Like a ferret

A recent research article indicates that people’s blogs correlate with their personality type, at least in the choice of words used.

Mattias Östmar has independently developed Typealizer, which analyses the contents of blogs and determines their personality type. This is the analysis of Pointless Anecdotes:

ESTP - The Doers

The active and playful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

I recognise the character, but it’s not me—Honey, you have taken over the blog…and I love you for that!

The right person in the right place

A square peg fits quite well in a round hole if the hole is large enough. I think this is true in the figurative sense as well.

Problem symptoms

I have found it a persistent urban legend that Swedes would be particularly prone to suicide. In order to demonstrate that this is not the case I looked up the relevant WHO statistics. As you can see, Sweden is not particularly high on the list, but we knew that. However, what did stick out as a sore thumb was that the People's Republic of China is the only country in the world (for which there are statistics) where women have a higher suicide rate than men.

Googling around confirmed that I am not the only one to have noticed this. Explanations seem centered on Chinese women's subservient position and low chances for poor people to improve their lot, and somehow I can't help but make the connection between this and the Google ads that turn up in the margin…

Light coming on

Once upon a time I did the IQ test at tickle.com and got a reasonably good result. I then followed it up by doing the EQ test in which I bombed completely—I couldn't even understand the questions, or to be more precise, I couldn't understand how to answer the questions with the given alternatives. Typically a question would describe a person behaving in a certain manner, and the alternatives would require me to explain why. This was patently impossible from the given information, so I was forced to just select random responses.

I told Honeybuns about this and she explained to me that the point was to answer the questions in such a way as to interpret the behaviour of the posited person in as positive light as possible. The truth of the matter was irrelevant. Oh. No wonder engineers score badly on such tests, being trained to find out the truth rather than making up the most pleasing alternative.

I will now have to mull this over.

Conservation efforts

Jean Piaget developed a model for children's intellectual development. One of the milestones is the understanding that a liquid doesn't change its volume when it's poured from one container to another of different shape. This is known as conservation. However, sometimes it's painfully obvious that this is an understanding on a more superficial and intellectual level, as when a friend poured the contents of a can into a glass with seemingly larger diameter yet the water level ending up much higher in the glass. We could figure out that the thickness of the walls of the glass was larger than those of the can, yet the effect was eerie.