History of Everything

History of Everything is a song by The Bare Naked Ladies and has been loved by me for the past two years as the theme song of The Big Bang Theory, the best show on earth, but more on that later. This post can only be done justice by your watching the following video.

I are officially kind of smart

Some of you might remember my taking a Mensa approved IQ test about a week ago, well today, finally, results came in and what I found out was surprisingiy similar to what I'd already known. My IQ seems to be 134, which is supposedly in the top 6% of the human population - not perfect, but good enough I say, I've got objective proof that I'm smart rather than stupid as I so often feel I am.

But how on earth did I know I'd get about that result? Online IQ tests to be honest, for some reason I've been nearly obsessed with knowing my IQ for the past few years and have thus solved many online tests. Some better, some worse. The results, accordingly, varied quite a lot, but a clear median shined out from the masses and that was 130-ish.

See, I knew enough not to trust the tests that want to sell me their results, the whole point of those is giving a high score so you'd be tempted to buy the advanced results. I also knew not to trust the tests that asked for too much knowledge because hey, how am I supposed to know what a friggin' nickel or dime is?

Lately, however, I've solved the facebook IQ test and found it to be the most accurate of them all and it in fact showed a result quite similar to that of Mensa's test. Facebook says my IQ is 143 and given the fact that performance can vary between days, that I took the facebook test in my natural environment, nighttime, and some other factors, I'd say it's a rather accurate way of gleaning one's IQ.

Clean Code and speed coding

Some weeks ago I finished reading Clean Code by Robert C. Martin, which is something I may have spoken about already, but I can't remember. Well it was an amazingly good read and it instantly changed a lot about the way I code and even the way I think about things. At first a lot of what was mentioned in Clean Code made the optimiser in me cringe and whince. Things like putting conditionals into a separate function and so on.

But later I realised that hey, modern computers are fast enough, some wasteful practices like that aren't going to hurt too much and the saved time in development can only do good. See, the thing is that if, for example, you encapsulate conditionals in separate functions you don't only achieve greater code readability, you also get the ability to change an important part of algorithm behaviour (when to do something) by changing a single function and the change automatically propagates throughout your code.

I believe that due to my new practices of writing code cleanly I have been able to develop Twitulater as much as I have in the past twelve days. It's reached version 0.3 of all things and is fast becoming useful. So far the version update cycle, starting from 0.1, has on average been 2.5 days and that, if you ask me, is quite astounding - especially taking into account this is the first time ever of me developing in Adobe AIR.

The reason developing can be so quick once you acquire clean code practicess is mostly that, as Uncle Bob says, developers spend much more of their time reading code than they do writing it and when that code is super readable it takes much less time to read. Furthermore, due to many of his advice, the code is also much more searchable and better structured so it doesn't take as long to find what you're looking for - this especially applies to us text editor types who abhor IDE's.

There is another reason that I believe is of even greater weight, now that I keep code clean I find that I can write large chunks of code, without testing, and have it working correctly the first time it's run. With Twitulater it's happened that I wrote a hundred lines of code, ran it, and it just worked, just like that.

Now all that's left for me to do is acquire test driven development practices so I can cut my debugging time in half. Oh and if you didn't glean from the rest of this post: You want this book.

My twitter goals

Initially I wanted to write this as a comment to TwiTip.com's Twitter goals post, but it grew and grew and felt more like a blogpost of its own.

I use twitter to be a popular twitterer. That's the only goal I really have.

But there are hidden goals of course. Like just _what_ comes from being a powerful twitterer? Well there's the personal branding thing, everyone's doing it right now and it's useful for a number of things pretty much everyone knows. Another thing powerful twitterers have is an instant readerbase, have a new project? Announce it on twitter and instantly hundreds of people know about it ... that's a very powerful promotion tool.

Last but not least, is the knowledge aspect of being a powerful twitterer. You find out many things, very many things you find out near instantly and a lot of that information is in fact very good, useful information. The old saying goes "Valuable information is only valuable while it's fresh". Ding ding.

So yeah, twitter goals, I say don't go overboard, just go out there and have fun. The rest will follow.

Took IQ test - found problem

Last Friday I went and took a proper IQ test issued by mensa, because I was sick and tired of all those online tests of all weights and sizes telling me how bloody smart I was. Time to find out for real I thought.

The Mensa IQ test deals away with the largest issue IQ tests have in general - that they're very knowledge and not very intelligence centric. They demand you know anything from maths to language skills and whatnot. While I do agree that the ability to do maths in one's head is a great marker of intelligence, it doesn't mean someone not good with numbers isn't just as smart, but in a different way. The way Mensa does this is by issuing a test based solely on numbers and pattern recognition, arguably the most cross-platform, if you will, way of finding somebody's intelligence.

The test itself seemed surprisingly easy and I even managed to finish ahead of time, how much of what I'd done was correct and the rank of my IQ remain an issue to be found out after mensa's psychologist evaluates the tests and sends out the scores.

There is a very important reason as to why I cannot say that hey, the test was easy, I must've gotten a big score. And that reason is lateral thinking. I'm not going to brag about being a very huge or very awesome lateral thinker, but that's something very difficult to put a value on. How do you know you're a lateral thinker and not simply stupid? You can't and this is where the image-pattern IQ test fails.

See the thing with patterns is that ok in many cases the pattern is very obvious and pretty much everyone finds the same one. But as soon as you get into very complex transformations different smart people will find different kinds of patterns in the sample set. This could, of course, be solved by giving a sample set larger than eight (for example when I'm finding a pattern during programming I usually work with sample sets of hundreds). That would introduce a whole bunch of other problems of course, namely the speed factor of processing a large sample set.

All in all, I believe the IQ test I was given to be the best possible compromise, but it has a great potential for giving a wrong score.