gosh, that’s blue

{25 May 2010}

I’m in tech, and thus unable to produce original content OR finish unpacking the new blog. This seems to be a chronic condition, lately. In the mean time, an excerpt from the results of a survey of color names that the author of XKCD did last month.

So I was feeling pretty good about equality. Then I decided to calculate the ‘most masculine’ and ‘most feminine’ colors. I was looking for the color names most disproportionately popular among each group; that is, the names that the most women came up with compared to the fewest men (or vice versa).

Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among women:

1. Dusty Teal
2. Blush Pink
3. Dusty Lavender
4. Butter Yellow
5. Dusky Rose

Okay, pretty flowery, certainly. Kind of an incense-bomb-set-off-in-a-Bed-Bath-&-Beyond vibe. Well, let’s take a look at the other list.

Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among men:

1. Penis
2. Gay
3. WTF
4. Dunno
5. Baige

I … that’s not my typo in #5—the only actual color in the list really is a misspelling of “beige”. And keep in mind, this is based on the number of unique people who answered the color, not the number of times they typed it. This isn’t just the effect of a couple spammers. In fact, this is after the spamfilter.
I weep for my gender.

home sweet wordpress

{14 May 2010}

okay. slithy-tove has signed a lease and moved to wordpress, but none of the furniture is here yet. we’re surrounded by towers of unpacked boxes, sleeping on the metaphorical air mattress and eating cold pizza on the floor (the pizza part isn’t really so much a metaphor).