Archive for February, 2010

Performance

Bill Wallauer is a videographer, a colleague of Jane Goodall.  Click here to read Bill’s observations of chimpanzees behaving in ways that are fascinating to consider.  Bill observes males displaying at waterfalls and in thunderstorms as individuals and groups transition into the sexual-display mode of communication.  Jane Goodall wrote a famous passage describing these events. “All at once Evered charged forward, leapt up to seize one of the hanging vines, and swung out over the stream in the spray-drenched wind.  A moment later Freud joined him.  The two leapt from one liana to the next, swinging into space, until it seemed the slender stems must snap or be torn from their lofty moorings.  Frodo charged along the edge of the stream, hurling rock after rock now ahead, now to the side, his coat glistening with spray.  For ten minutes the three performed their wild displays while Fifi and her younger offspring watched from one of the tall fig trees by the stream...[Read More]

Andrew Lehman on 03/10/10 | No Comments | Read More

Cost Accounting

Fellow contributor Clay is happily bemused this week over at Comet’s Corner, reflecting on his recent release from some of the lifelong difficulties that finally led to his late-life diagnosis of au...[Read More]

Mark Stairwalt on 02/26/10 | 5 Comments | Read More

Uncharted Territory of Autism

We all do it, to some extent anyway.  Whether we're neurotypical or neurodiverse, we find it easier to say things that we've already said.  When President Obama gives a speech, I'm sure that he prac...[Read More]

Clay on 02/25/10 | No Comments | Read More

Speed of Information

Light moves at a speed of 186,000 miles per second.  Speed as a concept is also integral to biology.  I hypothesize that the speed with which information passes between the two cerebral hemisphe...[Read More]

Andrew Lehman on 02/24/10 | 3 Comments | Read More

Lifting Veils

There is this thesis that I’ve been playing with.  Like the experience physics theorists have described, it seems too beautiful to not be true.  Nevertheless, Stephen J. Gould has described th...[Read More]

Andrew Lehman on 02/22/10 | No Comments | Read More

Covert Ops in Autistic Self-Advocacy

Pandemic autism that’s hidden in plain sight, an autistic spectrum populated overwhelmingly by undiagnosed fellow travelers and autistics-in-hiding—if this is an accurate description of autism’s...[Read More]

Mark Stairwalt on 02/19/10 | 4 Comments | Read More

Autism, Diet and Sexual Hormones

I’m still trying to grasp the concept that testosterone and estrogen and their associated hormones are together managing ontological, social and biological evolution by adjusting to changes in t...[Read More]

Andrew Lehman on 02/18/10 | No Comments | Read More

Autism and Societal Individualism

"The highest concern of all the mythologies, ceremonials, ethical systems, and social organizations of the agriculturally based societies has been that of suppressing the manifestations of individuali...[Read More]

Andrew Lehman on 02/17/10 | No Comments | Read More

What Darwin Never Knew

Here's a link to an excellent PBS Nova show I saw the other night.  It's nearly 2 hours long, 1 hr 51 min, but I hope those who are interested will find time today or over the long weekend to watch i...[Read More]

Clay on 02/15/10 | No Comments | Read More

Meeting the Extended Family

[caption id="attachment_1325" align="alignleft" width="315" caption=""Note," she said, "that the Rolling Pin is on top.""][/caption] I’ve never been able to take in the big pi...[Read More]

Mark Stairwalt on 02/12/10 | 1 Comment | Read More

Creoles, Aboriginal Identity and Autism

“We have now surveyed a wide range of creole structures across a number of unrelated creole languages.  We have seen that even taking into account the, in some cases, several centuries of time th...[Read More]

Andrew Lehman on 02/11/10 | No Comments | Read More

Hybrid Vigor and Autism

On page 575 of the May 1 issue of Science there is an article, “Africans’ Deep Genetic roots Reveal Their Evolutionary Story.” Examining the blood of 3,194 Africans from 113 populations, res...[Read More]

Andrew Lehman on 02/9/10 | 1 Comment | Read More

Open Letter to Joel Johnson (Gizmodo)

Hi Joel – I’ve waited twelve years now to see the word “autistic” begin to come out of the closet in the tech world, but your otherwise dead-on post the other day about “iPad Snivelers”...[Read More]

Mark Stairwalt on 02/6/10 | No Comments | Read More

Rich Shull: HBO Temple Grandin Special

Rich Shull writes with an intensity that befits a man struggling to whittle a rapid-fire slide show of thousand-word pictures down to a sentence or two at a time. Mr. Shull is part of a longstanding o...[Read More]

Mark Stairwalt on 02/5/10 | 3 Comments | Read More

Corpus Callosums, Autism & Aboriginals

“I have found the midsagittal area of the corpus callosum to be larger in mixed and left handers, referred to as non-consistent-right-handers (nonCRH), than among CRH subjects (Witelson, 1985).  ...[Read More]

Andrew Lehman on 02/3/10 | No Comments | Read More

Autism, Asperger’s, and Chicken Broth

Anyone who has been in the online "autism community" for any length of time, whether they're autistics or parents, knows that there is a sort of person who trolls autistic advocates' blogs, and gives ...[Read More]

Clay on 02/2/10 | No Comments | Read More

Emergence of a Universal Language

There is a phenomenon in linguistics where language complexity is directly related to how isolated a particular language is from its neighbors.  A new language is difficult to learn for adults. ...[Read More]

Andrew Lehman on 02/1/10 | 1 Comment | Read More