physical quantities can be changed only by discrete amounts, or quanta?
The answers are just stupid. None of them (even the "correct" one) is a technical term. The actual correct answer would have been "quantisation" (or "realizing that quantisation is necessary").
18. When Kelsey Grammer appeared on "Star Trek NG"...
It's Star Trek TNG, not NG. Wikipedia and Memory Alpha agree with me (eg. there's a redirect on Memory Alpha to the correct page from "TNG" but not "NG"), though NG appears to be used sometimes by a few people.
GED/J d-- s:++>: a-- C++(++++) ULU++ P+ L++ E---- W+(-) N+++ o+ K+++ w--- O- M+ V-- PS++>$ PE++>$ Y++ PGP++ t- 5+++ X++ R+++>$ tv+ b+ DI+++ D+++ G++++ e++ h r-- y++**
Yes, and I can interpret it without the guide: 5 points
Yeah- I remember that/ Oh, God, I thought we were done with that nonsense: 3 points
What?: 0 points
Is that HTML?: Go away
Who calls TNG "Star Trek NG"?
I am seriously questioning how this even got fronted here on /.
Seriously, didn't they even check where the link lead to? I'd bet both my tabletts that it was a iWhatever jockey that posted it and another that frontpaged it.
IT Admins Group: Where you decide the content
.. the only winning move is to choose not to play.
Actually, I've yet to see anyone who says that logical reasoning flat-out is unimportant. (Except when you apply it to their Bible or Quran, I guess.)
What is the actual objection is that the ways used to measure it, actually measure more whether you trained the application of that exact measuring method, than a more general ability to use logic in the real world or in a real world job. It's, if you will, like I were to measure your mental abilities by your gear-score in WoW. Sure, it can be argued that you need SOME amount of intelligence to know what to get or how to function in a group or even follow directions for what to do at the boss, but at the end of the day, I really just tested how much time you were willing to dump into raiding in WoW.
But otherwise nobody will actually tell you that the ability to do logical reasoning is bad. It's just being measured badly.
As for the Flynn effect, that's the most bogus explanation I've ever heard, no offense. The effect of warfare on the US population since WW2 has been minimal, and even less important in Europe. Starvation is also no longer a major factor. The vast, immense, overwhelming majority of people who would have flunked survival of the fittest in the past, now do pass their genes on just the same. In fact, even the opposite can be better supported: the dumb procreate faster. You can't explain an effect by something that's just NOT THERE. You might as well blame it on Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy (maybe smart kids don't ever sleep with their head under the pillow;)) at that point.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
On a side note, a lot of the "current" articles on InfoWorld seem to be very, very, very similar to articles that have appear on /. A co-inky-dink? (Use of geeky work to throw off the posse...) Prollynot.
Print pages are a beautiful thing.
Think of the page hits lost, man! Must! Get! Hits!...More! Hits!...HITS!!!!
I tired of flipping through the questions and keeping track on my own of my score, while laughing at the auto-text that said I picked this or that when clearly I could not pick a damn thing without a frakkin radio button to poke, so I wrote a script to take the test for me, consulting wikipedia and (proud of this one!) the RFC library for answers. Eventually, I edited the script to filter out all future references to infoworld from my slashdot feed, and to extend a robot arm and hand from my monitor and slap me in the face if ever I decide to similarly waste my time again.
Does that mean I pass?
Plus it has all the answers right there, so you've no excuse for not scoring 20.
NB When I tried the print page two hours ago, I got the answers to the first question (but not the question) with radio boxes by three out of four, followed by a button with no text, and some header and footer guff. I think it was quite reasonable to assume that they'd bodged the print page completely, although now it seems that it was merely slashdotted.
http://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=nerd+test&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
seriously though, I haven't bothered to fill any of them up since I was 18 and.. well too white and nerdy, obviously.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I hope the guy who approved this to be on the front page read the comments.
Start on page 25 and answer the questions in reverse order.
For reasons that cannot be fully explained you may end up with a much higher score using this method.
The questions are silly and way to random. And, no radio buttons or even a form or score keeper?
I understand they are just wanting people to view the pages that have ads but at LEAST put a little effort into it or fake it better next time lol.
Thanks for mentioning Infoworld in the summary. Otherwise, I might have actually visited the link.
Anything is possible given time and money.
How many points do I get for knowing how bad InfoWorld usually is, and coming to the comments section to find someone who'd posted the print page?
Is 1563649 a prime number?
But especially this "answer":
"If you got this right -- (b) Captain Morgan Bateson, USS Bozeman -- without the Internet, you should get a trophy. And a hooker."
It was pretty easy since they only listed two ships from the series including the obviously-wrong answer of the USS Enterprise. It would have been a harder question if they had you choose between ships that were actually in TNG like the USS Pegasus, USS Aries, or the USS Excalibur.
It wasn't there when I started it. And when I started it, the questions were radio buttons.
You win one Schrodinger's Cat. Maybe.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
My time is valuable.
I won't click 10 times to read something that could have been put on a single page.
Not photo essays, top 10 lists, bottom 10 lists, quizzes, nada.
If it's not all on one page I just click the big X.
Great,
A slashdot guy finally gets some, and it may or may not be zombie pussy!
15. Related to quantum mechanics, what is the term for the observation that some physical quantities can be changed only by discrete amounts, or quanta?
The answer IS quantum mechanics (or quantum physics) and not, as they suggest, "multiples of planck's constant".
My last comment was a year ago on the 2010 geek IQ test... That site still sucks and i'm still not clicking anything on that page.
Sheesh slashdots collective panties really are in a bunch today.
So much nerdrage over a lame quiz - don't you all have something better to complain about? (obviously I don't)
"Geek IQ" is a polite synonym for mastering alternate life pursuits not entirely like living. However, such a test ought to know the difference between nerd IQ and geek IQ.
The question about "Heroes" is the moral equivalent of the birthstone questions in the science category of the original Trivial Pursuit.
Every category had some bird food. In Sports, you just keep picking Bath Ruth or Mohamed Ali whenever they come up, you'll get one eventually. For a science ignoramus, the closest surrogate to low-hanging fruit is substituting astrology for astronomy.
When they started asking windows related questions. No geek with any kind of self-respect would answer those.
Also, not an IQ test, just a stupid quiz.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
what was the first question we asked you? (answer, do you want to take the geek test?)
I didnt get a single question right..
Last time I checked, when you take an IQ test they don't give you a score out of 100.
Maybe in Alabama...
"You must select an answer before proceeding to the next question".
An important quality in intelligence is being able to recognize when you don't know. A guessing competition is not an IQ test.
With four answers to select from, someone who knows absolutely nothing should on average get 25% of the answers correct. That's useless for an IQ test.
Question 18: When Kelsey Grammer appeared on "Star Trek NG," what was his character's name and which ship did he captain?
Correct Answer: Captain Morgan Bateson, USS Bozeman
Your Answer: Captain Morgan Bateson, USS Bozeman
If you got this right without the Internet, you should get a trophy. And a hooker.
Really? The options were:
Captain William Larkin, USS Andromeda - Any reasonable sci-fi geek knows Andromeda is the other Roddenberry series.
Captain Morgan Bateson, USS Bozeman - This is the only one that makes sense
Captain Jonathan Archer, USS Enterprise 1 - Uh, no. Different series, different decade of production.
Captain Han Solo, USS Millennium Falcon - Fairly obvious this one is wrong even to non-sci-fi geeks
8 out of 20, with four of them being complete flukes. If you'll excuse me, I'll go look for Naruto's spoiler.