For that matter, can you do the Spockian single eyebrow raise? Right brow only? Left brow only? Inner corner? Outer corner?
When I was in grade school I wasn’t able to do it. I would sit through a whole hour of classes with my hand pointed down and fingers pressed against the desk to force my hand into the Vulcan salute. After a while of doing this I was finally able to say “Live Long and Prosper” with the correct hand gesture. My brother, on the other hand, was able to do it easily and constantly taunted me, hence my efforts at school.
I can wink with my left eye (lower the left eyelid while the right eyelid stays up) but I am unable to wink with my right eye.
See my old thread on this subject.
Not only can I do all of the above AND the Vulcan salute with either hand AND the single-eyebrow raise with either eyebrow…
… I can almost do the Vulcan salute with my toes. Yes, really! I still need to refine the gesture a bit, but I knew I was making progress when my husband caught me doing it and said “You FREAK! I’m supposed to be the biggest Star Trek nerd in the family!”
Feh. The Spock hand is easy. I can touch the back of my left hand with the middle finger of the same hand.
On an important issue like this, I’m ready with a cite.
Okay. But reading subsequent posts, I’m betting there’s a deeper strategy out there. You just need to analyze the physical difficulty of performing the various gestures and then map out the relative probabilities of each ones being used. With these probabilities you can then determine which gestures have a weighted advantage against the “easy” gestures that are more likely to be used.
Sheldon, of course, has already done this.
As a child, I was not spock-abled. However, after years of knuckle cracking and practicing, I’ve now forced my fingers in to submission and can do it at the blink of an eye.
I can do the Spock salute with both hands simultaneously whilst touching my nose with my tongue … and playing blindfold chess too!
How do you move the pieces while keeping both hands Spocked?
I would venture to guess that it makes the results more random. Myself and the president of the last company I worked for would both consistently come out as the winners in regular paper-rock-scissors against a crowd of ten others (we had a contest one day, going about ten rounds.)
I’m still not sure where the two additional gestures came from.
Interesting thread though.
Playing blindfold, you just call out the moves: “Pawn to King 4” or “e2 to e4” - someone else has a board to make the actual moves on. (Of course, two strong blindfold players don’t need a board at all.)
Slightly harder than the Spock salute, in my opinion anyway, is the “reverse Spock.”
Hold your hand up. Now, keep your middle fingers (long and ring) together, and move the outer fingers (index and little) away from them. Should look like “\ || /”. The faster you can do the move, the better.
Took me a few minutes practice to get it the first time, but now I can do it without thinking.
I’ve always been able to do the Spock salute with no trouble, and I did the reverse Spock for the first time today with no trouble.
Maybe I’m part Vulcan
I think you’re Vulcan crazy.
I considered that, but then the difficulty is in calling out moves while licking one’s own nose.
Why wouldn’t you just pick up the pieces by squeezing them with your middle and ring fingers? I just tested this, and if I can pick up a glass bottle like that, chess pieces should be cake.
Weird, I can do that easily, but I can’t do the Spock salute.
Well, OK, but you’ve got the pointy ears already, don’t ya? 