(no subject)

[gfish]

Terrifying idea that just came up in conversation after dinner: left-handed CDs. I decided it was a spec pushed by the Soviet Union in order to be assholes, like that horrible 'metric inch' system.

Comments

[corivax.livejournal.com]

A Russian physics teacher was responsible for teaching me the left-hand-rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_hand_rule) i, j, and k.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

Of course, cross-products and all other "vector" functions that depend on a right-hand or left-hand rule are really a different kind of object which just happens to also form a vector space with the same number of dimensions. There are vectors and cross-vectors, and the choice of relationship between them is arbitrary in the same way as the choice of i or -i as the square root of -1 is arbitrary.