Hindu God Meme

Hanuman You scored 76% intelligence, 19% strength, and 42% goodness!

Hanuman is the monkey god. He is fiercely intelligent, and a helper to the divine couple Rama and Sita (when Sita, an incarnation of Lakshmi, was kidnapped by a demon and had to be rescued by Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu). He found Sita on Lanka (on the island of Sri Lanka) and alerted Rama to her whereabouts. He once, when someone was in need of medicine, brought an entire mountain where the necessary medicinal herb grew to that person. Oh, and he can fly. And he has a kickass army of warrior monkeys. Damn.

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 71% on intelligence You scored higher than 7% on strength You scored higher than 10% on goodness

Link: The Which Hindu God Are You? Test written by mirchini on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

I have some vague knowledge of the Hindu pantheon but had never heard of this one. I'd like to learn more, not just Hindu mythology but about India in general. Anybody know a book that would make a good "Dummies' Guide to India"?

Still a Few Bugs in the System

My county had some brand new software for running this election. And like any new software, it had bugs. Noticably one really big bug. Causing it to report three times as many votes as were actually cast. It looks like it's probably just a one line fix, though.

The problem was that the officials would run a "current total" of votes to see where the candidates stood in the votes that had been counted so far. They did this every hour or so to monitor the results. And the totals kept getting bigger and bigger. Turned out the software was supposed to report:

currentTotal = sum( precinctVotes )

but instead reported:

currentTotal = sum( precinctVotes ) + currentTotal

Count the same votes over and over and the totals just mount up. No real damage was done, since they had the real precinct results to go to. Presumably a coder at Hart InterCivic has already changed that routine to reinitialize variables as needed.

What bothers me about this is that it's such a blatant bug that any real full up test--such as a dress rehearsal of an election--should've caught it. So the county is just accepting delivery and using the stuff in blind faith. Meanwhile the vendor has demonstrated that they don't deserve any trust if they're letting stuff like that through.

Can I have a paper ballot next time?