Last post here

All right. New blog is going live. wilful.dualism is the new journalhome; this one's not going to contain the most personal stuff, because my family will read it. (Yes, I do keep most of my personal life separate from my family life. If you had my family, you would too.)

Accordingly, things which I don't want my family to read will be showing up at the LiveJournal.

Farewell, TransDimensional.

I took an IQ test here. No big, and, in a development which should surprise no-one, I did quite well.

However, I don't think IQ tests measure anything other than how good you are at IQ tests. (Anyone who scores below 126 and wants to join The International High IQ Society anyway, I'm happy to give you my answers, by the way, for I surely do think that high IQ societies are lame, and would find it cool to subvert the system.)

But you look at the kind of questions they ask. Why do I rate well? Because my vocabulary is large, my spatial recognition skills are good (with the exception of the tesseract questions, at which I suck), and I'm good at algebra. And I know what to look for.

This question appears in pretty much every IQ test ever:

What is the next number in this sequence? 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21...

They take it to a varying level of the sequence, of course, but you see, to anyone who's done enough Maths, the instant reaction is "Oh, that's the Fibonacci sequence, wherein you add the two previous numbers together to get the next number". And voila, correct answer. Easy for me, since I learnt the Fibonacci sequence many years ago, when my father assigned me "write a program which calculates the Fibonacci sequence" as a project as he was (attempting) teaching me to program.

Other questions, where you have "if A is worth x and B is worth Y then what's C worth?" you just work out what they have in common, represent those as variables, and reduce it with some very simple algebra. You do that enough times while learning algebra in high school, it's automatic. Anyone who's learnt to do it can get that right on an IQ test, but you could get someone far more intelligent than I am who didn't do so much algebra in high school, or who just doesn't think in terms of algebra for such questions, and they don't get the answer.

It's silly. Not quite as silly as groups like MENSA and the International High IQ Society, both of which I can mock quite comfortably on the grounds that I could join either if I wished. But not only do I think intelligence levels are a poor basis for selecting the people you keep company with - even if it's a factor, because let's face it, too wide a disparity doesn't work for either of you - because you may not share interests, at all, there's the undeniable fact that a lot of intelligent people are prats, and when you deal with people who are so hung up about their intelligence they have to join select clubs just so they can be snooty about it, you're probably looking at a damn high prat percentage.

Which would, of course, be why I've never joined an IQ-based society of any kind, because I have a feeling I'd end up committing mass murder, and giggling with "I had to do it! I had to! They all just had to die!" all the way to prison as the nice men from the tactical response group carried me off, which totally wouldn't endear me to any jury at all, and then I'd spend the rest of my life in jail, and that would be boring.

So, no.

Archives on this blog are going to be removed soon - no particular reason short of I'm going to need somewhere to post I'm willing to let my family read soon, both when I'm on my trip and because they're now aware I journal, and well. There you go, you see? Accordingly, if there's something I said you simply must see again, grab it now. (Unlikely as that seems.) A girl must have some privacy from her parents, after all.

Now that the end of semester crunch is done with, I'm going to be placed to start doing stuff here again. Because the Good Lord knows I'm a wordy wench, and now I'll actually have things to say that don't relate solely to History.

I finally picked up a copy of the soundtrack to Rent. It intensifies my desire to see this performed at some point, but I rather like a lot of the music as it is. And I like the way its overall message is positive. Even if it does have a track called "Today 4 U", which I like except for the title.

I hate the substitution of things like 4 and U for "for" and "you". Because, really, it's not THAT much harder to type the proper words, now is it, and it's got the significant advantage of not being a vicious crime against a poor defenceless language.

I'm not sure whether it's something I should feel bad for or proud of - sure, I'm resolute in maintaining my own standards of grammar and spelling online. In online journal, e-mail, and instant message conversation alike I use proper words, proper spelling, and complete sentences. Go me. But I also think less of people who don't, because, well, I associate a lot of it with being an absolute twinkie. (I'm more or less resigned to people who don't use their shift keys, but that's my line of tolerance.)

It's not so much that I think people who don't use proper words in chat or e-mail are too stupid to use it when they choose to. But it's a sign of something negative that they don't care enough, or respect the process of communication enough to communicate properly.

Besides, you then get the kids who start using IM colloquialisms in formal schoolwork and so on. Which is just beyond me - I mean, who doesn't get the difference between formal academic writing and EVERY OTHER KIND of writing? Take a sentence from one of my recent essays.

"Without a means of linking fascism to the background of European social philosophy and sociopolitical development, fascism remains to an extent impenetrable; it is here that he uncovers the foundation for fascism's existence as a metapolitical phenomenon, a manifestation of the process of Europe's political progress."

Now.

In what UNIVERSE do I talk or write like that normally? Normally I use far fewer polysyllabicisms, and I use less elaborate sentence structure. Now, there's a difference between written and spoken English; written allows longer sentences, and more involved clauses, like this sentence for example, which I wouldn't even attempt to construct if i were speaking off the cuff. And which, you'll note, is still distinctly less involved than that other one.

It's the important distinction between categories of language, is all. It's a pet peeve of mine. If you are intending to communicate with another human being, unless you know them well, it is a sign of elementary respect to communicate with them using actual, real language.