I am technologically useful!

No, really, I am! I took the quiz to prove it! The Universe As features this online quiz of ten questions: if you time-traveled back two thousand years, how far could you jump-start civilization? I got eight out of ten right, and therefore could advance civilization from "year 0" (I presume the author means Year One) to the Seventeenth or maybe even the Nineteenth Centuries. (Nothing much of technological import having happened, of course, during the 1700s, as everybody knows.)

But the way I see it, that's good enough. I mean, I figure when I show up in Rome at the head of a conquering legion of steam-powered tanks, the last thing Augustus Caesar is going to say is, "Yeah, well you obviously don't know how to build a diesel engine, so, like, you suck and stuff!" No, he will be too busy pissing his tunic when I come to bury him, not to praise him. Unless "Suck it, Augustus, your month doesn't even have any holidays!" is some kind of weird praise in Latin. I don't think it is. I may have to ask my friend who's pretty fluent in it.

Anyway, if you see some kind of temporal vortex or wormhole, let me know. If I'm as big a badass as the internet just said I am, I am totally selling out to the Han or somebody cooler than the fucking Romans. Fuck them. Nothing personal, Western Civilization could just use a kick in the ass or something.

(H/T to Kottke.org!)