I guess it's early in the poll, but I'm surprised at the answers for this question:

"Ignoring practicalities and existing partnerships, in a series of unrelated one-shot thought experiments, would you like to try to form a romantic relationship with more than 10% of your Friends?"

Currently it stands at 4 and 4.

I was a bit confused by this question:

"Do you consider at least 5% of your Friends to be the people you would like to be yourself?"

What does "people you would like to be yourself" mean? Have qualities that you yourself would like to have? How many qualities? I would say that there is no one I know that I would like be, but there are *certainly* qualities that I admire in others that I would like to have.

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I'm interested that you're surprised! Without prejudicing what your vote might be or have been, what would you have expected the outcome to be? I also note that if the vote does end up at close to 50-50, then I have a reasonably good estimate as to what the median proportion is. Of course there will be a great deal of variance (not so much arithmetically as geometrically - I expect many people to be factors of 3 or 5 or 9+ away from the 10% in either direction) but having any sort of median at all may be of some use.

Other question: it's an "on balance" issue, based upon what you know about them, how they have presented themselves and so forth. If you like, this could be reasonably reinterpreted as "if it were possible, would you swap?". However, your last sentence up to the comma looks like a reasonably clear "no" to me.

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I would have thought it would be a lot lower.

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It's now about 2:1 in favour of No, so we can be confident that the median is likely to be lower than 10%. I wonder if it's about 5%.

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I don't think I understand the questions in this poll.

Do you consider yourself to have many Friends?

Well, anybody who wants to know how many LJ-Friends I have can go count 'em. I consider myself to have however many of them I have, I haven't counted lately.

I have really problematic semantic overlap between "Friends" and "friends". I can't answer the question about LJ-friends without feeling like I'm also, somehow, half-answering a question about friends (in the non-LJ or not-only-LJ context).

Do you regard yourself as generally open about the identity of your worst fear?

I honestly don't think "Yes" or "No" would answer this in a way that was true (or at least not untrue). I don't know what my "worst fear" is, so I don't see how I can be open about it. On the other hand, I'm open about my fears in so far as I can actually verbalise them (and often, too, when I can't verbalise them -- which results in much handwaving and "You know, wassname, thingy, badgers"-ing) so I guess if I had a single "worst fear" and/or knew what it was I'd be open about it.

Do you consider at least 5% of your Friends to be the people you would like to be yourself?

Either I can't parse this, or I just don't understand it. I don't want to be anybody else. I want to be me to the best of my potential and abilities. I'm a long way from getting there yet -- well, I don't think I'll ever get there; I think it's the travelling that counts, not the destination. On the other hand, a lot of my LJ-Friends have qualities that I admire; I can learn from them without wanting to be them.

Ignoring practicalities and existing partnerships, in a series of unrelated one-shot thought experiments, would you like to try to form a romantic relationship with more than 10% of your Friends?

I have absolutely no idea. I don't often try to form romantic relationships; they grow out of friendships. There are people on my Friends list with whom I'd like to spend more time; maybe if I did then I'd become romantically involved with (some of) them. I don't know.

Have you ever had a mental image of a Friend and not been able to immediately recall their username, on more than two occasions?

I often have mental images of people I know (on usenet, on LJ, in real life) and can't dredge their name out of my mind, but it's nothing personal; I frequently forget the words for simple things like "tree" and "house" and "coat", and, you know, thingy. I know what the thing is, I even know what the word is, but it's stuck somewhere in the brain and doesn't want to come out, and I just end up waving my hands and saying "wassname". I need flash-cards just to get through a sentence, these days.

Summary: Does not play well with Yes/No questions. :-} Sorry!

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These are at least as good answers as "Yes" or "No" in each case. :-)

Question 1 is about your definition of "many". Obviously "many" depends on what it is being counted; three Shredded Wheat are many, about three hundred Hundreds and Thousands are many. LiveJournal Friends are probably somewhere in between. In both cases, it's probably relative to what you've seen other people have, for most people. Doing some work with averages means that I'll be able to come up with a figure for "many" which at least has the benefit of some data behind it.

I don't know what my "worst fear" is, so I don't see how I can be open about it.

That's probably a "no" in that case. I was thinking of putting a "regardless of the intensity of that fear" in there, but most of the other questions also have a "regardless of" and so that's why I put the other "regardless of..." more general disclaimer in the overall text.

Question three: I would interpret what you're saying as a "no". It would probably have been clearer without the word "the" in there, because there are people I would like to be who aren't on my Friends list.

Question four: again, because of your second sentence, I think this is to be interpreted as a fairly clear "no". Of course, if you would like (in the thought-experiment way as specified) to deliberately try to form a romantic relationship rather than having one grow out of a Friendship, then this is a "yes", but from what you're saying, this seems unlikely.

Question five: this one sounds like it's likely to be a "yes", but only you will know for sure. :-) This question is only asking whether this general process has applied to Friends' usernames in much the same way as you say it happens to you for other nouns. Personally, this happens to me most frequently with adjectives; I can think of an emotion, know there's a really appropriate adjective to convey it and can't remember what that adjective is - which is different to having an emotion and not knowing what adjective might convey it.

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I strolled up to Euston this lunchtime and found only disappointment. Windy the Snowman was there, or possibly his younger brother, who was closer to two metres in height than six. But there is no wind machine, merely a ten-to-fifteen-second lucky dip to rummage in one of Santa's bulging sacks for furry bugs (you know, the sort people attach to monitors). What do bugs mean? Prizes! But not for me.

Still, thanks for the tip! All we need is an indoor fan and a shed and we can do it ourselves.

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Excellent effort and I'm sorry that my promising-sounding tip came to nothing. I am looking for Ryanair to release a PR saying It's Another Easyjet Cancellation! but it hasn't happened yet. There's the scope for some The Crystal Maze fanfic where the computer from the Future Zone goes on strike and refuses to let the four winds blow.

Will you start the fans, please?
No! What do we want? Crystals! When do we want them? Within two and a half minutes without touching the floor three times!

Ahem.

I joked that I wanted to hold the Nimbus - 2003 Quidditch matches at Flyaway Indoor Skydiving, but it strikes me that there's the principle there at least for an insanely cool Crystal Dome-style game.

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