I'm special-er than I thought

...and not just because of my outstanding ability to turn a colorful phrase - because I'm left-handed! I remember hearing a while back somewhere that the ratio of left to right-handers is just a tad lower, but after a conversation with someone today at lunch I looked something up and found that the world's lefty population is around 10-13% or so - I knew that lefties were less frequent than righties, but I didn't think it was that lop-sided! Some of the other interesting factoids I found in my query:

• More men are left-handed that women.
  
• Although there are indeed more intelligent lefties than righties, there are also more learning disabled lefties including autism, Down's, epilepsy, dyslexia, retardation, etc, so things go both ways on that one. To illustrate this I embody both, as I am either a genius or a total retard depending on the situation and rarely am to be found anywhere in between.
• Twins are more likely to be lefty, and in the case of identical twins if one twin is then the other has a 76% chance of being lefty as well.
• Gay people may be as much as 39% as likely to be left-handed as straight people.
• In 2006, researchers at Lafayette College and Johns Hopkins University in a study found that left-handed men are 15% richer than right-handed men for those who attended college, and 26% richer if they graduated. The wage difference is still unexplainable and does not appear to apply to women.
• Left-handed people are always cooler than right-handed people. Honest!!! ;P

So the way the conversation went was that this guy at work was checking out my wicked sharp chopstick skills, as Japanese people like to do, and noticed that I was using my left hand. So apparently the guy sitting across from me was left-handed as well, but he uses his right hand with chopsticks and writing because that's the way he was taught growing up. I told him about how both my grandparents on my dad's side are righty and yet all 4 of their kids are lefties, which leads me to believe that they were also taught not to be lefties. I know that back in the day they used to teach lefties to do stuff righty in the US as well, and it's still said that with Chinese characters (which are known as kanji in Japanese) right-handers have a decided advantage in writing legibly because the strokes were designed to be written as such. I also reminisced about how when playing games in arcades as a kid I crossed my arms if I had to so the joystick was in my left hand.

Here's some more "leftist" reading for you:

Read me!