The Purity Test

During an internship I received a forward that included a short .exe file that asked questions about your life and experiences with dating, drugs, etc. I took it and scored a 29. A similar or identical test had made the email rounds during my freshman year at Purdue, and at that time I scored a 9. When I learned that a coworker of mine scored a big fat 144 on the test, I immediately set to work figuring out when I would reach that score if I continued at my current rate of corruption. It was somewhere around the year 2016. As I considered this, though, I decided that corruption probably wasn't linear- after all, we've all heard about 'gateway drugs' and things like that. If, for example, I started taking drugs, I'd be more likely to start dealing drugs, and if I started dealing drugs, I'd be more likely to get arrested, thus upping my score. Maybe the more points I scored, the more likely I'd be to score even more... and so I began my quest to find the exponential growth and decay equation online. Eventually I resorted to pulling out my environmental engineering class notes where I found the desired information in a matter of seconds. This is the content of the email in which I reported my findings to the concerned masses:

N = Noert
where N = end level of corruption
No = original level of corruption
r = rate of corruption in units of test points per day
t = time period, in days



Lack of exact information dictated that I assume 
exactly three years between my first two tests, so

29 = 9 e (r*(3*365))


Some algebraic manipulation yields

ln(29/9)
--------  =  r = 0.001068558...
  1095


THEREFORE:

ln(144/29)
----------  =  t  = 1499.7 days 
0.001068558

According to the math, I will reach that level of corruption 
4 years, 40 days from the date of the test, June 11, 1999.

In summary: I have not been living life to the max. I am on a collision course with absolutely nothing. I am puttering down a long, dusty deserted road with the intermittent tumbleweed and disintegrating Burma Shave road signs rather than racing recklessly through the New York City of life in the backseat of an overpriced taxi. But wait... what is that, rising out of the horizon like Gamera out of a murky swamp on Mystery Science Theatre 3000? No, not a man in a turtle suit crudely fashioned from egg cartons, green felt and pipe cleaners: it's experience! Liberation! Visceral knowledge!!
Estimated Time of Arrival: July 21, 2003

**Update! It is now nearing the end of 2003, and I do not feel nearly corrupt enough to score a 144 on that test. Unfortunately, while purity tests galore are available on the internet, I have not yet found the original test. And obviously taking a different test would skew my numbers.(This is all very scientific, you know.) Looking back on the past four years, though, I'd estimate my corruption did increase at or near a linear rate. Who would've guessed??