Kinda pointless, the whole thing - though I bet some statistician is going to publish some deep-insight paper from this data :D
Kind of like xkcd - pointless.
The xkcd survey
91–100 of 281 posts
Re: The xkcd survey
#92So is the last question not a common thing? Because I do it every year or so, but my wife thinks I am crazy.
I do this and thought I'd had an original idea.
Only having one type of sock pair * $n_pairs in rotation makes laundry super simple.
Re: The xkcd survey
#93My answer to 'Write any 5 random words' : 'Moon landing was a hoax'
I wonder how many entered 'any 5 random words'
Re: The xkcd survey
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
How come?
It's always the number everyone thinks no one else will choose.
Hypothesis:
People think even numbers aren't as "random" and odd numbers are more "random". That leaves us with 1,3,5,7,9. 1 and 5 both divide 10 and don't seem so "random" to us, I guess. That leaves us with 3, 7, and 9. 33, 77, 99, i.e. numbers with repeated digits don't seem so "random". That leaves us with 37, 39, 79. And 9 maybe (not sure if all people subconsciously think this way) isn't that "random" because it's one less than 10 and divisible by 3.
Infact, the jargon file says that 37 is the most common random number people will choose[0].
Re: The xkcd survey
#95Was it proper thing to stop myself from writing "five random words are here" as a response to "Write five random words"?
Fun anecdote. I took a cryptography exam, where the question was "Progress as far as possible towards decrypting or decoding the following message:", followed by a sequence of letters in alphabetical order- several As, a different number of Bs, and so on. It seemed obvious to me that a message that has been sorted into alphabetical order cannot be reversed without luck and a computer, so I assumed the unencoded version was something we could guess. On a hunch, I checked the question itself, and sure enough, the answer was "Progress as far as possible towards decrypting or decoding the following message". Apparently I was the only one to figure it out.
Re: The xkcd survey
#96"Which of these can you do reasonably well?"
Should really have a "none" option.
Re: The xkcd survey
#97"There was an error submitting your form response. Please wait a bit and try again."
sigh
Re: The xkcd survey
#98"There was an error submitting your form response. Please wait a bit and try again." sigh
Took me a few attempts. You will know when your success was accepted because you'll see a message stating so.
Re: The xkcd survey
#99=== SPOILER ALERT! === The most interesting question, to me, is the one about which words you know the meaning of. About half of them aren't real words. I assume this question is used partly as a gauge of vocabulary (how many of the real words do you recognize) and partly of honesty (how many of the fake words do you claim to recognize).
Some of the words came up in urban dictionary definitions, so perhaps it was a descriptivism vs prescriptivism angle.