[Buddha-l] First encounters of the Buddhist kind

[Richard Hayes]

Michael wrote,

> Hmmm.... I wonder how many Buddha-L members are lefties.

You mean politically? I think we discovered in a recent poll that quite a few 
buddha-hellians are lefties.

Or did you mean left-handed? I'm not, but about half of the people born into 
my family are. That statistical aberration is matched by the fact that 88% of 
the people born into the Hayes side of my family during the last six 
generations have been male. My grandfather had a sister. Neither his father 
nor his grandfather had any sisters. My father had no sisters. One of my 
thirteen Hayes cousins is female. And I have a daughter, as did one of my 
cousins. If you add up all the people born into my particular branch of the 
Hayes family in six generations, there are thirty males and four females. In 
other words, the odds are a lot better for being a leftie in my family than 
for being a female. I also hesitantly confess that the odds of becoming a 
fairly conservative Republican after being born into my family are about 12 
to 1. (Can you imagine what hell it is for me to go to a family reunion and 
to be surrounded by a bunch of left-handed ultra-conservative Republican 
males?)

Perhaps you can see now why I have little use for statistics.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico