Tuesday, March 9, 2010

A portrait of the blogger as a young man

The most recent poll, "Am I old?", is finished.  41% of you said "yes" and 58% of you said "no", leaving exactly 1% of you who seem to have been destroyed by the rounding error of Blogger's poll gadget.  Since only 17 people actually answered the poll, each person thus contributing 5.88% of the total vote, this means that one of you has lost almost a fifth of your body mass.  This would be roughly equivalent to both arms.  Perhaps Ernest Hemingway voted!  That would be exciting.

Anyway, 41% of you thought I was old.  In a pseudo-scientific attempt to find out what this means, I first took the life expectancy of an Australian male: 78.7 years.  I then used the magic of arithmetic to find 41% of 78.7, which is just over 32 years.  This is actually reasonably close to my age and is, I think, either an odd coincidence or a nice example of the Delphi method.

Finally, if I was female, as many of you seem to think, the adjusted age estimate would be 34.2 years - even closer to my real age.  Egad!

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