Being left-handed in a world primarily shaped by and for right-handed people can be a challenge, particularly with technology. In this episode, we look at how a right-handed bias can create frustrations for left handers, and how bias in tech can take on more sinister aspects. That was a pun.
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jovian Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio. And how the tech are you? I am still on vacation and so we are having a rerun episode. This episode originally published on July twenty nine. It is called right handed bias a sinister problem, and as a left hander, I often get real grouchy about having to fumble my way through using a lot of common tools that just weren't made from my dominant hand. I managed to funnel that frustration into an entire episode, and that's what you get here. Enjoy. It is a story time you guys. Now, those of you who follow my personal account over on Twitter, which is at John Strickland j O N. Strickland, if you're morbidly curious, those of you who do follow me, you might know that I was eagerly anticipating the delivery of a Squire Classic Sixties Vibe Stratocaster, an electric guitar. And you know, I've done episodes about electric guitars, I've talked about them a lot, and I thought, I really want one of these it would be really nice to have one. This would have been my first six string electric guitar, and I figured, since you know, I'm working from home now, it would be good to pick up a new skill to keep my mind sharp and occupied, and you know, to help me get into a sort of meditative state to help manage anxiety. By the way, um, anxiety is a real pain in the butt, and I recommend anyone who has anxiety to look into ways to manage it in a really healthy manner, because that stuff is no joke and it's obviously getting more challenging to deal with that. Anyway, back to my story, I had been thinking about getting a guitar, and I wanted it to be a decent guitar, you know, something I would actually want to pick up and play. I didn't want to buy something super cheap and then find out I didn't like the feel of it or how it sounded, because that would discourage me from playing it. I would just set it down and never pick it up again. But on the other hand, I also didn't want to go crazy and buy some sort of you know, super expensive guitar, because guitars can get real expensive, y'all. I mean What if I didn't like playing guitar just because I didn't like it? Right, what if I decided that I didn't enjoy playing. I am forty five years old this year, and skills just don't come to me as quickly as they used to. So it's entirely possible that I could become frustrated, or I could become bored even with a really nice guitar, and then just set it down and let it collect dust. So I would have wasted a lot of money on a really expensive decoration at that point, and that would be really irresponsible, even in a good economic climate, let alone one is uncertain as the one we find ourselves in today. So I did what I do. I did a lot of research, like a lot of research. My wife was getting amused by how frequently I was watching videos about different guitars and different price ranges, weighing them, saying, well, yeah, this is gonna be a slightly less expensive guitar, which means it's going to have these sort of things that I'll have to consider. But but on the other hand, it's better than this other guitar, you know. I went through all of that. Ultimately I decided I wanted a strato caster, a classic electric guitar. The strato caster is made by Fender, and I really like the sound of strato casters now. I love stuff like surf rock, and Dick Dave, one of the most famous surf rock guitarists, played a strat. But I also wanted to be financially responsible because there are a lot of different strato casters out there, and generally they mostly share a couple of common traits. Most strato casters have three single coil pickups, and the pickups are the components that pick up the vibration of the strings and then convert that into electric signals that can then feed out to an amplifier and speakers. Strats have three of these, typically one near the base of the neck of the guitar the neck pickup, one in the middle of the body of the guitar, and one towards the bridge of the guitar. A switch on the strat lets you select which pickup or which pair of pickups are active at any given time, and that changes the sound you get out of the guitar when it plays through an amplifier. But beyond these general similarities, there are a ton of different options. You can buy a starter entry level Strat for less than two hundred dollars, or you could go bonkers and buy a mod shop guitar for around eight hundred dollars. So yeah, there is a range, and of course if you went full custom shop it could be way more expensive. So I looked into the Squire line of guitars. Now, this is Fenders budget line, but they tend to measure up pretty well to guitars from the more prestigious official Fender line, particularly in the Squire Classic Vibe series, which are guitars they are designed to be closer to the style of the classic electric guitars of the fifties and sixties. Now, I'm left handed, and that's really what I'm going to get into in this episode, because being left handed means there are a lot of little struggles in your life. Most of the time, they aren't particularly meaningful or noteworthy. They tend to mostly be slightly frustrating worst, and that's about it most of the time. So I want to stress from the beginning of this episode that the stuff I'm going to talk about is really not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things most of the time. But being left handed often means that when it comes to purchasing stuff where handedness is a factor, like guitars, you're faced with fewer options than you're right handed counterparts. For example, if you were to go to Fender's website the morning that I wrote this, and you were to look at the different options for electric guitars that they had in stock, you would see at that time that the company had one hundred eleven guitars for right handers in stock, for left handers eight eight versus one hundred eleven. Now, typically a left hander has fewer options, and then fewer choices within those options, choices like the color of the guitar, for example, So while I could have loved a Candy Apple red left handed Squire Classic Sixties Vibes stratocaster, that was not an option, Nor could I get the lovely Lake Placid blue option that right handers could get. Those right handed versions had Candy Apple red and Lake Placid blue, but for left handers you didn't have a choice. There was only one color option, Sunburst, which sadly was my least favorite of the three colors. But hey, them's the brakes. And while I wasn't in love with the color. I could live with it, and I did love all the things I read about the line of guitars, so I didn't really let that bother me so much. And before anyone pipes up about re stringing a guitar so that you can convert a right handed guitar into a left handed guitar, yeah, I could technically have purchased a right handed Candy Apple red model, taking the strings off, taking the nut off the top of the neck, flip the nut around, reinserted it, then restrung the guitar so that it was a left handed guitar. But that would also mean that all the controls for the guitar, like the volume and tone knobs and the tremolo or whammy bar would have been on the wrong side, and I would have to figure out how to deal with that in order to play it properly. So I wasn't really keen on trying to make a product that had been made for a right hander work for a left hander. I had a few gift cards for Amazon, not a sponsor, and that sealed the deal for me. I said, I'm gonna use these gift cards toward buying a guitar. I would buy a Squire stratocaster for four hundred dollars, which is not an insignificant sum of money, particularly if you're trying to stay economically responsible during a time of uncertainty. But with the gift cards that would bring the price down to about half price, and I figured I would splurge on myself as sort of a late birthday present. I figured, if nothing else, I could consider it an investment in my mental health. I placed my order on a Saturday, and I was predicted to receive the guitar on the following Friday, so a week later. Now, over the course of that week, I grew a bit anxious because when I would check on the order status, it hadn't changed. It had registered order, but it never moved to shipping, let alone out for delivery. And then on that Friday that I was to receive it, July twenty, that was the morning that I wrote this, I finally got an email that said my order had been canceled due to quote lack of availability end quote. Now, Amazon's system had said that there was only one of these guitars and stock, but apparently they just couldn't locate it, and so I did not get my guitar, though I did receive the accessories I had ordered, so now I've got a guitar stand and a guitar strap, but no guitar to go with it. Sad trombone. Now, I don't tell this story just because I'm bummed out and I want to grouse about it, though I admit that's definitely part of it. I want to talk about the problems that left handers face when it comes to certain technologies, and how those relatively minor problems can open the door to the realization and acknowledgement that other people face much more serious challenges when it comes to tech and bias and accessibility. And before I get into it too much, let's talk about why I'm not upset at Fender Guitars for this in general, I'm not even really upset at Amazon. I mean, when it comes down to one unit in all of Amazon, I imagine it's not that uncommon for something to appear in an online inventory, and yet you can't actually track down the physical thing when someone places in order. You just can't figure out where it is and aware how somewhere that's got to happen. You know, fairly frequently the prevailing wisdom is that left handers make up about ten of the total population. Now that number is sometimes disputed. Some argue there are way more lefties than that, but the general consensus is that nine out of ten people are right handed. So if you are making products where handedness matters, it makes far more sense to dedicate your focus on the right handers. They make up the bulk of the population, they represent your primary customers, and that will guide many of your other decisions. For example, if what you're making requires mass production, you have to create an assembly process, and that assembly process needs to be as efficient as possible. Efficiency relates to cost, so the more efficient you are able to make the production process, the less it costs to make the thing you're making, and that means you can be competitive in your pricing. When you put your product up on the market against products from other companies. You need to charge more than it costs to make so that you can make a profit. You don't want to sell things at a loss typically, but you can also be competitive against those other companies that are also making whatever it is you're making. But this means your assembly process needs to be fine tuned toward that product. You can imagine that there is an ideal version of whatever it is you're making. This is the model you're working off of. This is what you're trying to replicate every single time. So your goal is to produce stuff like guitars that match that model as much as possible. And with guitars made from wood, this is actually impossible. You're never going to have two guitars come out exactly the same because there's going to be variations in the wood. You'll be able to see and maybe even feel minor differences from guitar to guitar, even in the same line, even produce just on the same day. But the goal is to get each guitar as close to this standard as you possibly can, and that means that the whole process needs to be precise, consistent, and easy to replicate. So the process works great as long as you're producing the same thing over and over. You'll get small variations, but in general you'll chug along and you'll build however many guitars as your facility can manage given the process of materials, as long as all these guitars require that same process, and that's where the left handed problem comes in. To make a left handed guitar, you need to flip everything a d eighty degrees. The string order is reversed, the headstock has to be flipped, the tuners will have to be on the opposite side of a right handed guitar. The controls like volume and tone, and the tremolo or wamy bar have to be on the opposite side. The pickguard has to be flipped. You get the idea. The real problem is you can't just flip a switch on the assembly line to go from right handed to left handed and have the whole process pop out ten left handed guitars for every one right handed guitars. It doesn't work that way. Instead, you either need a parallel assembly line just for left handed guitars, but that doesn't make much sense because you're never going to need to produce as many left handed guitars, or you have to retool your normal assembly process in order to occasionally produce some left handed models. Either way, producing a left handed guitar isn't as efficient as producing a right handed one, and that means it costs more to make. Now you could charge more for a left handed guitar, and some companies do, or you could resign yourself to the fact that you just won't make as much money selling a left handed guitar as you would selling a right handed guitar. Are either way, you're not likely to make that many left handed guitars, and it's important that you know I am not criticizing that decision. It makes no economic sense to produce left handed anything's in the same amount as right handed ones. You would never sell them all because there's just not enough left handers to make up the market. The same is true for all the different options you find with products like guitars. Sure, you could spend the time and effort necessary to provide the exact same options to lefties as you do to right ease, but there's a good chance you would end up with a lot of unsold stock. You might eventually move that unsold stock by selling products at a huge discount, but by then you could be looking at maybe breaking even or perhaps even selling them at a loss. It makes way more sense to just never make the ding dang durned things in the first place. So this means that left handers often have to make some compromises when it comes to technology. Either we have to make do with things that were made for right handers and find a way to make it work, or we are left with a limited number of options that pales in comparison to what is available for right handers. When we come back, we'll talk about how the more sinister among us have to navigate technology. But first let's take a quick break. Now. I'm not going to go into the history of how being left handed is or was a taboo in many cultures. That gets outside the realm of tech stuff. But it mostly comes down to how groups of people are pretty good at identifying individuals who do not fit the norm, and then they attempt to find ways to explain why that person is different in those ways often can end up being negative. Going into left handed technology is interesting because in some cultures the typical approach to dealing with left handers was to force them to perform tasks as a right hander, forcing people to write with their right hand even if they were left handed. You hear the story all the time, and this is not always easy for left handers. I mean, assuming you're not ambidexterous, I imagine there are things that you would find fairly simple to do with your dominant hand that become frustratingly difficult to do with your non dominant hand. I figured we'd start with a technology that I found quite vexing in my youth, a very simple technology, scissors. Let's talk about how scissors work. So scissors are a type of compound machine, and a compound machine is one that makes use of two or more simple machines. The six simple machines the class simple machines are the wheel and axle believer, the inclined plane, the pulley, the screw, and the wedge. Now, interestingly, the pulley, screw, and wedge are all extensions of the first three machines, and simple machines are intended to change the magnitude of a force or the direction of that force. A pair of scissors consists of two blades, which are essentially wedges, and that's one of the simple machines. They are also mounted in a cross shape around a fulcrum, and that turns the handles of the scissors into levers, another simple machine. So pushing the levers together brings the wedge blades together, and that's what allows you to cut stuff. Moreover, the process of squeezing the handles actually creates pressure that squeezes the blades together, not just up and down, but left and right, so there's a sort of pinching action happening between the blades that allows for a nice clean cut. That is, they do this if you happen to be using the scissors in the proper hand. If a left hander tries to use right handed scissors with their left hand, they will find that the blades tend to create a space between them as they close, so they close up and down, but there's a space left and right that allows whatever you're cutting to bend between the blades, which usually means you don't tend to cut anything at all, or if you do cut, you do so in a way where you're maulding whatever it is you're trying to cut. I can't tell you how many times I ended up with what looked like shredded paper instead of a nice clean cut. The squeezing action with the left hand just creates a force along that full crumb that moves the blades apart rather than squeezing them together. Now, left handers can attempt to compensate for this by creating a different force with their fingers, essentially pushing their thumbs and index fingers in a way to create that pinching force. You're forcing the blades together. The boy howdy, that is not comfortable. It hurts. Moreover, the position of the blades means that the top blade is always on the right side. You can flip the blades over, but that means the top blade is still on the right side. This actually makes it really hard for left handers to see what they are cutting if they're trying to cut with their left hand, because the blade is in the way. Left handed scissors have the top blade on the left side rather than the right side. That There are so called left handed scissors that don't do this, but they are left handed only in the sense that they have handles that have contours that better fit the left hand. But without changing that blade orientation, you really haven't solved the problem. You still can't really see what you're cutting, and you're still going to be forcing those blades apart from each other. Now. Fun fact, I never learned to use left handed scissors because when I was going to school, my school just didn't have any. I would use right handed scissors, either trying desperately to get them to work with my left hand or just giving up and using my right hand, knowing that whatever I was going to cut was going to look awful because of my lack of fine motor skills with my non dominant hand. For another common tool, one much more advanced than a pair of scissors, let us consider the computer mouse. Now, your typical computer mouse tends to have at least two buttons, one on the left and one on the right. There are ones that don't, they're the single button mouse types, like the ones that are used with certain max that kind of thing. But your typical computer mouse has at least two buttons, a left click and a right click, and they tend to be contoured in such a way the mouse is that they have a nice fit with the right hand. They don't fit the left hand the same way. They're just not contoured that way. And most programs tend to incorporate mouse commands by shifting important functions for the keyboard to the left side of that keyboard, so that way you've got the mouse in your right hand and your left hand remains free on the left side of the keyboard to do whatever other functions you need to do to navigate the program. Computer games tend to be a good example of how this plays out in favor of right ees. So take a first person shooter game like Doom. The mouse controls your point of view or your aim in the game. You use your mouse to direct your line of sight and thus where you have your big zappy gun pointed at any given moment so you can shoot all those little demon critters. Your character's movement maps typically to the WAZA keys, the W A S D keys, W being forward, S being backward, and A and D typically being strafe left and strafe right, respectively. In a shooting game, you need to have precise aim to compete at really high levels. If you watch some pro e sports players and you really pay attention to how fast and precise they are with their aim, it's incredible, and it requires a highly developed fine motor skill set with whatever hand you're using to aim. In contrast, your movement in these style of games is important, but typically does not need the same level of precision as aiming, so offloading movement to the non dominant hand isn't a huge problem. Left handers have it harder. If they're using a traditional right handed set up. They're aiming with their non dominant hand and thus they tend to be less precise and less accurate. Now I know that's the case with me, and of course I'm also older, so my reaction times are slowing down too. I guess what I'm saying is you really don't want me to be on your Overwatch team. There are left handed versions of the computer mouse out there, and the fact that we've gone to USB connections rather than the old PS slash two ports that computers and stuff like keyboards and mice used to depend on. We don't use those anymore, which that usually means you actually have more options of where you can connect stuff to your computer, so cable management isn't as big a pain in the neck because you typically have more options of where that USB cable can plug into. If the game developers thought it through, you might even be able to map your computer keys so that your movement stuff can go to a different set of four keys, such as I, J, K, L or the number pad. If you can't map keys, then it means the left hander has to deal with sitting in an odd way or positioning their keyboard in an offset way so that the right hand can control those W A, S, D keys. Now I used video games as my example. But of course the computer mouse is a standard input device for all sorts of PC programs. I'm the only left handed person in my family, so our computers at home all had a right handed set up, you know, right handed computer mouse and all that kind of stuff. Likewise, when I got to high school and they just started to offer classes using computers, all of those machines had a right handed mouse as well. Some of the programs would allow you to switch the mouse to a left handed mode, but really all that meant was that the left and right mouse buttons flipped what they did, so that a right mouse click was the equivalent to a right hander using a left mouse click. It didn't magically change the shape of the mouse or how it connected to the PC, so it might still not really be convenient. So as a result, I taught myself to use a mouse right handed early on. It wasn't that big a deal because most of the stuff I was doing didn't require lightning, fast reactions or anything, so I could take my time moving my wobbly little cursor to the right spot on the screen. A few times I tried to use a left handed mouse. I hated it because all the important keyboard functions were on the wrong side of the keyboard, and the user interface was clearly biased toward right handers. It was just more convenient, though less precise, to use my right hand on the mouse. Sticking with video games, let's talk about consoles for a second. The standard console controller these days has two thumbsticks, one for each thumb. The left thumbstick typically control stuff like movement. The right controls stuff like camera angle or aim, so again, the task that requires the most precise fine tuning goes to the right side. Some games do allow you to change this. That's nice, but it's a bit weird when you first do it, particularly since a lot of games also include platforming elements where you need to access controls that are mapped to the buttons on the controller. The buttons on most controllers are, you guessed it over, on the right side, so you have to take your thumb off the right stick to hit the buttons on the right side of the controller. If aim is going to the left thumbstick and movement is going to the right thumb stick, suddenly you can't jump and move at the same time because you have to take your thumb off the thumbstick, and it has to do all the work. You could conceivably buy a really expensive controller with stuff like extra paddles and trigger buttons and map things out to improve matters, but it's really hard to compensate for this design using just a standard controller, and not all games allow you to map controls like that. Now, I don't mean to suggest that being left handed immediately means a person is going to be bad at stuff like video games. There are left handed players out there who are amazing. Many have spent countless hours training their non dominant hand to do more finely tuned tasks, and they can compete at a professional level. But for a lot of us, these basic approaches to design stand as an extra challenge we face on top of whatever it is we actually want to do. Now. I mentioned UI or user interface a moment ago. The user interface of a technology is exactly what it sounds like. It's the method by which a user interacts with the technology. It includes not just the physical interaction, such as the keyboard and mouse of a PC, or the touch screen of a smartphone or the controller for a video game console. It also includes the actual design of the software and how things are laid out, and sometimes developers will build it in a system that just favors right handedness in more subtle ways. For example, I can't tell you how many on screen smartphone keyboards I've used that become a total hassle because I would be using my left hand and I would hit keys a little to the left of center, and the keys really designed to be hit a little to the right of center. I've practiced using my right index finger to try and type things out much more smoothly then if I were to use my left hand. But I am left handed. I want to use my left hand. I'm faster at it, it's more comfortable, at least it would be, but I have to end up thinking about aiming a little to the right of where I think I need to go in order to hit the key I want. Otherwise I'm just getting typos and nonsense all the time. This sort of bias in design can be found in a lot of other places too. For example, the typical student desk tends to have a shape that caters to right handers. Often there's a place for the right arm to rest while the student is writing, whereas on the left side of the desk it's typically open, so if you're a lefty, you're writing with no support for your left arm. And when I went to high school, they had just switched over to these asymmetric desks and they had more surface area on the right side. So that's great. If you're a right hander, you're notebook is supported, you can just right that way. But as a lefty, it meant that I had to twist a bit in my seat just to write stuff down. Even note books are laid out in a way that work better for right handers than left handers, at least for those of us in the Western hemisphere who are writing left to right. The binding of the notebook is on the left side. Now that's not in the way if you're a right hander, but if you're a lefty, then you've got that binding to deal with, which means you're either contorting yourself to work around it, or you're starting a good deal further into the page than your right handed counterparts are. Curse you notebook bindings. For that reason, when I use notebooks, I typically either flip them upside down or I flip them over and I start from the back and I work my way forward that way. The binding is on the right side. I still right left to right, but now the spiral of rings is on the right hand side and they don't get in my way. Now. So far, most of the off I've mentioned has been frustrating, but ultimately not really that big a deal. Yeah, it's not fun to compensate to interact with a world that was designed for people who aren't like you. But for the most part, the examples I've used are fairly benign. But just you wait, we'll be right back after this short break. Left handers aren't strangers to facing struggles using technology meant for right handers. And when we're lucky, someone has created a left handed version for us to use. When we're really lucky, that left handed version works just as well as the right handed one does when we're crazy lucky. Whatever it is we're doing with that left handed tool doesn't otherwise have handedness entering into the picture. But now we're gonna talk out chain saws. Yeah, chainsaws. These are really useful and potentially extremely dangerous, and their design favors right handers, which means that for people like me, they become much more potentially dangerous tools. Now chainsaw has two handles. One is at the very rear of the chainsaw. That's where the throttle control is, and that's meant for the dominant hand. Really, it's meant for the right hand. And then there's a front handle, and typically that's an arc that goes along the top and side the left side of the chainsaw. It's meant for the left hand to be there to help guide the chainsaw. Many chainsaws have that front handle join with the body of the chainsaw itself close to the top right side of the device, which means that even if you wanted to hold it as a left hander, you would be very limited and where your right hand could go, they couldn't go all the way to the edge because that where the are the handle actually joins the body of the chainsaw. But if you're holding the chainsaw with your right hand on the rear handle, there's plenty of space for your left hand to hold onto the front handle. That gives you lots of different options for grips when you need to use the chainsaw on different orientations, But typically you just don't have that level of versatility on the right side of the front handle. So if you were to try and hold it left handed, you would already be facing some limitations and controls really important when you've got a whirling chain blade right in front of you. You want that dominant hand on the back to control the overall motion of the chainsaw and to deal with any kickback you might have. The non dominant hand is really meant to use to to guide the specific angle of attack of the chainsaw. Chainsaws typically have a guard that's called a chain break, like a brake, like a kind you would have in a car, and that's mounted in front of the front handle. The chain break is essentially a lever that, if it gets pushed beyond a fail point, will cut off power to the blade. So let's say that you're using the chainsaw. The chainsaw bucks back so that the blade is now arcing up so it would be coming towards your head. The lever is positioned in such a way that it will make contact with the back of your leading hand, your left hand, and it will trip that lever, cutting off power to the blade. That's the idea. The problem here is that if you're using it the other way around, with your left hand on the rear handle, your right hand might not be in the right position to really engage with that chain break, so if something bad happens, there may be no way to stop it. That's not great. Or you could be operating it as a right hander, but it means your non dominant hand is the one that's trying to control the overall motion of the blade. That's not a great option either. Now I have as chainsaws a few times, I've always had to revert to using them as if I were right handed, which in my mind, is the least bad of all the different options I had in front of me. And this is just one example of a power tool that is designed to be used by right handers. Pretty Much every tool is biased toward being right handed. Either the tools are contoured in a way where they fit the right hand but not the left, or they operate in such a way that you really need to be using them in your right hand, or the line of sight doesn't really work unless you're using it with the right hand dominant side. Whether it's a table saw or a drill press or a power drill, a lot of these tools just work best if they're operated by a right hander, and at worst they can be dangerous if they are operated any other way. The same thing is true with firearms. Now. I am not a gun guy. I have not fired any type of firearm in a really long time, but if I did, I'd likely be frustrated by the lack of options for me. Most handguns that have an external safety catch place that on the left side of the gun, so that your right thumb can easily disengage the catch whenever you are ready to actually fire the handgun. But if you're holding this in your left hand, the catches on the opposite side of the gun from where your thumb rests, it's no longer where you can easily disengage it. Many rifles are designed specifically to use with the butt of the stock up against your right side. They expend spent casings out the right side of the firearm, so they're away from the shooter. If you were to try and fire left handed, you would be dealing with this, and it would make the experience less safe for you and as well as less safe for anyone who happens to be around you. It's not great. Now there are manufacturers that make ambidextrous models of firearms, meaning that at least in theory, they can be fired either by a right hander or a left hander with no real difference in performance. And then there are a few that will make left handed models of certain firearms, but these tend to be more expensive than the exact same models that were made for right handers, for much the same reason that it's hard to find good options for left handed guitars. That being, the manufacturing process has been streamlined to create a certain type of product in a very particular way, and that process works great when that's all you want to do. But if you want to do anything besides make the exact same product with the exact same orientation, that assembly line cannot really accommodate that. So yeah, we left handers need to make do, or maybe spend more money so that we don't have to make do. Now, there is a small, nearly cottage industry business of creating left handed versions of many common utensils, tools, and gadgets. For left handers, there are left handed can openers, for example, since using a right handed can opener is tricky and at best of pain in the well the hands, I guess. For left handers, there are rulers that have measurements that go from right to left, which is useful if you're a lefty and you want to draw a line that is a precise length. Otherwise, my mo was to start at the end result and work back at zero. So if I needed to draw a three inch line, I would start on the three inch mark and then draw toward the zero because then it was just easier for me to see what I was doing. There are left handed cork screws because it's easier to use because the twisting motion ends up being counterclockwise rather than clockwise. There are left handed measuring cups and left handed playing cards. These have markings on the opposite side of where you would find them on the right handed version or the standard version. The products are otherwise identical to right handed whatever's right right. A left handed measuring cup is exactly the same as a right hand measuring cup, except the markings are on the opposite side of the cup. That's it. For that wonderful little flip, you're gonna be paying a premium, I mean, like sometimes a crazy premium. You might see a measuring cup that would cost five bucks end up being a twenty dollar cup because it was a left handed one. So yes, there is a certain selection of common tools and utensils that you can find in a left handed orientation. They typically cost more than the right hand version for the reasons that I've given already, and sometimes they don't even work as well as the right handed versions because sometimes they're just made by right handers. But if you look, you can often find them. So being left handed in a world that has largely been designed by an for right handed people isn't always easy or even safe. There have even been numerous studies that suggest that left handers may have a lower life expectancy than right handers, not because we are somehow inherently less healthy, but perhaps because we might be a little more accident prone than right handers. You know, maybe we're using those right handed chainsaws in a way that is most assuredly going to result in catastrophe. There are a lot of little tasks that just become a touch harder for the poor lefties of us out there. All that being said, I chose this topic not just a grouse about how irritating it is to be left handed sometimes, though again that was a big part of it, but to show how this is just one way that bias can have an impact on a population. In this case, I'm talking about handedness, and it's pretty obvious that most of the time the bias against left handers isn't malicious. It's not intentional. It's not like right handers are trying to wipe out the left handers by creating stuff like can openers or pencil sharpeners or chainsaws that really only operate properly if they're used as a right handed way. They're just making stuff that works for them. And that's one of the really insidious things about bias. It doesn't have to be an intentional, malicious thing. When engineers are building something, they want to make something that works, and you have to consider what the problem is and how you intend to solve that problem, and then you design that solution. And many times engineers are looking at problems from their own perspectives, but not from the perspective of someone who is not like them, And for that reason, we sometimes get technologies that work really great if you happen to match the same general demographic and perspective as the engineer who made it, but not so great if you don't. This becomes an enormous issue with stuff like accessibility, where people who might be differently abled are trying to use technology, Those who have challenges with hearing or vision or what have you might find it extra difficult to make use of certain technologies because those technologies depend rather heavily upon faculties that the differently abled may not possess, or at least may not possess to the same degree. And so a gadget that an able bodied person might think is life changing could be completely useless in the hands of someone else. And it doesn't always have to be that way. Designing things with accessibility in mind presents new challenges, no doubt about that. But that's what engineering is all about. It's about overcoming challenges. Moreover, it means more people can directly benefit from the solutions that engineers create, and bias can emerge in lots of other ways. I've recently had shows where I've mentioned bias in the design of systems that you use artificial intelligence and machine learning. If you train a system using a data set that is biased, the end result will reflect that bias. For example, if you train an image recognition system to identify a face and you only train the system using a data set that includes photos of white people, that system could have problems working when you feed in pictures of people who aren't white. We've seen this happen with some pretty awful results. More than a few facial recognition systems have shown to work well when they're identifying white people, but not well whenever trying to identify people of color. That bias leads us to a technological kind of racism that has real world effects and consequences, much worse effects than the little frustrations I've encountered as a left handed person. I can't even begin to understand how that all plays out in a day to day life, except to know that it's just worse than what I have to cope with. So that's really the message of this episode. It's not that we need more left handed strato caster guitars, though that is also true. We do need them, more specifically, I need them even more specifically. I just need one, really, and it's gonna be a while before I can justify buying a silver burst left handed strato caster, So get on that fender. No, the real message of this episode is that the purpose of technology, when you really get down to it, is to make our lives better. But that's only true if we're designing technology that addresses the needs of people in general, not subsets of people or through excluding groups of people. Whether you are designing a physical gadget or an app or whatever, it is important to step outside of yourself and to think about how people who are different from you will be accessing and experiencing the use of that technology. It could be that with just a few tweaks, you could turn what was a decent idea into a world changing one. I plan on doing more episodes like this one, and I hope to get some women on this show to talk about how the tech world has tried to cater to women in various ways, sometimes successfully and perhaps way too frequently, sometimes in colossal failures. Just look at all the pink stuff. But I think that that is really a related issue, particularly in an industry that is still dominated by male designers and engineers and executives. It's a problem that we have to confront and fix in order to make stuff that really works for everybody, or at least works for the intended audience, because otherwise you just get a bunch of you know, knuckle headed guys saying, you know, I think women like pink things. Let's make it pink. That's so not cool. Anyway. This is an issue that obviously goes beyond technology, but we see it really with laser focus in the tech world over and over again. That's why I wanted to bring it up, and I brought up the left handed perspective because it's one I can speak to directly. It's one that I have experience, and I can acknowledge that while it can be frustrating, it's nothing like what other people go through all the time in their day to day lives. So that's it for this episode. More of a kind of abstract approach to technology, but one I think is important and our goal, I think should always be to create technologies that work for as many people as possible, to improve things as much as possible, and not just to you know, throw in a feature because you think it's cool, or to throw in a feature and call it accessibility in order to have a little box checked off of your to do list. That's not good enough. If you guys have suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, whether it's a specific technology, maybe it's a company, maybe it's a person in tech, maybe it's a theme, let me know. Reach out on Twitter. The handle is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tex Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.