drifting leftward - notes on Right Hand Left Hand 1/4

Right Hand Left Hand
Chris McManus

finally got time to read about my all-time favorite topic. I am going to take notes chapter by chapter, and after finishing the book, write a book review loaded with my own insights (if there is still sth "left", not yet said by the author).

Chapter 1: Dr. Watson's Problem
the beginning of the book already surprised. instead of some anecdotes about lefthandedness, as I'd vaguely expected, the author talked about "situs inversus", the complete inversion of internal organs, seen in rare individuals. He moved on and discussed the asymmetry of the world from even the basic building blocks: amino acids, carbohydrates...

the scope of the book is far larger than what i knew of the topic. now i am looking forward to a wild explorations.

one disappointment: the writing is noticeably poor and awkward. i was stopped from time to time in the middle of the sentences - the grammar is never wrong but the flow is simply aweful.

Chapter 2: Death and the Right Hand
The scope continued to expand, now into the sociology and symbolism of left and right, always left being bad and right good:

left-right symbolisms are universal in human cultures, and that they are driven both by physiological differences between the two sides of the body and by social pressures. they gain much of their distinctive character from the tendency of the human mind to process the otherwise incomprehensible in symbolic terms.

one impression i got is that scholars tend to underestimate the impact of biology while overestimate that of society or culture (environment) - not that i know how to quantify, they don't either, yet make bold quantification like "more" "less" very freely. :-)

for example, here it says:

modern research, ..., finds the right hand to be only about ten percent faster than the left. It is a small difference, particularly for explaining why a typical right-hander will use their right hand for ninety per cent or more of their tasks. So how did a 'vague disposition' become converted into 'an absolute preponderance'? the only way could be something outside the individual organism, something which does not consiste merely of the instinctive preferences, and fairly weak preferences at that. - pp36

This is almost certainly wrong. first of all, it assumes 10% biological difference determined by simple tests, is far smaller than the "more than 90%" usage of the right hand. however, these two are of different qualities and not comparable, sort of equivalent to comparing the "distances", instead of the "angles" between two rockets at the beginning and the end of their journeys and concluding that the starting difference can't accounts for the immeasurable difference at the end. secondly, the "preference" of using one hand over another can be deterministic in my mind, but to the scholarly, it becomes "merely" (another quantification of the unquantifiable).

(it's not clear whether the author agrees with the culture scholars he cited here. in later chapters, he indeed demonstrated that "hand preference" is the determining factor.)

Chapter 3: On the Left Bank
The author explored how people use the terms left and right in daily life. and how incredibly confusing left and right could be, compared to "up and down" "front and back". and how pervasively left and right designs are used in everyday items: screws, stairs, ropes....

And left/right has to be relative while philosophers had tried hard historically to define positions in space in absolute terms.

Chapter 4: Kleiz, Drept, Luft, Zeso, Lijevi, Prawy
Explained the common origin of words left and right in different languages; explained how slowly children learn about left and right: a complete understanding involves the coordination of three separate skills - understanding right and left, carrying out a mental rotation, and seeing the world from a different perspective.

even adults have harder time to determine left/right, as compared to up/down, front/back.

animals in general are not able to tell left and right.

even paired terms such as 'above' and 'below' are not entirely equivalient to one another in their usage. subjects are quicker to say an object is above another object than below it. 'above' is the unmarked form of the description, whereas 'below' is marked - in effect it means 'not above'. and takes more time for brain to process.

80 days of the innocent past

Around the World in 80 Days
Jules Verne

I bought the book for the boys but read it to reconnect with a distant past. What struck me most was indeed the very sense how life had changed, not just from my own childhood, but from Mr. Phileas Fogg's time.

This eccentric Britishman was created by a French. His travelling-around-the-world stories and all characters were full of charm, wonder, kindness and humor; even bigotry, sort of matter-of-factly in the 19th century, was so simple and unconscious, making one ache for the innocence of humanity long lost.