Bill Gates Handwriting Analyzed

Kaal Alexander Rosser writes "The BBC is reporting that a doodle left behind at a Davos press conference given by Tony Blair, Bill Gates and Bono shows the writer to be: "an unstable man" amongst other things. The Gates Foundation has confirmed the doodle was left there by Bill Gates."

Comments

Re:Wow

[essreenim]

I found a great sight with downloadable hand writing sheets in my final CS year. It had a sentance fully in hand (thatch-writing), with lots of sentances below with dots, so you could practice again and again. It was really good as it calmed me for the exams. I felt like I was back in playschool writing my lovely curly and puposeful writing. I actually felt like taking up caligraphy. There is something spitiual about this writing, something we are sadly losing in the computer age. I did it to recontruct my ability to write in time for my exams as my writing was awful before. Afterwards, not only could I write better, I felt happier, like a return to serenity. Sounds gay? Yeah I was surprised too but I can't knock hand writing. We should all do it

Actually... it can be accurate.

[oneiros27]

They're not by any means 100% accurate, but my grandfather used to do contracting analysing handwriting of potential executive hires for a few companies.

Now, he'll be the first to tell you that it's not a perfect science -- but if you see five different indicators that suggest the person is dishonest, there's a better chance that there's a correlation.

Here are a few points that I remember from reading the manual that he had written --

• Pressure of the writing is an indicator of the person's stress level. [how hard are they pushing the writing implement into the paper?].
• A person who tends to come back and write back over the top of their words (not to make a correction -- writing over it twice or more) is a sign of dishonesty.
• Your normal handwriting tells your personality; Your signature tells how you want people to think you are. (so a person whose signature is like their handwriting is more likely to be comfortable with themselves)
• A person whose lines slope downwards as they write tend to be pessimists (if upward, optimists)

There are things that can be infered from the angle the writing, the general shape of letters, how the person dots their i's, the width of the margins, how they place the addresses on the letters.

I would relate handwriting analysis to be more like reading someone's mannerisms and how they dress -- it can be a good indicator, but isn't a perfect correlation. Whereas, astrology and the like are basically just cold reading (normally, based on the person's reactions, mannerisms, and how they dress), and not really on the stars.

Now, that's not to say that someone can read something wrong -- I'm sure it happens all the time -- my grandfather has one indicator (the size of decenders) that he attributes to 'passion' -- someone may attribute it to sexuality, sports, or even as agression and a tendancy towards violance. You have to read it in combination with other indicators.

Re:Speaking as a geek...

[Xilman]

Ahhh but Gates is not a geek. He is a business man. A cunning business man at that. He knows little about technology other than what most salesmen know. He doesnt' have a deep understanding of the "how" of computing, mostly just the "why".

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Have you ever met Bill? I have. He most certainly has the geek nature. He most certainly does have a deep understanding of the "how" of technology and asks very penetrating questions if you're demonstrating something to him. He's a good business man too, but don't let that lead you into underestimating his technical abilities.

Paul

Re:The real scoop

[Foobar of Borg]

I hope this isn't getting too offtopic, but I remember that one of the big problems with polygraphs was the need for baseline values to determine truth and lying. Apart from the fact that you would respond differently when deliberately telling a lie because it is part of the procedure and when telling a lie to deceive, the baseline questions usually show the prejudices of the interrogator. For example, an interrogator will often ask "have you ever smoked before?" or "have you ever tried marijuana?" assuming, of course, that everyone has tried these. Therefore, if you say no, they assume that your response is the baseline for lying since obviously anyone who says they haven't is lying. And it is an unfalsifiable position.

The human race would be so funny if they weren't so dangerous.

Re:The real scoop

[MightyMartian]

My understanding is that the problems with polygraphs are sufficiently numerous that they should be regarded as little more than mysticism. Cops use the excuse that they can feel out potential suspects, and providing that the potential suspects believe the test to be accurate, then I guess it may be just another tool like BSing a suspect about evidence, witnesses, etc. In other words, it's just a parlor trick to make a suspect screw up. So far as I'm aware no court in the US, Canada or Europe even allows polygraph "evidence" to be admitted.

Re:The real scoop

[MirthScout]

You don't need to refuse to take a polygraph test.

Always agree to take it. They will want you to sign a release form (they have no liability, blah, blah). Refuse to sign the release form. They will decide not to administer the polygraph test. Remind them that you are agreeing to take the polygraph test and it is they that are choosing not to administer it.

I did this with an employer many years ago. It was very funny.

Re:Speaking as a geek...

[bushidocoder]

Larry Osterman wrote an article once where he talked about a presentation he had with Bill about a portion of the IPX stack in NT4. Bill wasn't familiar with the project prior to the meeting, so it started off with Larry just telling him what was supposed to be accomplished.

After a couple minutes, they got into the technical part and after Bill had spent two or three minutes looking over stack trace information he abruptly starts screaming at the team about how the memory footprint was too large, and then stopped, thought a minute, and accounting for a dependant project off the top of his head, spit out what he thought was the appropriate memory size for the stack. Everyone in the room stared at him slack-jawed - he quoted a number that was too small by half. No one outside the marketing department would make up a number like that.

But they had an explicit order from BillG to rewrite the stack to that size, so they went back to the drawing board and, after bringing in some more BSD hackers, realized that not only was his number achieveable, but he'd hit the number they could theoretically reach given the dependencies with other portions of the system right on the head. Although that section of NT has been revisitted in every version since NT4.0, no one has been able to improve on the memory footprint of that section of the kernel.

That's not neccesarily the sign of a genius - I know people who can look at a database and give the same sort of summary judgements. But when a man can make realizations like that within 10 minutes of having learned about a technology, at a bare minimum you have to give him credit for being a geek.