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The xkcd survey

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Re: The xkcd survey

#141

Post by gknoy »

Gravityloss wrote: post #127
brianwawok wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But do you curl matching socks or not? If you have many different styles, you need to go hunt around and find matches. Curl or not just delays the matching problem, it does not solve it. Having all the socks be the same makes matching an O(1) problem.

but if you curl them after drying, you have a much smaller pool to find the pair from, the just washed socks (which will be the socks you use the most anyway). So it's faster that way, than to mix them all up and only then match.

My wife has about twenty pairs of socks, and no more than a few of the pairs are the same variety. It's like some masochistic combinatorics problem every single time I fold socks. My kid and I literally were playing "sock go fish" a few times to get him to help (except ... I was more interested in the pairing, rather than taking turns. Doh.)

Laundry-folding happiness is increased significantly when I don't have to play "Find-the-mate" every time I pick up a sock (which applies to my kids' socks as well, since they are all patterned, but thankfully my son likes wearing party-colored socks, so I only need to match on shape).

I have two "vintages" of socks -- the old ones that I hate, and the newer ones that I prefer, roughly equally divided. I would donate + re-buy if I had more than two flavors of socks.

Re: The xkcd survey

#142

Post by thanatropism »

Xcelerate wrote: post #72
pervycreeper wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come?

It's always the number everyone thinks no one else will choose.

These are the prime numbers between 20 and 100:

23,29,31,37,41,43,47,53,59,61,67,71 73,79,83,89,97

Evens are out; so are small multiples. A multiple of three might end in 3, 9 or 7. A multiple of 7 may end in 1. So a "conservative mental arithmetic sieve" that wants to make sure one's picking a prime number will coalesce around 29 or 37.

Myself, I picked 11 and 17.

Re: The xkcd survey

#145

Post by gknoy »

mesozoic wrote: post #128
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My son just picks two in the dark and wears them. He wanted an outward sign of his nerd cred. If they matched, he used to pick again. But he stopped doing that, because if he really didn't care, he would wear matching socks too. Has he reached some higher level of Nerdvana?

I think technically caring about having socks that doesn't match rules him out. He's testing strongly for hipster though.

I'm going to second the "definitely a nerd", since not only did he make up an arbitrary rule, he even altered his behavior to be logically consistent ("well, matches can happen in random choice, so I can't disallow those ..."). That's pretty cool.

Re: The xkcd survey

#146

Post by Kluny »

muaddirac wrote: post #75

I can't shake the feeling that this will just measure of how willing people are to follow instructions for no reason whatsoever.

I may be exposing my own subjectivity here, but I, personally, did it because Randall asked nicely and I like the things that he does.

Re: The xkcd survey

#147

Post by Kluny »

ZantaWB wrote: post #43
ohitsdom wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was funny to see the slang word "fleek" in there, very unexpected.

I put yes for this because I've heard the funny sounding slang phrase 'on fleek' (similar to on point) before, but I'm not sure if it actually is an OED word.

What are a couple of different ways you would use "fleek" in a sentence? Only, I want to start using it but don't want to sound like a fool.

Re: The xkcd survey

#148

Post by snikeris »

gwern wrote: post #129
wingerlang wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I though, at least while reading the "type 'cat'" one.

That's probably a trap question, to let you filter out people who aren't paying attention. Similarly, in the 'recognize words' section, I'm fairly sure some of those words aren't real and so you could increase data quality by throwing out anyone who claims to recognize fake words.

I took my time to answer everything, but didn't type in 'cat'.

Re: The xkcd survey

#149

Post by RaSoJo »

JoblessWonder wrote: post #124
emidln wrote: post #4

Found out that gnome 3 has some keybinding for dynamically changing screen resolution. I don't know which keybinding that is, but I found it during the mash the keyboard test.

Sigh. I hit "Enter" and it submitted the form without letting me finish. Now they will never know if I'm a dog or a cat person...

me too. i retook the survey :)

Re: The xkcd survey

#150

Post by Twisol »

emidln wrote: post #4

Found out that gnome 3 has some keybinding for dynamically changing screen resolution. I don't know which keybinding that is, but I found it during the mash the keyboard test.

I did something that caused Firefox to restart and lose _all_ of my active tabs. (Got them back via sessionstore.bak, thank goodness.)
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