I read cnn.com because sometimes I want my brain to rot out for the fake news and cutesy headlines, yet have no idea at all what is happening in the world.

Today CNN wants to know how racist we are. Well? Paula Zahn wants to know. We must oblige her.

Insuperable technical difficulties, or to be more precise, the way I kept hitting the wrong key, resulted in a response of “Too may errors to score.”

I don’t understand what these people are trying to measure or how this test works: they say that they are trying to measure cultural associations, yet each question has only one right answer- you can’t proceed unless you choose the ‘correct’ association whether or not you agree with that association. The test really seems to be measuring how quickly you learn to recognize patterns and select the ‘correct’ answer.

My guess is that this is either A. a badly designed study that is effectively measuring nothing but is quite revealing about the prejudices of its designers B. a study designed to shock people by giving a predetermined result or C. a study that was fine under controlled conditions but has been implemented on the internet in such a way as to return useless results.

It is a shame because it would be nice to be able to gauge people’s actual degree of comfort with people of various races, backgrounds, sexual orientations, etc. But this study doesn’t seem to be doing that.