Slashdot Mirror
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."
i dont know about gates, but his OS is damn unstable.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I'd have to say, no surprise there. Anyone who is a geek knows were all at least a little unstable... You have to be to be attracted by Technology more than girls.
are probably nothing more than variations of the $ sign... =)
Geez, what next? Are they going to do his star charts? or read the coffee grind remains in his mug?
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
The 'unstable man, unstable OS' jokes may begin ... now.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Really, handwriting analysis? This is the computer age... I don't even know how to write... I put an 'X' in the 'sign here' section... everything else I type... If they analysed my handwriting, well... they'd think I was a 2 year old with a crayon. ;)
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
a "doodie".
I thought, pity the lab technician who had to do this for media purposes.
Paula: Can you grab my purse. .George showing Jerry the piece of paper he picked up
,if you think they look like this?
George: Yeah.( reaches for the purse and finds a piece of paper . he looks annoyed.
Monks , next day
Jerry: Yeah! So
George; Don't you see what this is?
Jerry: Yeah! It's a doodle.
George: Yeah!, a doodle of me...look at the size of the nose , the ears, all my features are distorted.
Jerry: Oh!.It's an affectionate caricature.
George: I'm grotesque . I look like a troll.
Jerry: It's just a drawing.
George: Don't you see what this says? How can you possibly like somebody
Free XBox, PS2
what bad joke is this setting up?
and before anybody jumps on this bandwagon, let's remember that handwriting analysis is only a little more authoritative than phrenology or astrology
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
Hey, the poor guy has been hammered left right and center for years - can you blame him for being a bit troubled !
I bet he draws penguins and apples and little tiny bugs and all sorts of odd things when he's bored !
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Here's a look at the actual doodle .
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
If you want to see the doodle in full, you can here.
"Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend." - Emil Michel Cioran
Most of those assessments were made when the "graphologists" in question were under the belief the doodle was Blair's. So we should withhold judgement until we have second opinions from the Phrenologists, Dowsers and any other Pseudo-Scientific Charlatans who feel like chipping in with their worthless, substance less opinions...
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Right up there with reading tea leaves and goat entrails.
Now analysis to verify for a court that this is the defendants handwriting yes or no,for example is a science.
Tying some Psychological profile to someone's doodle is a joke......
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
Blair left his doodles behind for analysis, too. And so we can conclude from the absence of Bono's doodles, and consequent lack of analysis, that Bono is paranoid, justifiably.
--
make install -not war
How did they crack the DRM on the doodles so they they could be analysed outside of Media Player?
/. effect.
:-) Or was it a monkey screaming 'oooh ooh develoopers! developers developers! aaaargh!'
And why didn't the paper contain a little ticker that showed the time and date and author of the doodle?
Anyone have a link the torrent? Oh man, I feel strange... it must be the
Did the doodles point to any new ideas in windows? Or was one of the doodles a strange on-flying bird like creature being beaten to death by office stationary (paperclips)
Who knows?
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
A spokesman said: "Following the press conference given by the prime minister, Bill Gates and Bono in Davos on Thursday, a number of newspapers printed stories claiming that a page of notes and doodles left behind on the platform belonged to Tony Blair, and provided an insight into the mind of the prime minister.
"They were in fact doodles made by Bill Gates.
"We look forward with amusement to explanations by a variety of psychologists and graphologists of how various characteristics ascribed to the prime minister on the basis of the doodles, such as 'struggling to concentrate', 'not a natural leader', 'struggling to keep control of a confusing world' and 'an unstable man who is feeling under enormous pressure', equally apply to Mr Gates.
"We are astonished that no-one who ran the story thought to ask No 10 if the doodles were in fact Mr Blair's, particularly as it was obvious to anyone the handwriting was totally different."
In other words, graphology is BS and the people who analyzed it already had a preconceived notion about whose it was and made the appropriate BS analyses.
I remember one card had a Skull...
and the other had a Penguin.
The "unstable" and "unfit to lead" assessments were made when the doodle was assumed to have been made by Tony Blair. While you would think that the same conclusions would be drawn regardless of the identity of the scribbler, there is speculation that the original conclusions were politically motivated.
From reviewing the doodle, it's is my expert opinion that Bill Gates has the doodling skill of my five year old son!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Bill Gates' psychological analysis using the science of Numerology, his tea leaves from his last sushi dinner and a phrenologic reading of his cranium.
No doubt that Microsoft has some shady business tactics. There's no question that they provide shoddy products from a security perspective and then push responsibility for their goofs to on user community. There's the issue ,of corse, that they hound free software by the cheapest pr tricks in the book and the system Microsoft sucks shit! Well, hell! There's a lot of valid complaints when it comes to chastising Microsoft as a corporation
I really don't want to ideolize Mr. Gates and he is often guilty of wrong speak; willingly or out of ignorance.
But attempting a character analyses from a doodle he left at a conference (which potentially was boring) is just plain juvenile.
Hold your ammunition for the real issues, slashdot, and retain your credibility in the bargain...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
My analysis? He was practicing writing with his alternate hand - because he was bored. I tried this over the weekend, and my scrawl looked similar to this.
I dunno - I don't consider myself all that anal, but my notes are generally a lot less flamboyant than that - a little more organized, legible, useful, etc.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
Excuse me while I go consult the "I Ching" to find out whether Microsoft intends to embed Internet Explorer in "Office 2007".
Since this is Microsoft and Bill Gates we are talking about, shouldn't you consult "Ka Ching" instead?
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Why is this newsworthy? Graphology is completely unsound from a scientific point of view, though it might interest students of the Forer effect. What next? Steve Ballmer's horoscope? What the tarot has to say about Larry Ellison's future? Crop circles resembling Linus' face? (All right, I reckon the last one could possibly be newsworthy. But, still, do we really want to go further in this direction?)
...and the bar tender says, "We don't serve big wigs here like you.".
Tony Blair says, "But can we at least vote on it?".
The bartender says, "No!".
Bill Gates says, "But we just need a place to crash.".
The bartender felt betrayed because he expected support from Bill, and thus said, "You too??".
Bono says, "Yes...".
testing out my trending skills
I dislike micro$oft as much as the next slashdotter, BUT handwriting analysis! Why not check his bio-rhythmn and astrological correspondences while you're at it. I bet even Bill still has enough geek in his soul to laugh at the morons who think his handwriting revealed anything other than the colour of ink he was using.
Of course, if he'd used a Tablet PC to doodle on, this whole hullabaloo would never have happened.... But then, that too is telling, that it's easier to doodle on paper than on a tablet pc.
You have a gun but only two bullets, who do you shoot?
Psychologists and handwriting experts were drafted in by the press in the hope of getting a glimpse into the inner workings of the prime ministerial mind.
Newspaper stories contained phrases such as "struggling to concentrate" and "not a natural leader".
That's why the pshychologists and handwriting experts spend a lot of time analyzing a doodle while Bill Gates is very rich and leads a multi-billion dollar industry.
It reminds me of someone who was explaining to me that there's no money in the cumputer business. He said that he was a business owner in an excellent industry. I later found out that he was the bathroom dude in a bar.
As the parent notes the story isn't really about doodles by Bill Gates, but about doodles that aren't by Tony Blair. And the ensuing BS because people assumed they were. The only thing remarkable about Gate's involvement is that he's such a clear proof that the graphology is crap. Him being a genius and all.
It's like when 2 students pass in the exact same assignment and get 2 vastly different marks.
It's interesting but why does slashdot care about some doodles? I'm sure most of us don't. It has nothing to do with tech or tech-related news. If, however, there was an improved version of quick sort hidden in the doodles we should all sit up. Is there a way to mod the original articles down?
And up until this point I thought it was all hard science. Next you are going to tell me that psychics and spoon-benders don't really have extraordinary powers.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Oh, wait, this is slashdot, wrong answer:)
This is really of bad taste guys. As much as I think Bill G. is Napoleonic and demented I don't put that basis on his handwriting.
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.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Moreover, they were employed by an anti-Blair newspaper, so their comments are likely to reflect what their employers wanted to hear, rather than the results of any genuine analysis.
When I doodle, I end up with spheres and cubes and conic sections, not because I'm a great three-dimensional thinker, but because I like to practice light/shadows and foreshortening.
Maybe Bill was practicing his triangles? Even if they were Tony's doodles, what's so wrong with Tony practicing triangles?
What I get from it is this: Some of the most powerful people in the world have fun with triangles, so they must be okay to play with.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
There is already enough evidence that Bill Gates doesn't have the qualities of a leader, and that he has few social abilities.
For example, look at Microsoft's keynote at CES. (Click on 100K or 300K to watch the video.)
There is no need for more evidence than watching any of Gates's public appearances to understand what kind of person he is.
I don't see what we could learn more from a handwriting analysis. There already is enough information available that is more relevant than what is mentioned in the article.
I saw a show on the Discovery Channel a few years back that sort of discussed the same sort of thing- handwriting analysis, art critiquing, phychics, etc.
They showed art critics discussing the art they were looking at and describing, in detail, the emotions and message that the artist was trying to convey.
The show's host didn't believe any of that so he showed some "respected" art critics a piece of art, which looked like scribble to me- it was just random strokes of the brush in different colors. The critics all agreed with each other and explained what exactly the artist was thinking, and the raw emotion that went into the painting.
Very impressive, I thought- and maybe I would have believed them had the artist not been AN ELEPHANT.
Yes, an elephant painted the picture with its trunk. The "respected" art critics were really just good at winning popularity contests- in reality they had no clue what they were talking about. It's the same thing between a "good" phychic and a "bad" psychic- neither one knows what they're talking about, but one just seems "more believable" than the other.
Damn, must be a very slow news day. Come on, I know taking jabs at Bill is fun, but this one is downright stupid. Even if they are Bill's doodles and chicken scratches, anyone with half a brain knows that handwriting analysis is NOT considered a valid diagnostic tool. So called "graphologists" who say they can detect personality traits from handwriting are no more capable of doing so than someone with a crystal ball can tell me anything about me. This type of graphology has basically been discredited in legitimate diagnostic psychology, but obviously reporters could not care less.
Handwriting analysis is well known to be a non-science with non-facts based on non-events that produce non-results.
It's also a non-brainer way for slashdotters to do some M$ bashing.
Maybe it's time for /. to move on or for me to stop wasting my time. The quality of information on this site is degrading every day.
I hate to say it, but nerds have finally gone too far. Do you guys have ANYTHING better to do than player hate all over Bill's doodles?!
He has created one of the biggest companies of all time, and made it almost unassailable.
There is nothing technical he can do that one (or a dozen) of his employees can't do 10 times better and faster.
He has (probably) saved millions of lives through his malaria research.
He has a nice wife and three kids. He has a really cool house.
What else is there left to do?
Maybe he could try being a Linux Kernel Hacker...
My handwriting is non-existant. My verticals go off in every direction and my line is uneven.
Am I disorganized? An idiot?
No. I have MS. To me the pen is an instrument of torture; my own.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Seems like flamebait but I'll bite. How many BASIC compilers have you written in 2 months without touching the target hardware before you were 20? some bio page
I wrote a forth compiler for the 6502 processor at the age of 17. A BASIC interpreter of the standard we're talking about back then was not as complex as you imagine. If I remember rightly, his was about 4K of object code. A couple of thousand lines of assembler. Big fucking deal. Impressive because he was the first to implement on a microprocessor, although there were minicomputer implementations for him to copy. But not a genius level accomplishment.
My grandfather is Carl Pacifico, and after being a chemical engineer, moved to management, and then, after selling his company, became a business consultant. (which is when he was doing handwriting analysis).
He started studying human behavior, and from that, thinking in general, and now spends his time trying to further research into cognative neuropsychology.
He's not some Miss Clio wanna-be trying to hawk his wares. I don't even know if he's done much with his handwriting analysis work in years, if not decades.
From the times that I've tried analysing other people's (and my own) handwriting, it seems to compare well with what I knew of the people, but I haven't tried doing double blind studies or anything else that would provide statistical proof as to the accuracy of the studies.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Graphology is just as laughable as astrology, acupuncture or homeopathy. Here's a nice experiment for your amusement: when you meet a "graphologist" who'd like to demonstrate her amazing "skills" to you, be sure to make an experiment using text copied from some newspaper, the same text written by all of the tested people who had no contact with the graphologist before and during the handwriting examination at all. Observing the graphologist's face when she doesn't have "side channels data" and no interaction with people to play with "cold reading" is a trully hilarious experience.
"This shape might sometimes mean that maybe some kind of a impatience... am I right?"
"Just keep going, I don't want to disturb you!"
And the most funny thing is that unlike psychics they can't just make up some dumb excuses that they feel some disturbance of Force or that the Angels are scared by the camera, because they are supposed to be scientists. Looking at someone's writing you can usually tell the gender and age--the same I can guess reading someone's palm... Or foot... Or arse! Does it make me an arsologist?
For more interesting informations read: Wikipedia article on graphology, James Randi's comments on graphology (by The Amazing Randi of JREF who offers "a one-million-dollar prize to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event"), graphology in the Skeptic's Dictionary by Robert T. Carroll, PhD, and of course the excellent Quackwatch paper How Graphology Fools People by Barry L. Beyerstein, PhD. This is not the first time we can laugh at psedoscientific morons on Slashdot thanks to The Amazing Randi.
And a comment to CmdrTaco: please add the Monty Python foot to the article because without it we look like a bunch of imbeciles. What next? Bill Gates tested by the lie detector and a story posted on science.slashdot.org? Please just add the foot. Thanks.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
If I ever become rich and famous, I am going to leave doodles of boobies all over the place. They will think I am a sex obsessed pig.... Oh.
I read this automatically as being about Bill Gates at a Davros press conference. Immediate thought: Davros, inventor of the Daleks, and Bill Gates together. You just know it makes sense.
Hmmm. Must . get . out . more.
Bitter and proud of it.