Quiz: Do You Live in a Bubble?

This quiz, regarding whether one lives in a bubble with respect to middle America, is very interesting.

I got a 9, which ends up pegging me slightly incorrectly (but only slightly) with the potential labeling that goes with the score ranges. Sensibly, the score ranges with different labels overlap. I think I should get a very low score within the next highest range. (A score of 11 is the minimum to do that.)

Note: I did not count my Oxford get-up as a "uniform", as that's definitely not what they had in mind (even though it technically is a uniform).

Note that this is talking about a bubble with respect to America, which is fair enough. Of course, the phrasing is very USA-centric. I am a citizen of the world (and California), with a good amount of international experience, but I am less experienced with the rest of the USA (especially in recent years).

(Tip of the cap to Oleg Kogan.)

Which Yiddish Word Describes Me?

You can check your own personal Yiddish word for yourself. I got "meshugene". [[whistles]]

By the way, I phrased things the way I did in the paragraph above because today is the 25th anniversary of the release of the song Personal Jesus.

My Dialect

I took a dialect quiz that I found via this article that Louis Wang posted on Facebook. My results place the way I speak from The Valley in California --- which I already knew --- though according to this quiz I have almost as strong a similarity as how people speak in Sunnyvale (part of Silicon Valley). From the perspective of how I speak, I apparently have least in common with people from Michigan, which might partly explain certain arguments/discussions with Lanth in the past (and, at the very minimum, it amuses me a great deal even if it doesn't explain anything!).

Obscure Baseball Rules Quiz

Here is a quiz on obscure baseball rules. (Note that this is a quiz about obscure rules rather than an obscure quiz about rules.) It is apparently part of an advertisement for some book about how to become an umpire. I found the advertising statements in their descriptions of the correct answers to be rather annoying, but the quiz itself is cool, so I'm passing it along anyway. I only got 4 right out of ten, though a couple of the ones I missed are rather cheap and depend on the interpretation favored by the book being advertised.

(Tip of the hat to Rob Neyer.)

Which Superhero and Supervillain are you?

(Hmmm... my copy-and-paste job gives html that looks horrible. I really don't have the patience to do anything about it beyond acknowledging that it's crap. Anyway, you'll just have to scroll a little more for this entry.)


I'm a sucker for quizzes like this, and I decided that I was curious what superhero I'd be. While I was at it, I saw the supervillain quiz and decided to take that one too. There are unsurprisingly many more superhero and supervillain quizzes available from all corners of the Web. (I know, I know: Those sites probably aren't true corners, though one can actually define a rigorous notion of a corner in a graph---just consider nodes whose edges all have low betweenness centrality.) Let me know if you find any betters ones.

Anyway, here is my result for superheroes:


You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 70% Hulk 70% Batman 60% Green Lantern 55% Robin 50% Supergirl 35% Superman 25% Iron Man 25% Wonder Woman 20% The Flash 20% Catwoman 20%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Comment: 35% Supergirl? What the fuck? The combination of Spider-Man and Hulk is kind of odd, but I can see it to some degree. I don't follow comics, so I'm sure there are characters out there who would fit better.


Here are my results for supervillain:


You are Mr. Freeze

Mr. Freeze 57% Riddler 53% Dr. Doom 48% Apocalypse 46% The Joker 44% Green Goblin 44% Two-Face 40% Magneto 37% Venom 36% Poison Ivy 36% Lex Luthor 33% Dark Phoenix 31% Catwoman 20% Mystique 20% Juggernaut 12% Kingpin 0%

You are cold and you think everyone else should be also, literally.

Comment: I didn't match particularly well with any of the supervillains, but the choice probably makes reasonable sense. I'm apparently not at all like Kingpin. :)