Random Thoughts

The Autism Blogs Directory has approximately 1,000 blogs, websites, and forums representing autistic bloggers, family members, professionals, and other disability-related bloggers. It's grown so large that as blogs move up on the feed with new posts, I'm often surprised by a new-to-me blog (yes, Kathleen and I add them all manually, but I don't always get to read everyone and there's no way I could read every blogger anymore). Our directory continues to grow, with a handful of blogs being added each week. The diversity in bloggers is often astounding to me, and never more so as we…

I got a private message from Gerhard Adam which went "I'm getting used to being called a moron, etc. but why do they have to pick on the cowboy hat?" Why indeed?  Hats used to be cool but they don't even wear them on "Mad Men" any more.  Hats are out of vogue even on fake romanticized shows about our past. The official Science 2.0 hat from this day on. We shouldn't hate the hat.  I mean, to do so is a downward spiral culturally. Consider the case of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old Florida high school student who was shot and killed Feb. 26th. He apparently died because he was…

I hear "yeah, but" all day long. I hear it from students at school. I hear it from my children. I read it and see it all over the internet; from autism-land to politics, we have become a nation of YeahButs. And it's enough. "Yeah, but" is ALWAYS an excuse for avoiding accountability, and it's not okay. It's not okay for students to fail to show up prepared for class or with late work and offer me a "yeah, but" as to why they didn't take the course seriously and in an attempt to avoid the very real consequences that happen when work isn't done. It's absolutely not okay for my children to ever…

The Being Human conference was held yesterday, March 24th, at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Part of its description is " insights from science and philosophy shed new light on the processes of human experience – the how of feeling, thinking, and believing – and invite us to redefine who we are as human beings." Sounds like philosophy, right?  Worse, maybe New Age philosophy. Nope, this was good stuff and I am pleased to say I got to watch this event evolve from the beginning - because I have long wanted to do a real Science 2.0 conference (i.e., not some conference where…

The sounds of mowers (ours among the others) can be heard from where I sit inside in my recliner, hiding behind my laptop, trying to ignore the chaos that surrounds me. The kids have gone quiet in their rooms; I can no longer hear peals of laughter, squeals of delight and the rush of their running feet as they run from room to room, wrapped in their play. I've separated them each to their various rooms to clean, and doors have slammed shut, hiding any noise of electronics I failed to confiscate before demanding they de-tornado their rooms. I've been up for hours, wandered through blogs, read…

There is nothing like computer-assisted post-mortem analysis of your chess games to get you back to reality about the potential of your brain: the computer sees so much more than you do, and so much quicker, that you can't help throwing your hands up sometimes. It is the case of the game I played yesterday during a team chess match in Cavarzere. My team won the match 3-1, but I only drew my own game. Upon getting back home and checking an opening book, I was satisfied to see that I had found all the right moves in a opening variation unknown to me. But then I looked a bit further using a…

Let's be honest, if you are a Republican, you don't care about the environment because you received your own oil well when you registered to vote.  And you like vampire babies. So you do not care about the emissions of your yacht. But if you are a rich Democrat, things are a little dicier.  Buying pretend carbon offsets for a 29,000 square foot house can only get you so far. If you want to own a superyacht too, that's a lot of liberal guilt to agonize over. What to do? The free market - that thing progressives hate - ironically has a solution to the problem; the 130 foot Ocean…

Max Lugavere, founding producer and host for Current TV, the Emmy winning cable network started by Al Gore, started a column on Psychology Today and came up with this gem.(1) He writes that he saw a piece by Nick Cox, a writer living in Cambridge, MA, called How To Be Emotionally Stable Without Getting Bored and liked it so much he...put it to music. Well, sort of to music.  He plays a guitar with it but the piece he is singing is over 1,300 words long. In a verse/verse/chorus/verse/chorus world, this is more like what would happen if Shel Silverstein, Tom Waits and  Ed…

We grieve in our own ways and in our own time. Some of us push the losses into the dusty recesses of our mind and refuse to go there. Some of us cannot and remain in the immediacy of the loss, continually bombarded with it so that we are sucker punched throughout the day. I've struggled with our latest loss, Frankie, and was only able to make a joke this week, regarding freeze-drying him an attack position. My struggle, my pain, though, has not been nearly as heart-rending as Rosie's grief over both Frankie and Ib the last five weeks. She cries nearly every day, and while she doesn't stay…

"To her who appears in the sky    to her who appears in the skyI want to address my greeting    to the hierodule who appears in the skyI want to address my greeting    to the great queen of heaven, Inanna [ancient Sumerian name for Venus]I want to address my greeting    to her who fills the sky with her pure blaze    to the luminous one    to Inanna        as bright as the sun    to the great queen of heaven." An ancient Sumerian hymn to Venus, written by…