just some thoughts

Two things I've been thinking about in the last few weeks/months:

Left-handedness
Color Blindness

**The use of the links above is in no way an endorsement of Wikipedia as a legitimate research tool. I use it to get a quick synopsis of the subject of interest. I do not pretend to think that it is 100% correct, though I think it is often more correct than academics give it credit for.**

Anyway.

1) Left-handedness. I am right-handed. I want to be left-handed. Off and on throughout my life I have played with switching over, to the point that I could sort of write functionally with my left hand. I did this with writing backwards too, but that is a much more useless skill. So yeah, I recently picked this up again and have been writing with the left some. Results are still fairly shaky. I always thought left-handed people were cool, and wanted to be different like them. Also I'm wanting to learn a language whose script is right-to-left, and being left-handed is perfect for that. Some observations from the wikipedia article:
a) my autistic brother appears to be ambidextrous. That is apparently somewhat common. Interesting...
b) Scissors and many knives are apparently designed specifically for right-handed people, and thus are difficult for lefties to use. I think in this regard it would be dangerous for me to convert, as I'm already somewhat of a klutz and have fairly frequent unfortunate incidents with sharp edges.
c)It seems left-handedness is associated with greater creativity and intelligence, but also shorter life span. I wonder if this would extend to a mid-life convert. Maybe I could obtain some creativity. That would be good.

2) Color Blindness. This fascinates me. It's the whole idea of someone else seeing something different from me but calling it the same thing. Crazy. Some things:
a) I found this website a while back (it wasn't working for me just now but hopefully it still does) where you can upload a picture and view it the way a colorblind person sees it. That was pretty cool. It's a dull world for them, I must say.
b) I didn't read the whole wikipedia article. It gets really technical. Stuff about cones and absorption spectra, and pigments and retina and stuff. Whatever. But I think I ascertained that this is NOT acquirable later in life, so I'm good with my multi-colored world. And I'm thankful for that.
c) Because color blindness is hereditary, it can be geographically bound. For example, this slightly creepy story in the wikipedia article:
While normally rare, achromatopsia is very common on the island of Pingelap, a part of the Pohnpei state, Federated States of Micronesia, where it is called maskun: about 1/12 of the population there has it. The island was devastated by a storm in the 18th century, and one of the few male survivors carried a gene for achromatopsia; the population is now several thousand, of whom about 30% carry this gene.

I thought that was crazy. The end.