"To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition." -- Woody Allen
I was recently chastised for not posting real entries to let folks know how I'm doing, or at least that I'm alive (the QotD posts are automatic). Since then I've been meaning to write here, but by the time I pull myself away from other things I've been trying to get done (the past few weeks, I've spent more time writing about writing tools to write music, than I've spent writing music ... argh) I'm too wiped to compose my thoughts.
This isn't that intended "real post" entry, though it will at least show that more than just by cron daemon is still alive. This is just to share a link to a kinda nifty vocabulary quiz thing that's also a research project (that needs a wider range of participants, not that my flist will broadan that for them very much). It takes about five minutes and is in two stages (three if you include filling in demographic info for their research): the first establishes a really rough idea of what sorts of words to throw at you in the second. It estimates the size of your 'productive' working vocabulary (the number of words you can use, which is smaller than the number of words you're likely to understand).
The FAQ says it has about a 10% margin of error (n.b.: based on their specific focus on how to count 'words' and which words to test on, so they warn that results are probably only comparable between folks taking this test, not between different tests with different assumptions). When comparing your scores to each other, note that at the high end, 10% is ... a lot. (The friend whose f-locked entry I got the link from scored 5000 words below me, but the error bars on our scores overlap by a couple thousand, so I'm not feeling particularly superior. If his actual working vocabulary was underestimated and mine was overestimated -- easy enough based on the number of 'obscure' words I know -- then even if the test is every bit as accurate as its creators think it is, he may well know more words than I do. But yes, it still feels nice to look at a big number at the end, of course.)
They're trying to do real science. I'm treating the test more as entertainment, but with warm fuzzies from the idea that my being entertained is serving somebody else's science. And part of my entertainment was the geek-enjoyment of reading the explanation of how the test works, afterward.
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