Blogtrotter

Do You Have Gaps in Your Knowledge?

Despite neither Harvard doctorate nor Cambridge Tripos-- and blowing an oral intelligence test when I was five for insisting that, yes, you could put your pants on over your head-- I managed to evade the machinations of this remote viva voce. Better than my dissertation defense transpired! I paused over how many legs an insect sports. But I aced it. Only due to the lack of math problems, luckily.

I knew at five the capital of Greece-- the only other question I can recall from that pre-computerized scrutiny. And, my stubbornness about the wrong-way trousers stemmed from my confidence that if you tugged hard enough, one pant leg would rip and the slacks would slip down my skinny body somehow, albeit in shreds. I insist that I deserved extra credit for my sartorial ingenuity.

Later in school, I faced more I.Q. tests. My score fluctuated, to my chagrin, over a seventeen-point range depending on when. My official record for my transcripts, of course, proved the lowest. My highest placed me in the precise cohort alongside Gary Gilmore and Charlie Manson.

I failed another match of wits the other day. My début at "Play Chess Against the Computer" at Chess.com found me pitted haplessly in front of its baby computer engine. Repeatedly, I reeled punchdrunk pummelled by the infant incarnation (inlapidation?) of Deep Blue's doppelgänger on its "easy" setting. I desperately needed an ego boost. If chess bested me, I bettered another calculator.

If you want to test your wits, here's that quiz at Blogthings. 21 questions today, compared to only four for yesterday's blogged here about musical psychology. I guess next, illogically, will be the one featured on their sidebar seeking my "leprechaun name."

Update: I already tried it. Don't bother. I repeated the prompt via various names of mine, eliciting aleatory but anodyne Darby O'Gill-ish monikers. The banner ad caught me off guard, a wimpled lass shilling for the "world's largest Muslim matrimonial site."

Where you have gaps in your knowledge:
No Gaps!

Where you don't have gaps in your knowledge:
Philosophy
Religion
Economics
Literature
History
Science
Art

Chart: I.Q. Bell Curve