It is my vague, backed up by snippets of ‘fact’ from ill-remembered sources, suspicion that there is something about being Left-Handed that makes a person more technically minded, and that there is an unusually high percentage of Lefties with technical/engineering type jobs/careers/interests.
Now I know it is virtually impossible to figure out the ratio of leftie-techies to non-leftie-techies on the boards. So that’s not what I am doing. I am just interested in whether there are a lot.
hijack this thread with anything vaguely left-handedness related if you like.
I hate lefties… you guys talk about being leftie like you are in some sort of special cult…
I swear to god…
Everytime I go out to eat with my SO’s extended family…
Her cousin ALWAYS yells out… “So who hear is a leftie??”
“We have to adjust the seats for the lefties”
No you don’t have to adjust the seats for the lefties… You just want to sit on the corner of the table because you are fat!!!
We go out with like 10 people… and 6 of them are lefties!!!
Do right handed people get a say?? NOOO…
oh… wow… I am sorry…
so to the OP… well i am a tech… but righty…
My sister works for VT SRS. In her office, there is only one male, and he is a lawyer. All the rest of the employees are female. and 80% of them are left handed.
Another probably wrong bit of ‘fact’ in my brain is that because women’s minds are more evenly balanced (i.e. there is less of dominance on the left or right) there are likely to be more left-handed women, and that (please don’t take this the wrong way anyone) left-handedness in women is less significant, as it doesn’t mean a switch in brain-hemisphere-dominance as it might in males.
I dunno about techies being more likely to be left-handed, but I do think it runs in families.
I’m left-handed. My mom is left-handed.
At the last place I worked I was a graphic artist. Out of the other 4 artists I worked with during that time, only one was right-handed. She was female, as am I. The other three left-handers consisted of 2 males and another female.
Mr. Butrscotch is a technie from way back when (started in IBM programming school in 1967), and he’s about as strong a leftie as I’ve run into. I’m a leftie, too, but no one would be so foolish as to describe me as a techie, although I’m less ignorant than many non-techie folks I know.
He works at a data center with dozens of technies. I’ll ask him for an unofficial survey. Hmm.
We lefties are indeed superior to our right-handed brethren, but the percentage of lefties in technical fields is no greater than that in the general population.
But that’s because we planned it that way.
Fun fact: Bill Clinton, Bush the Elder, and Ross Perot are all left-handed.
Actually, there is some merit to your observation.
Women tend to be less ‘lateralized’ than men, with more of their brain activity distributed evenly between their lobes. This is why women are less likely to lose their speech function after a temporal lobe injury. Men are far more likely to do so as their speech center is nearly always located near in the same region.
Don’t know the stats on left handed women versus left handed males, but I’d like to see them.
Besides, us left handers are the only ones in our right minds!
My right-handed colleague likes to have her mouse on the left, with the buttons configured to suit. I am left-handed and whenever I have to use her computer it drives me nuts. I learned to use a computer with a right-handed mouse and it never even occurred to me to change it. So I guess I am somewhat situationally left-handed.
ex-wife and I are both lefties. All three kids are righties. I’m sad for them because I’ve always had the notion (probably instilled by my worried mom) that being a lefty is somewhat special.
I’ve never heard of having any particular advantage technically because of being left-handed, but I applaud the theory, since most aspects of society are constructed to be for righties.
We’re the last un-organized minority.
I have heard that lefties are disproportionately represented in every extreme/fringe/special interest group: artists, criminals, insane, presidents, geniuses, idiots, schizophrenics, etc. So you’ll find more lefties than average at either end of any bell curve you construct, but fewer than you expect in the middle.
Merge, the reason to adjust seating for left/right handedness is to avoid having people bump arms when they’re eating if a right hander is to the left of a lefty. Some people make a huge point of it, others don’t. Your SO’s family apparently does.