5 o’clock in the night and I am still here wasting my time on my computer.
While looking for a linux PDA I encountered a link to an IQ test and did it. I don’t think the numerical results are important, they are usually pushed over the threshold of 100 in order to make people buy the test. It was for me a delusion but I can bring to my defense the late hour and the speed at which I took the test and the fact that I don’t have good linguistical skills in the English language.
But, as I already said it’s not that important. The fact that touched me and exorted me to post this first blog was the interpretation: I am a professional mathematician without quite any philosophical skill, but the resulting profile was the following.
Citation from the results of an IQ test on www.tickle.com:
During the test, you answered four different types of questions–mathematical, visual-spatial, linguistic and logical. We analyzed how you did on each of those questions which reveals how your brain uniquely works.
We also compared your answers with others who have taken the test. According to the sorts of questions you got correct, we can tell your Intellectual Type is a Visionary Philosopher.
This means you are highly intelligent and have a powerful mix of skills and insight that can be applied in a variety of different ways. Like Plato, your exceptional math and verbal skills make you very adept at explaining things to others–and at anticipating and predicting patterns. And that’s just some of what we know about you from your IQ results.
I am working on both Wikipedia and PGDP, which takes me quite a bit of my free time. Recently I decided to talk with my collaborators in a inexpensive and rapid way.
Well, I had many surprises. The first was Jabber: I contributed to the development of clients for other IM, mainly Yahoo!, to be able to use the Voice Chat that is very important for my life, since I move often and I had to talk to my buddies with intercontinental calls. After I discovered Jabber, I found out that all my work was a waste of time. Actually the proprietary IM change very often nowadays, change they proprietary protocols in order to prevent third part clients to connect to their networks. They release clients only for Windows and if they provide a Unix version, this one really suck. But Jabber is different: it’s free, the protocol it’s an Internet Draft, the servers are Open Source and it can connect to every possible proprietary network with its transports. I stopped interesting me in any other IM and changed all my Yahoo! projects mailing lists with the Jabber equivalents.
I had another surprise when looking at the IRC channels of Wikipedia (Yes, I managed to pass through my firewall). I never noticed before that the development of the English Wikipedia is so fast, with an edit every second. I evaluated in about 40000 articles the critical mass that prevents a Wikipedia from dying: The Italian Wikipedia is struggling to arrive to 10000 articles and it’s not powerful enough to catch real users and not only contributors. Hope it will be better. Maybe it could be slashdotted 
