Archive for February, 2010

your dreams will be reduced down to breathing, and you will be grateful

The thing about not-being-a-person is: They will say those people and the price of being a person is to nod and agree that yes, those people aren’t people at all. They will have no idea who they are talking to. You yourself will start to forget, too. They will say a million small things that sow the seeds for violence done against you, and you will smile and let them. You will do math, constantly. How much do I want to be a person today? How much do I want this project to succeed? How much honesty can I afford? How much dishonesty will kill me? What is the cost of coming out? Is there a way to delay, soften, transmute? How long can I survive as half a person? Ever since the world ended ... I don't go out as much. People that I once befriended, just don't bother to stay in touch. Things that used to seem so splendid, don't really matter today. It's just as well the world ended -- it wasn't working anyway. Your dreams will be reduced down to breathing. [Read More]

on 03/5/12 | 2 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]

on 02/26/10 | 7 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]

on 02/25/10 | 1 Comment | 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]

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]

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]

on 02/19/10 | 5 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]

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]

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]

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

Meeting the Extended Family

I’ve never been able to take in the big picture at family reunions.  Between the carnival of overstimulation that comes with all that social interaction, and being the unacknowledged odd neurol...[Read More]

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]

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]

on 02/9/10 | 2 Comments | 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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