OTTAWA—About 40 years ago, I found myself at the Calgary Stampede and spent a couple of hard-earned, oil-patch dollars at a carnival booth that used a machine to examine handwriting and graph a line against a number of personal attributes. When the machine was graphing my line above “procrastinate” it went so high that it flipped off the edge of the page and the ink-filled needle could not get back on the card to finish the analysis. I was left with an unintended piece of modern art and no idea how I ranked on the last six personality traits.