Sunday, November 6, 2011

Setting professor fashion straight

How good are you at distinguishing professors from the homeless? Test your prof/hobo classifier here. I only did slightly better than chance -- 6/10. (Though obviously it doesn't sample uniformly over all professors.)

HT: Jerry Coyne

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, wow, I got 6/10, too! Hmm, we should do this same test with engineers. Wonder how that would turn out.

Pete said...

This was pretty easy. I got 9/10. But I also didn't play by the rules. I focused on their faces rather than clothing.
Messed up on the last one.

Pete said...

Wait, nevermind about the "didn't play by the rules" part. The actual quiz said nothing about judging by fashion. I just said that due to this post's title.

Anonymous said...

I got a 10/10 and the answers are as follows:
hobo
Bill Unruh
hobo
David Hansen
Professor (unnamed)
hobo
hobo
Kim Sterelny
Professor (unnamed)
hobo

I hardly looked at the people themselves, because I automatically assumed that they would all look like hobos. What I looked at instead was the background. The only one that I had a little trouble with was the young guy in the woods. This was easily solved when I remembered that hobos need to beg for change, and money doesn't grow on trees.