The Skeptical Boffin

Or so saith the Empathising Quotient/Systemising Quotient (EQSQ) test. Okay, so they didn't *quite* put it like that. (The test actually implies that I'm not even human...).

Found a link to it from some other site, had nothing to do, thought I'd take it. (Force knows, I've tried everything from the Nerd Purity Quiz, to determining my LOTR Orkish name. Which happens to be Ishluk the Choker, in case anyone's asking). This is what my scores said:

Your Systemizing (SQ) and Empathizing (EQ) Quotient Test Results

May 07, 2010

 

Respondent	Average EQ	Average SQ	Brain Type
Males	39.0	61.2	Systemizing
Females	48.0	51.7	Empathizing
Your Score	11 (???!!!)	101 (?!)	Extreme Systemizing

What does your score mean?

Generally, the higher the score the greater your natural ability for that trait. However, the EQ test has 40 questions compared to 75 in the SQ test. As a result, although the unprocessed quotients may be used for comparing each trait ability between individuals, the absolute scores do not tell an individual if he or she has a greater tendency to empathize or systemize. A calculation taking into account the quantity of questions in each test is used to determine a person's brain type along the following continuum:

• Extreme Empathizing (Extreme E)
• Empathizing (E)
• Balanced (B)
• Systemizing (S)
• Extreme Systemizing (Extreme S)

	Brain Types of Experimental Control Groups
Respondent	Extreme E	E	Balanced	S	Extreme S
Males	0%	17%	31%	46%	6%
Females	7%	47%	32%	14%	0%

The important factor to consider is not your absolute score, but the difference between the two. This indicates whether you have more natural ability as an Empathizer or a Systemizer. If your scores are about the same for your EQ and SQ, then you have well balanced empathizing-systemizing capabilities.

Eleven??? OMGROFLMAO.How is it even possible to score *that* low on an empathy test, assuming the person taking it is neither, oh, Jeffrey Dahmer or a brain-dead oyster? [facepalm] I may be socially dense at times, and know exactly where each and every book I own is in my library, but scores like that also imply that I routinely vivisect my neighbours' pets (and maybe even my neighbours) in the basement, and obsessively count the number of peas in each can I open (and probably sort them out by size)? I'd love to set my friends loose on that site. If their scores come out equally odd, it can be assumed that the quiz is broken. If their scores *don't* come out equally odd... the quiz is broken anyhow! (The alternative would be that I'm actually a robot placed on earth to imitate humans while studying their behaviour and culture so that I can report to Chief Green Guy when I get back).

In the meantime, if anyone wants me, I'll be upstairs in my room. Cutting worms in half.

MOULDY BREAD - Fitness experts are baffled by the spontaneous migration of multiple workout machines around a local gym last night. The phenomenon, dubbed "Sailing Machines", left only deep gouges in the flooring, and no eyewitnesses.

"We don't know exactly what happened," says an unnamed employee at the gym. "When we locked up for the night yesterday, everything was where it should be. But when we punched in this morning, we discovered that all the machines had changed places."

Adds her colleague, "It was just dead weird. There was no sign of a break-in, or any kind of human activity. It was as if... the machines just got up and rumbled around in the middle of the night."

Already, panic is spreading across the city as locals speculate about the possibility of the gym machines acquiring sentience. "Just think about it," presses a concerned citizen. "We keep giving these machines bigger and better electronic brains; it's only a matter of time before they develop artificial intelligence. What we've just witnessed may be the first manifestation of self-awareness and free will among machines. And then what next? My coffee machine refusing to let me drink any more decaf? My car deciding that it wants to come into the house at night? It's pandemonium, I tell you!"

Experts are quick to scoff at these rumours and speculations as "uneducated, hysterical rambling." 

However, there may be a scientific explanation for the phenomenon: A local fitness machine expert points out that drastic episodes of unexplained machine movement tend to coincide with the shifting of the Earth's magnetic pole. "We weren't expecting this phenomenon until next year," he admits. "The last time this happened was some 780,000 years ago, during a period geologists called the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal. As you can imagine, there was widespread disaster when the poles spontaneously reversed: we've found fossils of sabre-toothed tigers and glyptodons crushed under heavy gym equipment, and there's evidence to suggest the mammoths went on a rampage and tore down fitness centres in a bloody fit because they couldn't find their programmable steppers."

"Quite a bit of luck nobody was around when this thing happened last night," he says, almost as an afterthought.

Or was there? Suspicious dark smears on the linoleum floor suggests that there may have been at least one witness, but that they will not be talking anytime soon.

In the meantime, gym regulars are appalled with the abrupt rearrangement of equipment, which, as one regular points out, "has no rhyme or bloody reason. I mean, if those damned things had to go and move themselves around, why the hell didn't they group themselves by type, instead of scattering themselves haphazardly throughout the damn pla-- *BONK* OW! Who the hell put that lat bar there?"

Experts are hard pressed for a reasonable answer at current time.


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Because it's obviously more fun making jokes about our gym's peculiar tendency to keep shifting machines around, than ranting outright about it.