The xkcd survey | Hacker News Reader

The xkcd survey

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If you like this sort of thing, you may also enjoy:

1) My website Correlated.org (http://www.correlated.org), which has been generating weird correlations based on users' survey responses for more than four years.

2) Spurious Correlations (http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations) by Tyler Vigen, which also offers wacky correlations, but based on publicly available datasets rather than survey responses.

3) Google Correlate (http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/draw), which allows you to draw a curve, then find search terms whose popularity over time matches the shape you drew.

correlated.org: there are 1,500 of those?! Bang goes my afternoon ...

Correlated.org is quite brilliant. Is there a way to see the most popular posts?

Is your correlated.org data-set or result-set available bulk or via API?

I think my favorite is Google Correlate. I have no idea what the motorola tundra is but it got super popular on 12/21/2008 and then slowly fell out of interest by 2014.

Can anyone explain how Google Correlate works? I understand how a brute-forced approach might work, but is there any way of optimizing this?

Locality-sensitive hashing should work:

http://www.slaney.org/malcolm/yahoo/Slaney2008-LSHTutorial.p... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-sensitive_hashing

They link to their paper on the Google Correlate site: https://www.google.com/trends/correlate/nnsearch.pdf

Google Correlate is weirdly fun.

Whoa! Getting a 500 on Google Correlate. First time I've ever hit a 500 on Google Services.

Correlated.org interests me. Scrolling down the front page, it's fun to try and form connections and explain correlations to yourself (probably wrongly).

Here are some of the ones on the front page I was able to think of a possible explanation for (many quite tenuous):

> among those who would be willing to observe a prison execution, 68 percent say they tend to stick to their decisions.

Sticking to your decisions might be a mark of social conservatism. In which case, being willing to observe someone being executed might correlate.

> among those who need corrective lenses to read, 54 percent prefer to play with dominoes as a tile game, rather than by toppling them

If it's myopia causing them to need glasses, well, myopia is apparently caused by not getting outside enough during childhood (and therefore not getting sufficient sunlight).

Perhaps, then, more active people would enjoy toppling dominoes more and have gotten outside more during youth (thus not developing myopia).

> among those who say that longevity runs in their family, only 26 percent like skim milk.

Maybe skim milk is a more recent thing, and people whose longevity 'runs in the family' would be more traditional? I'm really grasping at straws here.

> among those who use anti-dandruff shampoo, 54 percent say they are good Frisbee throwers.

Apparently dandruff can be caused by greasy skin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandruff#Causes) - is this more likely in more active people(?)

> among those who have recently done something dangerous enough that they had to sign a waiver, 73 percent find Irish accents to be especially attractive

I had two thoughts on this one:

1) Are people more likely to need to sign a waiver in certain countries? In which case, this might be a cultural thing.

2) People who've done dangerous things might be rather adventurous, and think Irish accents somehow symbolise that(??)

> among those who like the taste of honeysuckle nectar, 61 percent say their favorite kind of doughnut doesn't have a hole in it

Is honeysuckle nectar a sweet, fructosey thing? Well, doughnuts without holes often contain fruit jam. So someone who likes sweet, fruity things would be more likely to like both?

> among those who don't like couscous, 54 percent have witnessed an animal being born

People who live in the country are perhaps more likely to have witnessed an animal being born, right? (Though I suppose most people don't live on farms, hmm...) Since couscous is not a traditional foodstuff in the West, perhaps people living in the country, who are likely to be more conservative(?), would be less likely to enjoy couscous?

> among those who think that the only things that really exist are material things, 60 percent would prefer a messy roommate

This makes a certain intuitive sense to me, but I can't quite think of the words. The word 'hedonism' springs to mind, though might not quite be what I'm after.

> among those who find it hard to tolerate oscillating fans, 58 percent do the Electric Slide at wedding receptions

I wonder if this is a generational gap.

> among those who like raspberry vinaigrette salad dressing, 69 percent like candy corn

Like the honeysuckle nectar one, I suspect this is some common taste between the two foods.

correlated.org doesn't seem to have updated in ages -- the dates keep updating, but the correlations stay the same...

Found out that gnome 3 has some keybinding for dynamically changing screen resolution. I don't know which keybinding that is, but I found it during the mash the keyboard test.

Ctrl-Alt-Plus (and Minus)

Yeah, while I was "typing" my response to that question, my screen suddenly went completely black... and then luckily just returned to normal a few seconds later.

... or at least I thought it returned to normal...

Having read your comment, I realize all the text on my display is subtlely squashed and blurry in a way that I didn't notice, but is pretty obvious now that I'm looking for it! ><

HAH! I almost just had coffee spurting out of my nose.

Did anyone mash about a fifth of the window, select all, copy, then paste until it filled up and then some?

Guilty.

I hit Enter a few times and I didn't like the jaggedness of the box. So I had to clean up my randomness a bit.

Someone (we?) should do an analysis on how many people did that, when the data comes out.

Sigh. I hit "Enter" and it submitted the form without letting me finish. Now they will never know if I'm a dog or a cat person...

me too. i retook the survey :)

hit back button, continued.

I hit back and my answers weren't there. I did end up doing the second half of the survey but I was hoping my dataset would be complete.

I suspect the real problem isn't so much hitting "enter" but hitting it directly after the other hand hit "tab". A text field should be able to deal with an enter.

The text fields do handle the enter key correctly. Sometimes you just accidentally press enter and the form lacks required fields and validation.

I discovered that SOME combination while mashing would close my tab in Chrome. Fortunately, ctrl-shift-t brought back not just the form, but __saved_responses__. What a pleasant surprise. I wonder if that saving is done by the browser, or by the website (local storage?).

Probably Ctrl-W, and the browser does the saving. It also works with back.

I did something that caused Firefox to restart and lose _all_ of my active tabs. (Got them back via sessionstore.bak, thank goodness.)

"How many tabs do you keep open on your browser" would be an interesting question, to me, to see the results on. I'm often mystified by the stories of people who keep 50+ tabs open. I've never understood why, but I guess now that I'm considering it, I'm guessing such people must base their workflows around tabs.

Vertical tab bars :) It doesn't impede my workflow as if I had that many tabs open on a traditional horizontal bar, so they just accumulate.

I tend to have about 50 or so tabs, per /window/ (it's time for a new one when I can't see the faveicon anymore).

I tend to have about 250-300 tabs open in total. Various things I mean to get back to, reference material for projects that I've paused working on, etc.

In general when it costs you nothing to keep a photocopy of a reference on your desk, the desktop becomes nothing but photocopies of reference materials.

Same. Weirdly, it tends to be worse on my phone where I used to have over 250+ on my phone alone.

I'm back up to 89 tabs now, after having recently cleaned it up a bit.

The people I know who do it simply use them as bookmarks. No, me neither.

I have no idea how many tabs I have open, because it's a lot more than my browser is able to display. It's not so much that my workflow is based on tabs, but rather my procrastination flow. I encounter something I want to read, open it in a new tab, but then put off reading it until I forget why I wanted to read it.

I can't shake the feeling that this will just measure of how willing people are to follow instructions for no reason whatsoever.

Here are some obvious signals that I think can be pulled from the data set:

• gender

• age (since they just straight up ask for it)

• rough geo data (if the survey records IP geo information, so assume they are doing that)

• economic status

• rough tech literacy level

As far as I know, it's not possible to record respondents' IP addresses with Google Surveys, so I think that one's out. I suppose you could make rough inferences based on the food, weather, and snow questions.

The keyboard part will help quite a bit, at least. Being from Norway, the occasional æ-ø-ås are quite revealing.

I type on Dvorak, so lots of "oeuieu" (clusters of vowels) in there. Midway through the gibberish I typed "this is a dvorak keyboard" just for grins.

That's what I though, at least while reading the "type 'cat'" one.

That's probably a trap question, to let you filter out people who aren't paying attention. Similarly, in the 'recognize words' section, I'm fairly sure some of those words aren't real and so you could increase data quality by throwing out anyone who claims to recognize fake words.

I took my time to answer everything, but didn't type in 'cat'.

I thought about it for a while, and then it occurred to me, that there are actually many ways one could possibly understand that -- thus replying e.g.:

- cat

- "cat"

- 'cat'

- panther (not exactly a cat, but kinda -- that's why it was in quotes, no?)

- [one could type "cat" in one's terminal]

- "Whiskers", etc. (i.e. name of one's cat)

then, one could make a typo (thus e.g. "ca" or "catt"), or finally something more or less totally random, given that it's an open question (thus e.g. "no", or "How are you?", or whatever).

So, not that stupid a question I thought initially :)

I just pasted a picture to heavy machinery.

My phone was going put 'Cat', but I corrected it to match 'cat'. I'd be curious to know how many people on smartphones would do the same.

Took it on a smartphone. Also overrode to match case. So, at least 2.

not to mention the obvious ones

- Cat

- Cat.

In a bit of "don't tell me what to do" pique, I typed the cat emoji, .

Turns out something in Google Forms uses UCS-2 internally, so it rejected my whole survey.

EDIT: I guess Arc isn't very good at this either.

> Turns out something in Google Forms uses UCS-2 internally, so it rejected my whole survey.

Google love Java to bits, and it's UCS-2ish.

I included the quotes, just to be cute.

I included the quotes and then typed here with a colon after it.

Or as an alternative theory, Randall Munroe wants to know if it's OK to tell everyone when he throws away all his socks and buys a bunch of identical ones.

This seems strangely plausible.

It is the one way to eliminate the problem of matching socks after laundry.

I may be exposing my own subjectivity here, but I, personally, did it because Randall asked nicely and I like the things that he does.

I kept going because the questions were entertaining.

I would've stopped if the questions were boring.

I wonder how many responses of :

Cantaloupe');DROP TABLE Food;--

ol' Randal is going to get (or some permutation thereof). Figuring that Randal is pretty smart, I bet he has a piece of code to parse out that. Still, anyone here have a good hack that can just nuke days of his time whilst completing this form? Only other one I can think of him using is (for Matlab):

Cantaloupe'); clear all; clc; close all;

The data gets collated in a Google sheet, so I think he'll be fine. Or at least if he finds a bug, it'll get fixed.

Yeah I suspect google sheets is not obviously vulnerable to sql injection at this point in the game.

It's not going to -stay- in a google spreadsheet, though. You have to assume it will get loaded into some other system. there are opportunities to exploit that system, potentially. Kind of a 'stored' injection vulnerability.

yeah it's going into a docs spreadsheet rather than a db, at least directly, so I don't think he has much to worry about

I'll have to play with spreadsheet injection then

He is hip to sql injection. https://xkcd.com/327/

That's the joke.

This isn't Randall's first rodeo. On his color survey, he mentioned this (http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/):

"A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids."

I assume he'd use python for the parsing with the CSV library, so just including lots of quotes, commas, \t, and \n characters would probably mess something up.

=== SPOILER ALERT! ===

The most interesting question, to me, is the one about which words you know the meaning of.

About half of them aren't real words. I assume this question is used partly as a gauge of vocabulary (how many of the real words do you recognize) and partly of honesty (how many of the fake words do you claim to recognize).

And not at all biased toward native english speakers...

Or people with access to a computer and the internet.

He addressed that in the heading text: "This is obviously not going to be a real random sample of people"

"Biased" in the sense of correlation, yes.

Really? I thought it was biased toward native USAian speakers. What the fuck is Cilantro?

Technically that's a bias toward Spanish speakers too, since cilantro is just "coriander" in Spanish, usually referring to the leaves.

Technically examples are biased to the specific examples given though they aren't supposed to serve the particular examples in particular.

Coriander leaves.

Does this not have its own word in British English? Even given their international cuisine?

We generally just call it coriander.

I thought all of the words were perfectly cromulent.

cromulent

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cromulent

D'oh!

I thought you had intentionally misspelled it as a play on intentionally including non-words

excellent comment - I offer you my most enthusiastic contrafibularities

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOSYiT2iG08

They're great words to learn for anyone wishing to embiggen their vocabulary.

Agreed ;)

I saw a Reddit post once about how Google was releasing Cromcast.

I immediately pictured a device with an HDMI interface that continuously forces your TV to change to that input, turn up the volume, and then repeatedly play short videos from different scenes, of Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian, yelling "CROM!"

Kinda wish you had waited until after the results were published to mention it. Plenty of people will read the comments first, so by talking about it now you're actively harming the very experiment you're so impressed by.

Unless, of course, it was assumed this discussion would take place.

[[dramatic chord]]

That only applies to people who saw this on Hacker News; the survey link is on xkcd's front page today, and I imagine there are many xkcd readers who don't come here.

It was funny to see the slang word "fleek" in there, very unexpected.

I put yes for this because I've heard the funny sounding slang phrase 'on fleek' (similar to on point) before, but I'm not sure if it actually is an OED word.

What are a couple of different ways you would use "fleek" in a sentence? Only, I want to start using it but don't want to sound like a fool.

You must accept that you will sound like a fool just for using this word. You can use it for anything you want to show satisfaction/approval for. React.js on fleek, eyebrows on fleek, uptime on fleek

"Eyebrows on fleek" is definitely most popular, but "uptime on fleek" is now one of my favorite phrases and will be used liberally.

It isn't in the OED yet (I just checked)

Some of them were definitely highly specific jargon to medical fields and the like. I'm betting fewer of them are made up than you think.

Are they un-googleable jargon? I googled all of them, and about half of those searches yielded bupkis. Phoropter was the only medical term I found.

I wonder if there's jargon in the intelligence services that's classified?

Certainly some jargon is typical in spoken environments but rarely necessary in written contexts, just as vice versa. Not that I have any specific proofs on the specific words in the survey, but given at least one example of curious slang ("fleek"), I wouldn't put it past Randall to attempt to find some.

Also, the fun thing about pronounceable neologisms is even if Randall made them up, there's a curious tendency in English at least to actually start using some of them.

I checked them after I'd submitted the survey. The only real words that I hadn't ticked were "regolith" (I was almost sure it was a real word, but I didn't know the meaning of it), "phoropter" (I believed it could be a piece of engineering terminology, but again didn't know the meaning) and "peristeronic" and "apricity" (I would have given better than evens that these were made up).

Mmmm... no.

* Phoropter * Tribution * Slickle * Cadine * Fination * Apricity * Revergent * Unitory * Trephony

These are not words. They are not highly specific jargon either. They are just made up nonsense.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoropter https://wordnik.com/words/apricity

Seems you're right about the rest.

I'm not sure if it has been removed from most dictionaries, but apricity is commonly accepted as "The warmth felt from sunlight". Wiktionary lists it as obsolete though.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/apricity

Because guessing games are fun:

Slickle is clearly onomatopoeia for something I probably don't want to know what.

Cadine is a name (which is certainly a type of word): http://www.babycenter.com/baby-names-cadine-891835.htm

Tribution and Revergent are likely plays on con- prefix removal and substitution (contribution, convergent). If they are not part of some jargon, they will be. Similarly, the morphological construction for Unitory (-tory is the latin agency prefix) I can certainly believe it to have jargon usage.

Trephony could be a form of this noun for different grammatical situations: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trephone That would suggest to me that it may be a biosciences jargon term already.

I would argue as a descriptivist that revergent is a legit English word - something that was previously divergent that is now tending towards convergence.

"Slickle" has an entry as slang in the urban dictionary.

"Revergent" gets a definition here[1] as "a mutation that precisely restores a mutant DNA sequence to a WT DNA sequence".

[0] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Slickle [1] http://www.flashcardmachine.com/questions-set-2.html

I thought I had an above-average vocabulary, so I was getting nervous when I didn't recognize many of them.

And the first word in the list, hubris, refers a personality trait that the question is likely to reveal. Well played.

The order is randomized, apparently. Hubris was mid-pack for me.

At the very bottom for me.

Well, at least I don't feel so bad about not recognizing more than half of those words.

Some of the words came up in urban dictionary definitions, so perhaps it was a descriptivism vs prescriptivism angle.

I don't know why, but I was able to recognize the non-words instantly (with one exception) even though I didn't know the meaning of every single "real" one. (Peristeronic, etc.)

Perhaps a remnant of my spelling-bee days.

I knew "Peristeronic" was a real word, because I'd seen it somewhere before. Turns out it was another xkcd: https://xkcd.com/798/

Makes me feel better, then. I consider myself to have a relatively large lexicon, but only knew about 40% of the words.

If he had given the final round list of words from the US National Spelling Bee, I don't think I would have even been able to tell they were real.

balletomane? zimocca? scacchite?

http://spellingbee.com/public/results/2015/round_results/spe...

As a non-native speaker, this was a hard question to be honest on. I recognize the word "rife", I can use it in a sentence, but _do I know what it means_?

I can't remember what I clicked.

I wondered the same (also a non-native speaker), but I figured if I can use the word correctly (to my knowledge) in a sentence, it means I know what it means. Even if I can't succinctly describe its meaning in English or Dutch. That's a job for dictionary-editors :-)

The problem with "rife" is that it's mainly used in the context of "rife with", where it means something like "full of". Then it gets confusing because it's not really correct to say "rife" means "full". Or, "rife means full changing with to of", which is just word salad.

There’s a list of which words are real and which are fake on the wiki at http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1572:_xkcd_Survey#.... The fake words aren’t even in the Oxford English Dictionary – I checked.

> On a scale of 1 to 5, which number is your favorite?

> 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5

Chuckle...

"yes"

In that space, I wanted to say PI, but unfortunately they only allow ints...

Did you also pick e?

No, I went with 4: a) it's even b) 2+2 c) 2*2 d) 2^2

e) 2↑↑2 f) 2↑↑↑2 g) 2↑↑↑2 …

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuth%27s_up-arrow_notation)

My favorite 'survey' question ever...

> On a scale of 1 to 10, what's your favorite candy?

I originally heard it on a "Senseless Survey" radio segment.

If you liked that question, check out the Self Referential Aptitude Test: http://faculty.uml.edu/jpropp/srat-Q.txt

Now that was fun.

Arg! Help!

I must of miss-stepped somewhere because I think I proved the answer to Q8 was C, so Q3 and Q4 had to add up to 6, but Q1 says Q3 or Q4 has to be B, and they can't BOTH be B, because of Q2. So I'm stuck! I've done something wrong.

Maybe I'm reading one of these questions wrong? Rats.

edit: oooooops, C is 2 away from E.

So is the last question not a common thing? Because I do it every year or so, but my wife thinks I am crazy.

It's not as common as it should be.

It totally needs to be.

I think that is very wasteful.

http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_freshwater/freshw...

I mean, I run 6 days a week so my running socks get beat up pretty bad. When they are dead, I need to throw them out. So my options are:

1) Buy 1 new pack of socks, throw out 6 old socks - repeat every month. Doing it this way I have to match socks between several different styles.

2) Put 4 packs of socks, throw out all of my socks, repeat 4x less often. Also I have no matching to do, as all of my socks are the same - just grab 2.

(And technically I have 2 styles of socks, summer socks and winter socks. Summer socks is a buttload of cotton socks that get bought in bulk. Winter socks are 3-4 pairs of identical wool socks that last much longer).

My son just picks two in the dark and wears them. He wanted an outward sign of his nerd cred. If they matched, he used to pick again. But he stopped doing that, because if he really didn't care, he would wear matching socks too. Has he reached some higher level of Nerdvana?

I think technically caring about having socks that doesn't match rules him out. He's testing strongly for hipster though.

Hey, definitely a nerd. For fun he finds code races in Redis/Bayeux server failover. Also he fights in clubs, bashing his friends with sticks. And designs card/board games.

I'm going to second the "definitely a nerd", since not only did he make up an arbitrary rule, he even altered his behavior to be logically consistent ("well, matches can happen in random choice, so I can't disallow those ..."). That's pretty cool.

I do that just because I'm too lazy to match my socks, or I only have a few clean socks left and none of them match. I can't honestly say I've ever thought about it from a 'what would someone else think?' perspective before reading your comment. Heh, maybe people think I'm colorblind and are just too polite to ask, or nobody notices.

I can't say I notice other peoples socks either now that I think about it.

White vs Black pretty easy to notice :)

Ok, maybe I assumed you don't use them as heavily and also have more socks.

>I have to match socks between several different styles Do I understand correctly that you throw all your socks into a drawer/container, and when you need a pair, you go and have to find two matching ones?

This may be cultural (or even familial) thing, but I always curl two socks up into a ball so that they stay together. When I need a pair, I just take one ball, uncurl it, and voila.

But do you curl matching socks or not?

If you have many different styles, you need to go hunt around and find matches. Curl or not just delays the matching problem, it does not solve it.

Having all the socks be the same makes matching an O(1) problem.

but if you curl them after drying, you have a much smaller pool to find the pair from, the just washed socks (which will be the socks you use the most anyway). So it's faster that way, than to mix them all up and only then match.

My wife has about twenty pairs of socks, and no more than a few of the pairs are the same variety. It's like some masochistic combinatorics problem every single time I fold socks. My kid and I literally were playing "sock go fish" a few times to get him to help (except ... I was more interested in the pairing, rather than taking turns. Doh.)

Laundry-folding happiness is increased significantly when I don't have to play "Find-the-mate" every time I pick up a sock (which applies to my kids' socks as well, since they are all patterned, but thankfully my son likes wearing party-colored socks, so I only need to match on shape).

I have two "vintages" of socks -- the old ones that I hate, and the newer ones that I prefer, roughly equally divided. I would donate + re-buy if I had more than two flavors of socks.

Sock go-fish is _genius_

I pretend I am a computer doing a matching problem. I have a buffer of unmatched socks that I compare each sock as I pull it out of the pile, and if unmatched I add to the buffer. Kinda fun.

Yes, I pair them after washing, and curl them after drying. Putting them together makes searching O(n) instead of O(n^2) if you have a particular style in mind.

Of course, homogeneity makes this even faster, but you lose the benefit of choice, variability and fashionableness. Quid pro quo.

I think his point was that if you're seeking out all the pairs when you curl them together, you're still spending unnecessary time and effort matching socks, just ahead of time instead of in the moment when you need socks

Exactly he does an O(N^2) Pair followed by a later O(N) search.

Why not do a O(1) Pair folloed by an O(1) Search.

Of course, there's an enlightening stackoverflow question on this: http://stackoverflow.com/q/14415881/220347

Finally, my graduate-level algorithms class comes in handy in real life.

Intuitively I'd say a human pairing socks is far better than O(n2) because finding something that matches a given sock is close to O(1) on small sets.

I'd suggest Darn Tough wool socks. Buy two of them per season if you want. They are guaranteed for life. No, they really are. Return them, and they send you new ones. My wife has returned them twice. I'm still on my first pair and I run and go backpacking. They are awesome. Plus, wool is one of the best materials for not stinking (anti-bacterial) so you don't even have to wash them (every time) if you leave them out to dry.

Lots of socks are polyester.

"Throwing out" doesn't mean "destroy". There are plenty of people who could use socks in decent condition, so it's not a waste.

I've definitely had friends who both did it, and then told me I should. So it's a thing, but I don't know how common. Guess we'll find out =D

I do the buying all the same thing for the new, but I don't throw out the old. They go into reserve for when nothing else is clean. I keep them in a separate drawer.

I don't do it on the same basis, but I do have decay batches like that.

I'll buy a bunch of undergarments that are frequently used so that there's a whole generation. When I feel a need based on function I buy a new generation. If the old generation still has some service life it becomes 'houseware' (the 'holy' stuff worn only about the house).

Socks usually get culled completely once they have a hole of any size (evicted from the generation), while new generations tend to happen when parts wear too thin for comfort in shoes.

I usually keep holey socks as rags for use in the house or garage.

Steve Jobs did it, only with his entire wardrobe.

I do this and thought I'd had an original idea.

Only having one type of sock pair * $n_pairs in rotation makes laundry super simple.

I don't do it that often, but that is my preferred way of doing it. Eliminates the problem of having 7 socks with no matches. Eliminates the need to pair them when doing laundry or when getting dressed. And generally all my socks wear out within a couple of months of each other anyway.

Been wearing all black every day for a few years now. Knowing I don't have to fiddle with the world of clothing at all ever is comforting.

Well I have to have at least as many colours of socks as I have colours of pants to match them with. That is blue, beige/khaki, and black.

Also a few bright flashy coloured ones, for fun.

For those of you who are tired of matching socks after laundry but don't want to wear the same black socks all the time, I solved this issue by buying very colourful socks. Each pair is very different to the other pairs, so when it's time to pair them up, it's instantly obvious which socks belong to a pair.

Hope the results will be as entertaining as the Color Survey: http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

Thermostat: Warmer or Colder?

How about less intense? At the office I bring a sweater in the summer and so sometimes strip to my undershirt in the winter....

Yeah, I don't ever adjust a thermostat set by someone else. If there's a thermostat to set, I'm always happy with whatever anyone has set it to. if there isn't, there's nothing to set. There should be a choice "I never adjuust a thermostat."

I didn't answer that one. None of the answers clearly applied to me.

"Pick a number from 1 to 100"

I wonder how many of that will not be 42 :D

I chose an approximation of pi and later e. But I was very close to just typing 42 :)

Heh, I chose an approximation of τ and then 99.999999. I'm not as original as I thought!

I tried typing pi in first, and then it said it had to be a number. Then I found I could do a decimal, so I went with the golden ratio.

I bet 37 is pretty popular.

How come?

It's always the number everyone thinks no one else will choose.

son of a bitch. I swear I thought I was being genuinely random.

56 and 77 - no reason.. they were just random thoughts.

I also chose 37, but with the expectation that it would be a common response.

Hypothesis:

People think even numbers aren't as "random" and odd numbers are more "random". That leaves us with 1,3,5,7,9. 1 and 5 both divide 10 and don't seem so "random" to us, I guess. That leaves us with 3, 7, and 9. 33, 77, 99, i.e. numbers with repeated digits don't seem so "random". That leaves us with 37, 39, 79. And 9 maybe (not sure if all people subconsciously think this way) isn't that "random" because it's one less than 10 and divisible by 3.

Infact, the jargon file says that 37 is the most common random number people will choose[0].

[0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/R/random-numbers.html

I chose 37 purely because it was the first number that came to mind, but then I have also knew that jargon file entry...

Second was 51. Clearly the primest looking of the non-primes under 100?

I absolutely agree with your reasoning, but personally I chose even numbers both times ;-) They "feel nicer".

These are the prime numbers between 20 and 100:

23,29,31,37,41,43,47,53,59,61,67,71 73,79,83,89,97

Evens are out; so are small multiples. A multiple of three might end in 3, 9 or 7. A multiple of 7 may end in 1. So a "conservative mental arithmetic sieve" that wants to make sure one's picking a prime number will coalesce around 29 or 37.

Myself, I picked 11 and 17.

Interesting, although this raises the question of why someone would prefer to choose a prime number over composite ones.

Isn't 37 the most random number?

I saw a list once of what makes each number from 1 to 100 special. One of them was the most random number (I think 37). Another one was the least special (63 perhaps?).

In a row?

For me it's always like, 32.

Plenty of 69s as well. Many of us are still 12 year olds at heart.

One of mine was 69 -- genuinely at random. (Well, semi-genuinely. I picked a randomish number, counted that many places through pi, and took two digits. I wasted some time memorizing lots of digits of pi when I was in high school; it would be a shame not to put that to some use.)

I started with 14 (my wife's birthday/favorite number) but when it asked to pick another number I broke down and typed 42. I just couldn't help it!

I picked 72 for the first one and 18 for the second one. That's what came to mind. lol

66 and 33

Mine was 3.14 =)

Relevant: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/psychic.png

I almost typed 42, but instead I typed 12.<a long herd of digits>

! just pressed up on the keyboard for a few sec on both.

As we had to pick /two/ numbers, and eventually the set will be released, I don't want to get too close to identifying my self based on these numbers.

I chose two numbers that had some (basic) meaning to me and quickly came to mind. They were not related in any way to the month or day in month of any birthdays.

I tried to use 0.999..., but the form wouldn't accept it.

I am incredibly excited by this survey specifically because of the question regarding sandwiches.

I finally will have some meaningful data for my extensive definition of sandwiches as a structural form!

Woody Allen's essay on the Earl of Sandwich https://youtu.be/bwJkTuer5Zk?t=37m

And all those sandwich discussions in grad school lounges/kitchens/deli ;)

Relevant blog post about using the definition of 'sandwich' to teach the Platonic Dialogues: https://medium.com/@kmikeym/is-this-a-sandwich-50b1317eb3f5

I actually would like to comment here.

My personal definition for (an unqualified) sandwich is that there must be two /isolated/ 'bread' sides surrounding a payload (the 'meat' of the sandwich).

As a quesadilla is often made folded I at first disqualified it; however not /all/ quesadillas are folded. Some are actually made with two individual tortillas. Thus it is close enough to a sandwich to be expressible as a member of that class, while the others that are similarly close are always made with single pieces of bread (cut in the middle) and thus, they are not in fact sandwiches as it is not optional to select different types of bread for the two sides (even though I've /never/ seen anyone do this; it's still /possible/).

Is the submit not supposed to work on iOS? Kind of a let down to spend 10 minutes filling it out, then the submit button doesn't do anything.

I'm using Firefox on Windows and it doesn't seem to do anything either.

Try again? I had to try twice - google forms seems to be a bit overloaded.

Yeah I got asked to resubmit, then redirected to a blank survey after the third time. Wonder if that means it was submitted, oh well...

It worked for me.

I've never had so much fun taking a survey.

I wonder how much the dynamic URLs to the forms are playing a part in this. Each refresh of the comic [1] and homepage [2] gets a different form URL. Are these being associated with other data from the xkcd.com domain..? And how much has it messed up Randall to have such shenanigans defeated by a direct form URL being submitted to Hacker News.

In fact, how do we know that the form URL submitted to Hacker News is one of Randalls?

Dang should probably change the URL to the comic permalink: [1]

Though I am late to the party and this might not get noticed.

[1] http://xkcd.com/1572/

[2] http://xkcd.com/

Edit: Actually refreshing the comic URL [1] is getting only a range of URLs to forms. More often than not the forms answers are in a different order, I suppose to either prevent bias, or encourage it and monitor it.

Google forms has an option to randomize the order of the answers and the questions.

I spent 15 minutes filling it out only for Google to tell me "Wow, this file is really popular! It might be unavailable until the crowd clears."

I just hit the back button and resubmitted and it took it. YMMV.

My answer to 'Write any 5 random words' :

    'Moon landing was a hoax'

I wonder how many entered 'any 5 random words'

Close. "Here are five random words".

I'm not clever.

"one two three four five"

yes, I am that lazy

you're not alone

I followed the instructions exactly, and typed "five random words"

I went for "arbitrary, stochastic, erratic, haphazard, aleatory".

I went for the first 5 words that came to mind, which randomly happened to all be drinks from the previous question.

Mine was 'correct horse battery stapler comic'

I wonder how many variations on this he'll get. Mine was 'correct horse batter staple password'

I wanted to answer something in this class...

Except that's no longer random.

'Gazebo, ointment, harpsichord, bungalow, credenza'

I already had a wordlist on my computer, ‘enable1.txt’. I fired up IRB (Ruby) in the console and ran

    words = File.read('enable1.txt').split
    words.sample(5)

This gives a list like ["whit", "unrepair", "suavity", "roentgens", "tophs"].

Spoilers!

I like that it was allowed to put negative numbers of siblings/twins .. which I did :)

"There was an error submitting your form response. Please wait a bit and try again."

sigh

Took me a few attempts. You will know when your success was accepted because you'll see a message stating so.

I've been waiting almost sixty years, have yet to see that message. Still trying.

3dark5me.

We must imagine Sisyphus happy?

Is there any reason the results or at least the summary page are not already visible?

I imagine it's so they doesn't impact future entries.

I have a google form like this for Couchsurfers who wish to stay a few nights in my apartment. I believe my questions might be little bit more on the insane side though.

This I would like to see, for the laughs.

I am tempted to go public with the form but right now, I enjoy the novelty. I also barely have the time to keep up with the requests.

Sample portion:

  MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS

  In life, there are no right answers. But this is a test so you better choose wisely.

  Question 1. Right now, do you want to ask the apartment tenant something along the lines of: “Are you serious?" ?

  A. Yes.

  B. Are you serious?

75% of applicants choose B. And it all goes downhill from there.

Was it proper thing to stop myself from writing "five random words are here" as a response to "Write five random words"?

Fun anecdote. I took a cryptography exam, where the question was "Progress as far as possible towards decrypting or decoding the following message:", followed by a sequence of letters in alphabetical order- several As, a different number of Bs, and so on. It seemed obvious to me that a message that has been sorted into alphabetical order cannot be reversed without luck and a computer, so I assumed the unencoded version was something we could guess. On a hunch, I checked the question itself, and sure enough, the answer was "Progress as far as possible towards decrypting or decoding the following message". Apparently I was the only one to figure it out.

For anyone curious, it looks like this would be what he was shown, assuming spaces omitted and all lower case: "aaaaabccddddeeeeeeeffggggghiiiilllmnnnoooooooppprrrrrrssssssssstttwwy"

After wasting time on this i get "Wow, this file is really popular! It might be unavailable until the crowd clears. Try again."

That was a fun survey... would be great to see the visualizations that come out of this data set

Who else?

> Type five random words

five random words

I would never, without quotes! (ie: Type "five random words")

Exactly. I know Randall definitely wouldn’t accept “five random words” because of this comic: https://xkcd.com/169/.

Yeah but the onus of proper communication in this case is on Randall so he'd be the one with his arm off.

Not quite, but close http://i.imgur.com/dt3hEYc.png

You missed the colon

I wrote "Felis catus"

Me too, but then the form wouldn't submit until I added a few more.

But there wasn't a quotation mark. I considered starting with the words "type", "five", "random", and "words" - but I realized that that wasn't very random at all (very very low entropy.) So I truly came up with extremely random words.

can it really be considered random if you discarded all of the first words you thought of?

well technically I should have used a random process that had an equal chance of selecting those words as well. But since humans are so bad at coming up with random things, I started with gibberish sounds and then found unusual words to match them.

"type five random words here"

I considered typing that, but went with "five totally random words phoropter".

"Which of these can you do reasonably well?"

Should really have a "none" option.

That would be equivalent to not ticking any of the boxes.

It didn't let me submit without checking one.

"five random words"

Was strangely fun answering these. Can't wait to chart some of this data on http://chartblocks.com

Yeah I was starting to design some visualization for it in my head!

I laughed at the last one I've done that and I certainly say go for it, there's nothing like uniformity in regards to underdress!

discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158352

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10158498

Interesting, the dupe detector allows both https and http versions of a site.

no idea why i just took that

The link here is different than the link from the comic, is this OK?

Well, it's totally random alright.

Anything for xkcd.

Much respect. salute! o7

Kinda pointless, the whole thing - though I bet some statistician is going to publish some deep-insight paper from this data :D

http://xkcd.com/1572/

Kind of like xkcd - pointless.

right - thanks for the link, I haven't been on the xkcd site in a while (really need to catch up ;-) )

I do think the downvoting is uncalled for though, after all, it's not like the questions weren't pointless, and you could reasonably call Randall Munroe a statistician of sorts..

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