Online Quizzes

One of the questions I hate on online quizzes starts out "My friends would describe me as..."

Um, I have no idea. Shouldn't they be taking this test for me?

That's one of the main problems with online quizzes. They're self-assessed, and people rarely see themselves the way that others do, nor would they act in the way they claim in certain situations ("Yeah, I would definitely stop whatever it is that I was doing in order to save that dying bird on the sidewalk! And I always stop and give all of my money to the homeless guy on the street! ")

In the pre-blog/pre-myspace era, people couldn't easily report the results to all their friends so it was more of an introspective personality assessment. But now that it's so easy to post them on a blog or social networking site, it seems that people could easily answer in a way that would cast them in the most positive light possible.

I, of course, would never lie on a test.

Here are some of my completely accuate and honest results: Perfect Human ("easy-going, friendly and know when to stand up for yourself"), Aegir ("you throw good parties, and are generally well-liked"), Robot ("more rational than intuitive"), Oracle ("typically easy-going and non-confrontational until someone violates one of the very few principles that you deem sacred, at which point you can fly into a rage"; "despite being outwardly humble, you probably think of yourself as being smarter than most other people"), Plato ("you believe in the virtue of humanity, the purity of music, the essence of morality").

Oh, and my nerdiness score means "you could be a nerd, but you're probably just a geek" and my celebrity date should be Paris Hilton. Go figure.