Sally-Anne Perks/Narcissa Malfoy? Maybe It’s Out There Somewhere, But It Seems Relatively Unlikely.

“We invite [name redacted] to one party...”

Reblog with an inside joke you have with your friends.

“Yes, Captain America has LEGS!”

This is a remarkably effective tactic for gaining access to someone’s account for any website that uses security questions, to the point that actual hackers will use guessing them as a tactic for gaining access to people’s accounts.

(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/03/this-is-how-easy-it-is-to-hack-someones-icloud-with-their-security-questions/)

funny story

when I was little, I would go on Nickelodeon.com all the time and they had this game similar to club penguin except it was called Nicktropolis. and if you forgot your password, a security question you could choose was “what is your eye color?” and if you got it right it’d tell you your password. so I would go to popular locations in Nicktropolis and write down random usernames who were also in those areas, and then i would log out and type in the username as if it were my own and see which of these usernames had a security question set to “what is your eye color?” (which was most of them, since it was easy and we were all kids). i would then try either brown, blue, or green, and always get in, then I would go to their house and send all of their furniture and decorations to my own account’s. and if it I didn’t want it, i could sell it for money

What were your poems about? You’ve gotten me curious.

My English teacher apologetically told me my poems were to controversial to tell in class (we’re in the poetry unit right now) and I can’t tell if I should be proud, concerned, or miffed.

No one knew who the tabby belonged to, though they presumed Mrs Figg as the cat had been seen to enter her house. However, it also seemed rather fond of number four’s back garden and the green eyed boy with whom it played most Sunday afternoons when the Dursleys went out. Of course McGonagall would never admit she had a fondness for playing with Harry when she was supposed to be keeping an eye on him.

Need a cheat sheet for wizard finance? We got you

Based on the calculations of an inspired fan, we put together a list of how many galleons you can expect to shell out to peep the next Chudley Cannons game.

SEE MORE ITEMS

Only if you ignore (not a comprehensive list):

- The five genders in Sulawesi culture

-Hijras, in India, who have been recognized for thousands of years

-Two-spirit people in Native American culture

-Some (though not all) of the people who identify as warias

-Hawaiian mahus

Non-binary genders: not actually a new concept.

That’s not quite how averages work.

There are three main types of averages: arithmetic mean (what people usually mean if they don’t specify a type), median, and mode.

The arithmetic mean is calculated by adding up all the values, and dividing by the total number of individuals measured. For instance, if ten people can speak 700 million words (this is a lot of words, way more than in any language on Earth) apiece of an alien language and no one else can speak any, this power would allow you to speak one word.

The median is calculated by ordering the values from least to greatest, then choosing the one in the middle of the list (if there are two, you take the mean of those two). If 3.5 billion people know 700 million words of the alien language, 3.5 billion people know one word, and one person knows fifteen, the median speaker knows fifteen words. This doesn’t change if the 3.5 billion people who know no words all learn fourteen words, because the speaker whose word knowledge is in the middle still knows fifteen.

The mode is the most commonly occurring value. If 2 billion people know 75,000 words, 2 billion people know 3,000 words, and 3 billion people know no words, the modal speaker knows no words. 

tl;dr: Being average will not give you superhuman abilities. If your power makes you human average, the absolute best case scenario has you as good as the best human, and that is very unlikely.

Your super power is that you are average, at everything you do.

@johnhocksbur

This isn’t how statistical methodology works.

If you want to be able to generalize the results of your survey to the general population, you have to use some form of random sampling*, you can’t just ask random people on the internet. Twitter polls (etc.) have two main flaws:

1. Response is voluntary, which means that people who don’t care are less likely to answer, and (on questions where this is applicable) people with more middle-of-the-road or less-shocking answers are less likely to answer. 

2. They operate using “convenience sampling,” which is basically what it sounds like and tends to bias the results in favor of whatever opinion is held by the people in the group likely to notice the survey. A political survey on the Fox News website will tend to have more conservative responses than the general population; a sports survey on the Boston Globe website will tend to have more pro-Red Sox responses than the general population; a survey on a Twitter page will tend to have more whatever-the-twitter-users-followers think responses than the general population.

(I did a brief Google search to see if this has been surveyed reliably and didn’t find anything, although possibly I could find something in an academic database. If anyone can find a reliable survey, I would be interested in seeing what the results.)

*This is somewhat complicated by the fact that it is nearly impossible to do a perfectly random sample. Phone surveys in which callers are randomly chosen and the response rate is high are generally close enough in surveys of Americans, although they aren’t perfect.

This is so interesting to me. 65% of people would rather experience rape than be falsely accused of rape.

jk rowling: okay so these guys have an eagle mascot...i'll call them 'ravenclaw'? sure that's not going to be confusing.

jk rowling: snake house...gotta be 'slytherin'. cos it's like slither in, and that's a thing snakes do. haha, i am a genius

jk rowling: lion house? i can't really do anything with lions...what about 'griffindor'? griffins are cool. doors are cool.

jk rowling: THE BADGER HOUSE IS GONNA BE 'HUFFLEPUFF' IDC WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU DO WITH A BADGER