I’ve been falling behind somewhat in keeping track of my tasks. That’s not to say I haven’t been productive, it’s just that most of my productivity has been focused in things I’ve been working on obsessively, like preparation for the roleplaying campaign I started running last week, Vim customization, and Python workflow coding.

It would be good to track other things better than how I’m doing it right now, but somehow returning to TiddlyWiki for my task management wasn’t appealing. I used it for quite a while, but a bare install of it doesn’t seem to quite work for task management, even though it’s still really good for keeping notes about things in general. I’m going to try d-cubed, a TiddlyWiki-based tool, instead.
[more...]

Tom Vanderbilt has a fascinating article in Salon today about Samoa switching its driving side and about the history of what side of the road countries drive on.
[more...]

In The Left Stuff: How the Left-Handed Have Survived and Thrived in a Right-Handed World I came across an account of the origin of the handshake that I’d never encountered before and which I find quite interesting:

The Roman ritual of touching right hands—the precursor to the modern-day handshake—was originally intended to demonstrate that one was weaponless. It was allegedly promoted by the left-handed Julius Caesar, who could use it to conceal a weapon in his dominant hand.
—Roth, Melissa (2005), The Left Stuff, M. Evans and Company, p28.

Obviously too good a story to not be true!

For years I’ve seen the statistic quoted that left-handers live an average of nine years less than right-handers. As a lefty, this naturally concerns me, and today I finally got around to looking into it a little. Apparently it’s not true—at the least, there are differing results and no absolute conclusions.
[more...]

I have a mild objection to the term “ambidextrous”, because I consider it prejudiced—dexter is Latin for “right”, so etymologically ambidextrous means “two right hands” or “both hands like the right hand” or “right-handed on both sides”. Hence I often use the terms “ambisinister” or “ambisinstrous”. Imagine my surprise upon reading the Wikipedia Handedness article and discovering that those terms were already in use—they’d already been appropriated to further anti-lefty prejudice!
[more...]