pontificator

[softwaregurl]

Does anyone else resemble this remark?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7768021.stm

[tobiaus]

Don't worry Clive, it just means that like me you're a creative "right brainer". You look for creative solutions to problems whereas our organised "left brain" brothers look for logical solutions to problems. Chaos breeds new ideas whereas as Order simply perpetuates old ones. Chaos is a creative force- order a maintaining one.
Matthew, Staines

actually i think his comment sums it up best. i used to be this way but like roberts i always try to maintain the collection, removing the things i don't use, particularly things i don't use that i didn't create. sooner or later i started applying this to my apartment, using plastic crates as "folders" for my things. i was lucky to have easy access to a full size dumpster, and i "deleted" items, particularly large ones frequently. eventually the obsession with paring the collection transmuted from windows to my apartment to linux.

anyone that is not familiar with this particular joy would call it ocd. however, if you saw my room, you would never think i had ocd. (and no one that does have ocd could be fooled into thinking i did either.) things are organized but not tidy. i don't tend to use icons very long, but my room is like a desktop full of icons, with nothing in folders.

if i could access everything in there from a command line it would be different. this was all a somewhat recent innovation, though. several years ago, i was just like you, and i have photos full of old junk to prove it. computing is a powerful metaphor. as for the right and left brain, people have that all wrong. people aren't "right brained" or "left brained" by nature, and they aren't stuck that way anymore than they would be if they only lifted weights with the right arm or the left. it depends only on what you use your thinking for.

[curaga]

Plus they got it wrong. or look at the brain from a different side than most

From your viewpoint your right side is the logical one, and left the creative.

[tobiaus]

i've always heard the left is logical and the right is creative.

my understanding is that mostly, the left controls the right half of the body, the right controls the left half of the body. so it's not surprising if most "right brained" creative types are left handed. (although this may not be the fact.) but this is a very wikipedia like approach to things. actually let's see what they have to say about it:

Popular psychology tends to make broad and sometimes pseudoscientific generalizations about certain functions (e.g. logic, creativity) being lateral, that is, located in either the right or the left side of the brain. Researchers often criticize popular psychology for this, because the popular lateralizations often are distributed across both hemispheres, [1] although mental processing is divided between them.

the article explains that the exaggerations are based on legitimate research and includes this table:

Left hemisphere functions	Right hemisphere functions
analytical	holistic
verbal	prosodic
logical	intuitive

[mikshaw]

I've always had the opinion that scientists spend most of their time poking at things in the hope that something makes a little bit more sense of what they're exploring.  Can't say that I believe anything about the left/right brain thing.  There seem to be certain areas that are influenced by certain stimuli.  Beyond that it's mostly speculation.  It seems the researchers themselves have a similar belief, up to the point when they are offered cash to give a succinct explanation of their work to the media.

[tobiaus]

woof... that's sounds like a deeply cynical view.

it's not alien to me, i'm a skeptic in many things, but skepticism being one of them. i'm sure you do fine with it, but other people have to guard themselves. first they log on to the internet, then people tell them scientists are just hacks that get lucky sometimes, and sooner or later everyone is being homeschooled because they fancy themselves smarter than people who think for a living and as a way of life. but scientists always make mistakes. typically each one is a step to a better understanding, i'll give them that.

[mikshaw]

Oh, I didn't mean to give the impression that I think they're hacks...I just tend to exaggerate a bit too often.  I think science is a necessary process of evolving theories, and nothing we've learned from it is 100% fact.  What scientists believe to be true is often replaced when contrary evidence is found to be more reliable and logical.  We should accept the most rational and well-supported explainations as probable reality, but never as solid fact.  I was mostly pointing to the habit of scientists to speak of theories as if they were fact, using phrases such as "this is", "they are", and "it will" instead of things like "evidence strongly suggests this is",  "studies have shown they are" , and "we believe it will".  Semantics may be unimportant to many people, but you can see it every day in advertising and politics that slight differences in the wording of a sentence can give quite different impressions of what the truth is.

[tobiaus]

oh i agree, and i wasn't accusing you or putting words in your mouth. i was just saying that in general, people have to be careful because it starts our realizing science doesn't have all the answers, and then people do 180's and go nuts against reason.

i very much doubt you're in any danger of it, it's difficult to believe it happens to anyone, let alone how common it is. we did a world class job taking the thread off topic, i wonder if anyone else will mention (or read) the article?

[softwaregurl]

The theory of trying to prove a universal negative.  It is impractical to prove that something does not exist anywhere in the universe, but saying impossable is using a universal negative to explain that a universal negative is impossable.

As far a right or left handed, where does that leave us ambidextrous people?

[tobiaus]

...but saying impossable is using a universal negative to explain that a universal negative is impossable.

that was incredibly awesome, i loved it.

As far a right or left handed, where does that leave us ambidextrous people?

well according to the pseudoscientific exaggerations, exactly where you should be.