Shameless Self-promotion Sunday
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 14 years ago, in 2010, on the World Wide Web.
This is going to be the last Shameless Self-promotion Sunday for the next couple of weeks, so let’s make it a good one.
As some of you already know, I’m going to spend the next week clearing the deck as well as possible, and then departing for a voyage to India. (I am visiting L. during the last two weeks of her study abroad; we’ll be visiting Kochi, Mumbai, Dehli, and a few points in between, and coming back together toward the end of September.) I’ll be almost completely incommunicado while I’m away; which means if you want to get Shameless, you’d better get while the getting’s good.
So what have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.
Gabriel /#
Sad to hear you will be incommunicado Radgeek, you are one of the most scintillating lib bloggers around.
After learning a friend of mine has been diagnosed with asperger’s syndrome I’ve been reading a lot on autism and how they perceive the world around them. The most striking things that stood out to me were the “rigidity” behaviors (i.e. stacking blocks, arranging cans, &c) as well as difficulties reading body language. The rigidity extends to thought and emotion as well: Many of them perceive the world in “black or white” terms, which can be problematic. For example, sometimes libertarians ask the question “Can you shoot someone invading your private property?”, and I wonder if the person asking this is autistic! Another example might be thinking that a conversation was either good or bad, but nothing in between. One account I found online stated he thought meeting an old friend had gone well, but his friend felt ill toward the end and had to leave. In his rigid, rule-based understanding this meant the outing was “bad”, i.e. his friend hadn’t had a nice time at all.
As for the second problem, that of body language and social communication, I wonder if it’s really true that more than 50% of communication is non-verbal? For example, anger or sadness might be communicated more through gesture and tone than actual word choice. How do you even begin to educate an autistic person who doesn’t understand gesture, posture, tone, or expression when you don’t even understand it yourself since it’s all mostly automatic? Do you suppose any of those “learn to read people’s body language” books are worth anything?
Have a great time in India!
Roderick T. Long /#
Rumor has it that there’s a wifi hotspot at the top of Mount Kangchenjunga — but only if you climb it barefoot and blindfolded.
Gary Chartier /#
I’ve been working on the presentation I’m supposed to give on October 15 at Libertopia. And I’ve been giving some thought to an article on intellectual property and natural law theory, which I’d like to finish before school starts in late September.
On Friday, Elenor and I explored the Sawdust Festival in Laguna—an annual source of pleasure in more than one way.