SpudFiles

Ragnarok wrote:Whether or not your dominance mismatch is a problem, it is always at least a disadvantage.

Gotta agree there, it's really hard to find hardware stores that stock left handed screwdrivers.

It's even harder to try and find metric hammers (if you ever see a really confused looking teenager working at home depot, now you know what to do).

Right handed, left eyed.
You can usually tell who is what by looking at the side of the gun they put the propane meter on.

_Fnord wrote:It's even harder to try and find metric hammers (if you ever see a really confused looking teenager working at home depot, now you know what to do).

Yeah, I asked for an imperial adjustable spanner and a replacement spirit level bubble in a DIY store last week, and they couldn't help me.

Born cursed (mechanically inclined) and right handed. Since breaking my neck and loosing the use of my right hand I'm now a lefty. The only difference is that things are naturally built for the right handed.

We've not had a lot of votes so far, but there are enough to start making assessments - it's interesting to see that the number of left handed spudders is about 2 or 3 times what would be found in the general population (which is normally between 7-10%)

To track back to this:

VH_man wrote:I want to prove my friend wrong in saying being lefthanded has no collrelation with "mental setup". aka: Artsy people are always left handed, Mechanically inclined people are are left handed, ect.

The mental set-up will heavily define preferential sides.

You are likely to find that a number of people with natural artistic talent have partial left side dominance, because art is the job of the brain's right side (because of course, there is a crossover).

Now, engineering/spudding is strongly left brained, so in some ways it's interesting to see these results. I suspect that many of the people on the forum have some form of dyslexia, autism, ADHD or similar to some degree, which often also spawns left handedness.

People like that often have mechanical understandings, or equally can develop strong obsessions in certain areas (in my case, it is both), thus explaining why you might find them on this forum.

Now, I'm a fairly interesting case myself - because I am both Artistic (right brain related) and Scientific (left brain related).
I suspect the likelihood here is that it is linked to my Asperger Syndrome, where some things are handled by the other side of the brain to usual.

Im much like mark too not completely ambidextrous but can do most things with my left hand or right like shooting. I feel if I tried writing with my left hand I could. My grandfather is ambidextrous so that might be some reason, is "favorability over hands" genealogical? I dont think I have any mental ?diseases? even on the lowest level, so that is not a factor in my case.

Left handed... Used to be left handed for everything, but the stupid spiral on my notebooks dug into my hand so I decided to learn how to write right handed.. but yeah I throw with my left, catch with my right, write with my right, draw with my left, operate a computer either way, but primarly right because thats how most setups are.

When twisting on fittings or taking them off I use my left hand to turn.

Maniac wrote:I dont think I have any mental ?diseases? even on the lowest level, so that is not a factor in my case.

Disability is probably the word you want, although I tend to think of it as a difference.

I was about to post to say almost exactly what Rag said. There's an oddly high percentage of lefties here.

I'm right handed, but I don't really know which of my legs or eyes is dominant. When I was 8, I broke my right arm, and became fairly proficient at writing lefty for a few weeks. I felt pretty much ambidextrous by the end of the 5 weeks I had my cast on, but my left hand is now just about as useless as it was before that incident.

It's unfortunate, but it seems very difficult to get any decent sample size in polls on this forum, even though we have such a (relatively) large member base.

DYI wrote:even though we have such a (relatively) large member base.

Regrettably, that's because not much of our forum is active at any one time.

Anyway, you need 25 posts to vote on anything (as best I know), and that rules out 5584 of our 6296 members.

However, 38 votes? Some beauty product commercials would consider that an adequate survey group! You know the thing: 72% of women agreed - and then in a tiny corner of the screen: "Independent survey of 64 women".

And it is large enough to make some reasonable assumptions

I'm ambidexterous, but since most guns are made for righties, I shoot right handed, even with a bow.

Also, since I didn't know what hand to write with as a child, my teachers assumed I was right handed, and made me write that way. So i write better with my right hand.

Dominate righty here, from head to toe. I have seen some evidence that IT professionals have a somewhat higher percentage lefty population. Musicians tend to be righty...I walk in both circles.

Actually, I've just had a thought. The topic title maybe causing some of the skew - think about it, a left hander is more likely to get interested and come and vote.

Have you ever heard the commonly quoted fact that "One in 10 people is gay?".

It's not actually true, because voting in the poll was a voluntary choice, and homosexuals were about 6 or 7 times more likely to turn up and vote.
The real figure is about one in 60-something.

Same thing here, we may have a skew caused by that kind of thing.