Minnesotans for Marriage: Thank you. (2012/11/07)
Thank you. I think it would have been entirely possible for the recent attempt at an anti-gay constitutional amendment to succeed. Minnesotans are, by and large, a little inclined to tradition, to a sort of comfortably midwestern view of family, to be cautious about change.
[read more...]Autistics Speaking Day: Predictably relatively quiet (2012/11/01)
So, there was some idea floating around that people ought to pick a day and not talk in honor of the communications difficulties faced by “people with autism”. Which, of course, helps cement the stereotype that we generally can’t communicate, and supports the idea that other people ought to speak for us. Which, it turns out, isn’t super popular with a lot of autistics, so some clever folks came up with the idea of Autistics Speaking Day. Of course. A lot of autistic people don’t particularly enjoy talking to strangers, or talking about themselves. Or are a little shy.
[read more...]Wow, thanks. It really is wonderful to be understood and appreciated. (2012/10/25)
Okay, this is a year old and all, but I only found it today. Apparently, according to someone who has letters after his name and is thus more important than I am, Teaching empathy to someone with autism/Asperger’s is almost like teaching a pig to sing - it is a waste of time and annoys the pig (at least most of the time).
[read more...]Standing room only... (2012/10/24)
I’ve seen one too many news stories about how it’s bad for us to sit all the time. I now have a standing desk. It’s a little wobbly, so I’ll have to add some supports to it, which means a hardware store trip. Planning to add four corner supports to it. Initial feedback, yes my feet hurt, but I feel otherwise quite a lot better. I’ve always liked to pace when thinking, and this gets me some of the benefits of pacing without the difficulty reaching the keyboard.
[read more...]Logic puzzle time! (2012/10/22)
Okay, so. There are three doors, two hiding goats, one hiding a car. You pick a door. The host now picks another door, revealing a goat. Should you switch? The answer is, of course, that if you switch, there is a one in three chance that you find the unexpected tiger.
Gricean Maxims, and why I have trouble with them... (2012/10/16)
A while back, I commented on Romney’s “Keep America American”. At least one person told me that I had given the impression that I thought that the people who liked this slogan were racists; this confused the heck out of me, because I thought what I said was that racists liked the slogan, and that I believe it was constructed the way it was in order to appeal to them.
[read more...]Burying cats: Humans are not sane. (2012/10/15)
Jesse’s cat Maya died today. She was 15ish. Our friend Aud had a cat named Penny, who also died today, so we dug them a grave. It turns out this is a lot of work. Our back yard has fairly dense dirt, full of rocks and tree roots, and it is really hard to get dirt out of a deep hole with a shovel. (We now own a shop vac.)
[read more...]Wow, I was a lot more pedantic ten years ago (2012/08/27)
I think one of the most useful things, for me, about knowing that I’m autistic is that it helps me give a slightly more useful evaluation to questions like “is this inaccuracy a serious lie or not”.
[read more...]Why I still think there's hope for humanity (2012/08/23)
On a forum I hang out on, someone mentioned that he was going to have to go to court and see the kid who had (inadvertantly) killed his wife. He was going there to plead for mercy. (Apparently, the kid looked down for a moment to set something down, looked up, saw a car, WHAM.) He chose to share with us the text of the speech he gave. Yeah, it’s full of typos. I put it to you that this is worth the time to read anyway.
[read more...]Discrimination: A quick math puzzle (2012/08/22)
Someone in a discussion recently conceded that people in meetings will often ignore a woman’s idea, but react positively to the same idea if a man offers it. This is moderately well studied. He then went on to point out that if this didn’t happen, things might not be better; after all, it wouldn’t be “twice as many people are talking and being listened to”, the meeting would still have the same amount of time and pick up the same number of ideas.
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