psychoceramics: Off-Topic, The Results

[nmcnelly @ acs.bu.edu (N.A.F. McNelly)]

Thanks to all of you who respond to my question.  Here's the promised
(not-very exciting) explanation of what it was all about.

On the Aztlan mailing list, someone made the same request that
I did here.  Two of the more statistically-minded listeros (I was one)
protested that the test was basically flawed.  Aztlan is made up of
people who have had a lot of exposure to Mayan sculpture and writing,
which made it easy to guess what the experiment was all about
before answering his questions.

The Mayans had a very strong tendency to draw faces in left-facing
profile (even the hieroglyphs that include faces are mostly drawn this way).
There are exceptions, but most of these involve cases where two
figures are facing each other, conversing, having sex (which they seem
to have done in a very uncomfortable position), etc.

So we needed some non-glyphers as a control group, and you were it.

The results:  Aztlan listeros and Psychoceramicists showed no significant
difference.  The pooled results were:

Right-handers:  76% drew profiles facing left, 24% right
Left-handers:  33% drew profiles facing left, 67% right
(Ambidextrous split 50-50, but there were too few to make a good sample).

The difference between right- and left-handers is highly statistically
significant.

Does this mean the Mayan scribes were all right-handed?  Not necessarily -
it could be that the lefties among them were just following the prevailing
style.  Still, it would seem to indicate that the majority of them were.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled looniness.
Thanks again,
Nancy
................................................................
Nancy McNelly                    |
                                 |        May the ta'ho'olob
http://www.he.net/~nmcnelly/     |       who voted for the CDA
Mayan hieroglyphic syllabary     |       tz'isob haway sotz'ob .