Talk:Handedness
The castle with the anti-clockwise spiral staircase mentioned in the article is Smailholm Tower near Kelso in the Borders of Scotland.
Shared material with left-handed
This article shares a fair amount of material with left-handed; I'm not sure where it belongs, but I think it shouldn't be in both. -- pne 10:25, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Agreed. I think left-handed should be turned into a redirect to this article, with some tweaks here. - DavidWBrooks 11:44, 25 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Right-handed should be the same way, too. - furrykef (Talk at me) 18:44, 30 September 2005 (UTC)
Definitely not. The term "laterality" is something students of psychology and biology might be looking up. The article should remain seperate and await more contributers who can write about studies concerning left and right hemispheres.
simply have a smaller wiki page for handedness in principle and examples thereof, two of which will be left/right handedness in humans.
Handedness of staircases in castle.
Assume
- The defenders are on the top floor going down.
- The attackers are on the bottom floor going down.
The spiral in the staircase should go the way that allows the defender's sword to swing into the centre pillar, for majority right-handers, a swing from right to left. This allows the defender to hit the attacker around the corner, almost. Let us call this a right hand spiral.
The same spiral in the staircase forces a right handed attacker's sword going uphill to swing from right to left away from the centre pillar, and into the outer wall, where it is reduced in attacking power.
This assumes that defenders and attackers are mostly righthanded. If possible, the attackers should use their left handers going upwards, if they have any, to lead the way.
If the defending force consists of lefthanders and they design the spiral of their castle staircases to go the other way, counter-intuitively and counter-productively, they make things easier for a right handed attacking force. A lefthanded spiral in a castle keep staircase suits a right handed attacking forces just fine.
Since attacking forces tend to outnumber defending forces, a left-handed defending force is still better off having right handed spirals in their Castle Keep staircase.
Attention Noe
I am not disputing the story about the Kerr family with lots of lefthanders, building their castles with lefthanded staircases, but I do think that their effort is futile.
The key difference between castles and say tennis courts, is that tennis courses are the same handedness either way, whereas a spiral staircase is one-hand going up and the opposite hand going down. This gives a rare left handed tennis player a consistant advantage, whereas with castle keep spiral staircases it depends ....
Tabletop 04:09, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
I have changed the article back (more or less), to mention your reservations about the usefulness of Kerr's staircases. --Niels Ø 19:05, May 28, 2005 (UTC)
Genetic evidence
A 2004 American Scientist article claims that handedness is genetic. [1] I don't know whether it is correct or not, but the inconsistency with the article should be resolved somehow.