The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Nix:

Best of luck. Good thing it seems to be 'only' seizures (which can be really nasty and can lead to strokes and haemorrhages themselves, so good thing antiseizure meds are being given).

(it seems to be the day for awful news. I just learned yesterday that my mother has a huge 8x12cm malignant tumour in her pancreas. Not metastasised and apparently resectable, but still, she's not immortal anymore.)

I'm going to spend Halloween evening at a Steve Reich concert :) It's about as far from spooky as you can imagine (but could be considered haunting).

I too just have a normal seasonal cold.

Unfortunately it's my fourteenth this year (I think: I may have missed a few).

I went through a two-month-long period of intermittent sort-of-fasting last year (three periods of no solid food, the longest approximately a week and a half long). I'm not really sure you can call these 'fasts' as they were medically essential -- my digestive system had essentially jammed. Even keeping my blood sugar levels up with lucozade and fruit juices and the like, after a couple of days it was impossible to concentrate on anything, and after a couple more anything approaching rational thought became pretty much impossible. Oh, and you soon start smelling like something dead, as well. Really attractive.

I can easily imagine someone in that sort of condition doing all sorts of horrifically dangerous things simply because they weren't thinking clearly enough to realise they were dangerous, and were weak enough, from hunger and heat, not to want to get up and walk out anyway, even ignoring the social pressures, assuming they were even conscious.

(I was lucky: I was at home, not in a sweat lodge, and I knew this was not normal, not good and not remotely voluntary, so I took no risks at all and didn't engage in any strenuous activity --- other than the risk of not eating, which I judged to be less risky than the risk of exploding. I never ever want to undergo anything like this again. Voluntary fasting is for people who've never had to cope with the involuntary kind.)

Panic attacks: allow me to third (fourth?) the suggestion of concentrating on your breathing. I'm extremely prone to them (had one on the Tube on Thursday and one when my primary server decided to stop booting at 00:30 on Saturday morning) and in both cases focusing on breathing saved me. It doesn't need to be deep: normal will do. But just concentrate on it: constant, unchanging, continuing no matter how horrible everything else may be.

(Of course if *that* isn't true you have bigger problems.)

You said it, sister. (Better than I could have said it, but that's exactly what I've been thinking for years.)

I *have* managed to renegotiate contracts between me and big corporations that happened to be my employer, but only because I had already made myself irreplaceable to them. I've never otherwise managed to influence any corporation in any way at all. I wonder if individuals *can* do it? I suspect that threatening them with embarrassment in the media is the only method that works consistently, and even that doesn't work in countries with supine media, like the US, or countries with insane libel laws, like the UK.

Giacomo @#33: The NHS is excellent and wonderful and employs my sister and has saved my life twice at enormous cost to it and none to me, but 'I think 40%+ of the active population works for it' is certainly untrue: that would make it by far the largest employer on Earth, and while it's close, it's not there. The last figure I heard was somewhat over a million people (Wikipedia says 1.3 million as of 2005). The UK has more than three million people active in the workforce! :)

Bruce@#79, there are leaks in FF, but not many. The majority of the effects you see are probably normal caching (it has to store all those millions of tabs somewhere until you close them) and heap fragmentation, which is pretty much impossible to fix as long as FF is written in C++ (or any other language that uses raw pointers extensively, as this prevents motion of fragmented regions).

abi@126, yes, large supermarkets are a vision of Hell. I think it's the combination of high crowding, fluorescent lighting, and long monocoloured aisles with massive visual detail on the 'walls' (shelves).

Unfortunately I can't use your nifty "avoid wearing glasses" trick because if I take my glasses off I can barely tell that other people have heads, let alone that they're, say, looking at me. (-9.0, -9.5, astigmatic). albatross@146's suggestion of noise-cancelling headphones is one I agree with strongly: stick the _Art of Fugue_ on there and the world goes away. :)

David@135, object separation loss sounds far more peculiar than anything I've been hit with. Of course amblyopia doesn't help here, and pretty much means I never get depth perception anyway (think 'permanent uncorrectable double vision').

Paula@137, you're misreading essentially everything I said in an apparent attempt to turn it into a personal attack on you. It isn't. David@#147 has it right, as ever: I was using 'we' as a reference to 'people on the autistic spectrum'. So therefore it's quite unsurprising that you consider that most of my comments don't apply to you. That was the point of them: I was trying to explicate differences, not point out similarities.

(Your claim that RMS has 'no social graces' particularly shows up the immense amount of structured knowledge that this requires. Of course he has some social graces. He doesn't eat people without cooking them first and he knows enough to get dressed before going out of the house. What he doesn't have is the advanced social modelling skills typical of normal humans. You might consider this pedantry but it's actually significant: without hardwired social-animal neural assistance *you would be like that too*. You could consider high-functioning autistics to be a real-world experiment to determine what humans would be like if they had to figure out all social matters via rational thought. It's humbling how bad we are at it. Hardwired neurological machinery is *much much* more efficient than conscious thought...)

Randolph@#141, arguing over Paula's language? Not intentionally. I didn't think I was arguing at all, more agreeing and saying 'hey, this is how it is for me, look, weird alien in your midst'.

My understanding is that *reasoning about empathy* is hard for most people. Actually having it seems to be largely automatic (at least within your ingroup: extending that ingroup until it encompasses everyone seems to be what some people don't bother with).

abi@#152, precisely. If anything my problem is the opposite of the typical six-foot-male problem: with an assertive sister and mother who are dramatically smarter and more competent than myself, I have a tendency to assume that all women are similarly smarter and more competent than all men (even though I know this is as fallacious as the other assumption). Combine this with shyness and I must have been thirty before I could exchange two words with a member of the opposite sex without stammering into incomprehensibility. So, no, if anything I'm a 'reformed female chauvinist pig' despite being male.

Paula@896: I see it more as failure to acknowledge female as human and a basic lack of respect

See, here you're making a basic category error. You're assuming (by implication) that people see other people as 'humans *like them*'. This is a delicate balancing act --- you have to recognise that other people have feelings just like yours *yet* are not just like you (for one thing, they're not necessarily interested in the same things you are, they don't necessarily have the same knowledge base, and so on).

For a normal person this is trivial, you probably don't even have to think about it. It took me perhaps a quarter of a century to stop oscillating between the poles of 'nobody but me is really human so I can ignore them completely unless they impinge on my goals' and 'everyone is a person with the same interests as me'. Even now, figuring out *which* components of my mindstate can be mapped onto someone else, and how, requires considerable thought and can't be done in realtime.

So it's not a failure to acknowledge female as human: it's a failure to realise that other people are like yourself yet not.

Another trap we fall into is to pick up techniques that we've seen normals use to ingratiate themselves with each other, and try them ourselves. So far, so normal: but we do it in a totally tone-deaf way, applying them largely at random at first and trying to derive rules of application from the result. Many of these techniques are apparently severely context-sensitive (which is tricky to figure out on its own: for the first few years it just seemed random what worked and what didn't), and we often can't determine the correct context to use them, or even what parts of human behaviour constitute the context. e.g. RMS's odious comments would not have been out of place in some all-male gatherings, although not the sort I'd expect RMS to go to. God knows where he picked them up, but apparently the 'use around females will lead to offense' rule wasn't succesfully derived. I suspect I can only do it because I have a sister, so I have a mental role model based on decades of observations to run things like this past.

So you see words like 'respect' are somewhat inappropriate here. In any case, respect-as-a-fellow-human-being is a rather abstruse emotion: I can feel it but I don't always know how it's supposed to influence my behaviour. (I tend to use the word 'respect' almost entirely to indicate that someone has done things that make me consider her better than I am in some area, and thus worth learning from.)

David@866, 'near-continuous overload' describes my life very well as well. Thankfully I'm not depression-prone so I can just keep on doing this forever :)

Friendship with older people seems to be an Asperger's constant: for me, many years younger works too but that's probably seen as creepy in this society.

I've also noticed visual abnormalities under social stress which nobody else has ever mentioned to me: my edge detector goes into overdrive, so everything seems to have more prominent edges than before. (Illness does this too.)

I'm going to stay out of the gender-balance stuff because as a lifelong bachelor programmer I have absolutely no right to say anything in it, other than that better gender balance in the field would be truly wonderful (though it might drive down the average skill level: I have trouble thinking of any women I've worked with who weren't at least competent, and most have been excellent: I wish I could say that of the men).

Mike@#63: my best moment programming probably came when a simple automated testcase took... longer than I thought to run, and then the entire shared development server started to slow down, and then oops that testcase seems to have eaten 14Gb of RAM growing at 1Gb/10s let's kill it *now*. 'Twas a race condition causing a rare error path to become extremely common in obscure circumstances and a 16-byte memory leak on that path... both bugs that had existed for years. (Both summarily fixed, of course, and resource limits imposed on the testing suite after kicking myself for not doing it earlier.)

Ten minutes later $GIANT_EX_DUTCH_BANK called, saying that things were running awfully slow: they'd hit the same combination of bugs! Ten years of trouble-free use, and then this bites twice in an hour. I felt oddly guilty: it was obviously a genuine Schroedinbug.

David Harmon, you've said everything I'd have said if I wasn't a) too shy to post and b) stuck with a web browser that hates web pages this size.

I've found it a lot easier to talk to people now my hormones are calming down in my mid-thirties: I can treat them as 'human beings of nonspecific gender' more easily, and turn off all that annoying biology stuff (yes, it is annoying, it's never done me a blind bit of good).

One thing that perhaps needs to be emphasised is that a huge proportion of an Aspie's life is *stress management*. I don't bother with any kind of social life and try to work from home whenever possible simply because the alternative is constant stress --- and we're talking the degree of stress that takes hours to days of just sitting there shaking to get rid of, just from, say, travelling on the Tube or meeting a single person, even if that person is charming.

Hence my friendship formation rate has been constant at perhaps one per decade, and is unlikely ever to rise. The chances of ever finding anyone suitable at a rate of one per decade are... low, especially when you miss every single damn signal other than extreme emotional state changes until hours later (at best: sometimes days to years later). So I too don't bother with the romance game, to my parents' chagrin. (Alas I have the standard human desire for offspring, but 'dreams die in every life' and it's not as if the world is short of people.)

(For comparison from my position deep in the full-blown Asperger's zone, my current social skills at the age of 33 are approximately equivalent to a twelve- or thirteen-year-old's. Reading body language? A normal eight-year-old can outdo me. But I can outdo the eight-year-old at attention to detail and C coding, dammit. :) )

Struggling with unmentionable desires? Want to understand the natural world better? Phillip Mann's The Eye of the Queen (a more different book from The Honor of the Queen, referenced above, could not be imagined).

Switching to short fiction, want help staking that mining claim in a distant locale? Terry Carr's The Dance of the Changer and the Three.

Hell, instead of any of a myriad postmortems of the financial crisis, _How Much for Just the Planet?_ (specifically, the immortally brilliant _Percentages of Trade_).

Jules@#10, there are self-help books that teach you how to improvise explosives? Where?

Serge@#105: sounds like an imitation of Chesterton's immortal _The Man Who Was Thursday_, in which every single member bar the chairman of the central anarchist's council turned out to be an undercover police officer investigating the others. (Anarchists, the terrorists of their day, who actually succeeded in killing several governmental figures and royals and, oh yes, a decade or so after they'd become passe, possibly starting World War I. I doubt the terrorists will ever do anything so impressive.)

Ken, if the python stuff is one single python instance trying to multithread, then I'd expect exactly what you're seeing. Python's interpreter is largely single-threaded: most things grab the dreaded Global Interpreter Lock, so anything CPU-bound is going to be CPU-bound on one thread only.

Python is a lovely language, but its interpreter is intentionally really simple, and this is one of the places where that shows.

Joann @#31, there are other people like that? I had no idea. I thought uncomfortable-with-phones was a me-specific thing: I haven't encountered any other antiphonists before.

I'm particularly bad at leaving messages for machines: I have no idea why, as the machine has no social expectations of me and I spend my entire day negotiating with machinery far more complex than an answering machine. But nonetheless it is so.

Sanity at the INS, Paula? I doubt it. Try fear.

'We have *how* many Senators asking why this lady doesn't have her visa renewed? Do it. Now. Before we get our appropriations slashed.'

Comment statistics for Nix on the Making Light blog

Total: 165 comments. View all these comments on a single page.