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
are probably nothing more than variations of the $ sign... =)
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.
what bad joke is this setting up?
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
The sad thing is they THOUGHT they were doing it on Tony Blair, and attributed all these not-so-hot characteristics dissing his leadership abilities. I'm still trying to figure out how they can determine all of that, and not realize that it's not even Blair's handwriting. Big gaffe. Serves them write. I'm so tired of pseudosciences -- especially ones that have been admitted in court as evidence.
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.
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.
Bill Gates' psychological analysis using the science of Numerology, his tea leaves from his last sushi dinner and a phrenologic reading of his cranium.
Actually, George Bush's doodle was also found. You can see it here
Free XBox, PS2
I believe the correct sentiment is "more successful" with technology than girls.
In Soviet Russia, asses suck this joke.
Bono happens to draw comic versions of himself and The Edge fighting evil across the galaxy, and always takes them home to ink and color.
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
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
...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
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?
Oh, wait, this is slashdot, wrong answer:)
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
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
I can bend spoons. It's hard to explain to a lay-person, but it just takes a bit of ... I don't know how to describe it, call it "leverage." I would be the last to call my powers extraordinary, this is really a power that is latent in all of us, but usually suppressed due to a mental block I will call, in shorthand, "respect for silverware."
Handwriting analysis is also not complete crap. The other day, my wife went shopping, and correctly bought an item that I had written down on our shopping list, even though I myself couldn't read my own handwriting.
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.
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."