I am typing this on my phone with my left hand, as my right arm is attached to a plasma donation machine.

It's already more fuss than I'm comfortable with, even at once every 6 months frequency, let alone every fortnight.

And that's not including the (slightly) greater risk of side-effects.

I wonder if i will regret this.


Edit:
I don't remember feeling this crap after any whole blood donation. And it took two hours out of my day. And it was, if not painful, distinctly uncomfortable.

I don't think I'll be doing that again -- not fortnightly, six-monthly, or at all, TYVM.

Last night, about 19:15-ish

»Ringring ringring«

Heavy Indian accent: "Hello, my name is Florence, from the Maintenance Department of IT. Your computer is putting up a warning on the Internet from a Virus."
Mim: "Oh, really? What sort of warning?"
"Florence": "A warning about a Virus. We--"
Mim: "Yes, but what is the actual warning? My husband's a System Administrator, you see, so he can--"
"Florence": "-- and we can... I'm sorry, a what?"
Mim: "My husband is right here. He's a System Administrator: that's his job. I'm sure you can explain to him what the warning is."

Mim hands the phone to me.

Me: "Hello?"
Silence.
Me: "Hello? Are you there? I can't hear you. Hello?"
»click«

Queue Mim literally doing a happydance from pure glee.




Postscript: Today Mim got another phone call.

Heavy Indian Accent: "Hello this is Peter from Windows¹ IT and we have alerts from your computer."
Mim: "You guys tried this last night."
»click«




[1] there is a Windows computer in the house, as it happens. It's not connected to any networking. Nor has it been turned on in about ten months.

They hired some biologists for this, didn't they.

They also hired some linguists.

What does it say that I can watch this, and come out with grammar. (Na'Vi means "The People", and one of the first things I hear is Na'Vi'a, which is obviously the vocative case, and I wonder if Na' is the definite article.)

And yet... maybe they did too good a job. Because I notice patterns. The Na'Vi language is human... it can be pronounced by a human throat, it contains no alien sounds, no alien combinations, from the sounds of it a fairly normal human grammar. (It doesn't seem as alien as Klingon, or even Sindarin, for that matter.)

And then there are the Na'Vi themselves. There is a pattern with the body pattern: they are hexapedal, quad-ocular, their nostril analogues are where the chest and neck meet. And this is regular. Even the flying creatures have two sets of wings and a pair of legs.

Except the Na'Vi.

Are they mammals? The women have breasts. Or at least fleshy bumps in the right place. They have nostrils in the Earth-normal place. They have four limbs, and no signs of an even vestigial third pair. They gesture with their hands. They cover their groins. They smile and laugh like apes. And they have human teeth when they do.

They're tall blue monkeys.

And yet they have that neural connection tail thing. All I can wonder is if they are ret-connable as genetic constructs in the first place.

Because all the efforts they went to to make it biologically plausible combine with the necessities of making protagonists humanoid enough to empathise with to almost make it worse than if they hadn't gone to all that trouble.


That's not even going into all the "Corporations would burn the world for a profit", "Savage natives can only be saved by the Great White Hero" competing plots, pissing off the Left and the Right in almost equal measure.


But all that aside, it sure is very, very pretty.

She sent me a $50 voucher from booktopia.com.au.

I went searching for something I'd like, and found a veritable trove of books on Deep Linguistics, many of the really interesting ones starting at $250, and working up (I remember seeing one there with a price in 5 digits!)

But I found a couple of books, and another for Mim, and took advantage of a free delivery promotion as well. And the last has just arrived. I am now, after almost two months wait, the proud owner of Old Irish Paradigms and Teach Yourself Babylonian.

Who would have thought they wouldn't have those in stock?

The SCA in Stormhold was on TV.

There's some bearded fool being interviewed at 20:49.

Miss S features at a couple of points. It's almost like she's photogenic or something.

A question: what the hell should I teach?

I'm down to do Heraldic Consultation, and I've suggested that I could do an Introduction to the Irish and Old English Annals (ie., what they are, when they're from, what sources were used, when our existing transcriptions are from, what we can learn from them, difficulties in extracting useful data from them, ...), and Write your own name in an appropriate hand, ie., beginner's calligraphy to bring people up to the level of literacy most of them could have expected in period.

Mim suggests Beginners Knotwork again... but I don't know how much interest there is, and most of what I would be doing is pointing to Aidan Meehan's books, and saying "do what he says."

I could teach Latin, or Old English, or Middle English, or Irish, or an overview of European linguistics, but ... how many people would show, and what would I need to assume of existing knowledge, and how far could I meaningfully get in even a two hour session anyway?


Gah. Suggestions?

First was The Troll Hunter.

Now a movie about the Huldrefolk.

Apropos some comments I made on the Pure Poison blog today, I propose an update for Bierce's seminal work:

DEMAGOGUE, n. – 1. someone in possession of a voice, a soapbox, and an unwillingness to be parted from either.
2. a dog employed by wolves to persuade sheep.

So I've had this idea running through my head recently: taking the images in my head which encode my understanding of mathematics, and either writing the down or (better) animating them.

If nothing else it might provide a useful resource for students who think as visually as I do, or even for those who have difficulty decoding the static drawings and too often stilted and/or formal descriptions which are a plague upon those who have language difficulties. (It would still have a voice-over, but if it were done really well, it might not even need one.)

( Here is a rough idea of a script for such an animation... )

Well. Who knew there were so many of us.

Watching one's workmates hold an electromagnetism meter up to their LCD monitors to see what their EM radiation exposure is, then watching the look on their faces when I point out that each of us has two electromagnets strapped to our heads for most of the day.

Autistics Speaking Day 2011

Doubt

There are four learned men on a train travelling through Scotland. As they are looking out the window, they see a sheep.

"Ah," says the first man. "Sheep are white in Scotland."

"Some sheep are white in Scotland," corrects the second.

"At least one sheep in Scotland is white," adds the third.

"There exists in Scotland a sheep which is white on this side," says the fourth man, and returns to his book.

Autists tend, as a rule, to be like that fourth man. So when we are trying to distil what the "Austistic Experience" is like, we tend to qualify strongly: I don't know what the "Autistic Experience" is, because I don't know all Autists. Not even 'most' Autists by orders of magnitude. I know a couple of others, I suppose, but I wouldn't call that "many". And anyway, I don't know what their internal experience is. I am able to speak for exactly one Autist -- myself ... some of the time.

And Autists tend to take people at face value. It takes us effort to consider that someone might be lying, or that they might have an agenda which is distorting their evidence, or that they might, despite their air of assured confidence in their own correctness, simply be utterly wrong.

We doubt. But because of a lifetime of being the odd one out, of being the one quiet dissenter in what appears to be a sea of unanimity, we most of all doubt ourselves. There's always that niggling voice in the back of your head whispering "... or maybe it's just you."

Or maybe that's just me.

Combine that with Alexithymia: the inability to articulate -- even to yourself -- your own internal emotional state, and we find ourselves blown about in the breeze. Maybe that article which says that Autists are like psychopaths is true. Maybe all Autists are characterised by uncontrollable rages and incessant stimming. Maybe Autists really don't care about other people.

And yet... I have learned to control my rages, most of the time. I only stim when I'm stressed... so as I notice, anyway. I certainly think I care about others.

Maybe I don't cope as well as I think I do. Maybe I just think I care about others, but I don't really. I have logical reasons for why I want to be around my wife and my children, but I also have times where I want even them to just go away and leave me alone for a while. I don't know what "Love" is supposed to feel like; how do I know that I'm not just pretending to "love" them... even to myself?

Or else... maybe this is evidence that I'm not *really* Autistic. Maybe I'm just lazy and undisciplined and stupid, like I spent most of my life thinking I was. Maybe those people on the internet are right, and I am just inventing a condition to explain away my failings. Maybe I'm running away from my own broken self, instead of facing it and fixing it. Maybe if my experience of "love" is so different from how it's described, then I don't really-- No. I can't even finish that thought, not even hypothetically.

Is that evidence for or against the proposition? Which proposition?

It's really, really hard to put your own experience to the front, and have the strength of will to assert, even to yourself; "Maybe everyone else is wrong." Especially so when your entire life has been the experience of being the one who is the odd one out, whichever group you are in.

Assumption

“Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.”
--- H. L. Mencken

We fight, our whole lives, against assumptions. We all do: men, women, Autistic, Neurotypical, gay, straight, black, white, everyone. We are formed by what we are thought to be, by others, and by ourselves. We are expected to be smart or dumb, base or refined, educated or ignorant, cold or emotional. Other people treat us differently based on these assumptions, and we expect more or less of ourselves based on how we match up to our own expectations of ourselves -- our assumptions of what we should be.

We, all of us, are moulded by society, by those who surround us. For high functioning Autists, this is no less true.

Before diagnosis, this force to conform can cause intolerable stress. There are things which we are expected to do which Autists simply cannot do, or can only do with difficulty. Things which are taken for granted so much as to be invisible until the convention is broken.

People are supposed to like socialising. People are supposed to be able to look one another in the eye, unless they have something to hide. People are supposed to be able to chat in noisy places. People are supposed to react appropriately in a social context. People aren't supposed to freak out in crowds. People aren't supposed to find common and unremarkable sensations to be intolerable. There are all sorts of things you don't realise you assume until that assumption is violated.

And there are assumptions made about those broken assumptions. If you can't hold someone's gaze, you are assumed to be shifty. If you overcompensate and stare, you're assumed to be creepy. If you can't remember what you were supposed to be doing, you're scatterbrained, or undisciplined, or lazy. If you react too oddly, then you're rude.

Awareness

“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
--- H.P. Lovecraft

After diagnosis, the stresses are different. First, there is the stress of re-evaluating one's entire life in the light of this new information. It's not a trivial thing to retrofit such a fundamental and powerful addition to one's very self-identity.

But then you start to pay more attention to what people say about Autists and Aspies. You can't help it: you hear the word "autist" and your ears prick up, you join an internet group to see what people are saying. You discover yourself as a citizen of a new world. And with that, you discover that not all the things said about you are nice.

You discover that people are antagonistic to Aspies, because they knew someone who everyone knew was an Aspie, and he was a rude entitled prick. (Well, I'm sorry about that, but I don't think that person is representative... or is he? How would I know?) They are antagonistic to the very idea of Asperger's Syndrome, because it's an excuse to be a rude entitled prick, and it's not even a real condition, it's just bad behaviour, and those spoiled brats wouldn't even be that bad if their mothers and doctors stopped coddling their
tantrums and gave them more beatin-- discipline. People who get upset with you when you point out that the link between Autism and Vaccines has been proven to be not just wrong but actively fraudulent, as if it's your fault that they have left their children vulnerable to Rubella. You discover that Autists aren't really people, they're more like soulless shells in human form. You discover that you aren't your parents' child, but an empty changeling left behind after the Autism fairy visited and cursed your family. You discover that Autists don't feel emotions: we're like psychopaths, but we're the 'good' kind.

And, every time, there's the Doubt. But -- I'm not that annoying ... am I? I'm not throwing tantrums because I'm an immature entitled man-child ... am I? I feel emotions so strongly that they can tear apart my soul from the inside ... or do I?

Or is it that those emotions are the proof that I'm not really Autistic, that when I present myself as such, that I'm lying. I don't really belong in this community. I don't really deserve to ask for help from that association. I don't really merit accommodations, it's not really an explanation.

Maybe I'm just the horrible failure of a human being I always thought I was.

Maybe it's just me.

Hope

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
--- Albert Einstein

But then... in these communities, even as I struggle against my own instinct to flee them in shame, as a stranger and an alien and an imposter, I find something vanishing rare and precious: people who are saying the thoughts in my mind.

Even in such benighted places as television, there are characters who I actually understand, and who have their own dignity in their difference.

Mr Spock, Worf, Sheldon Cooper, Temperance Brennan. They all find themselves surrounded by aliens who are doing bizarre things for incomprehensible reasons. Where the incomprehension goes both ways, where the people around them don't understand why their passions are so important to them, why they react as they do -- as they must. And these characters must at least pretend to conform. And it is shown -- in Star Trek, and Big Bang Theory, and Bones -- that they are willing to make the effort, but it is an effort, and it's hard, and exhausting, and sometimes you just need to meditate, or fight holographic enemies, or lose yourself in physics, or run away to Paraguay.

We learn, all of us, every day. Not everything comes naturally, though. Muscles grow tired, and not all start as strong as others. Most of us can pass as normal for a while. But it's bearing a heavy load, and all of us need to put it down and be ourselves at times.

Some of us are lucky enough to have found a place, and found people, where we can do that and still be accepted. Where we can put down the mask for a while and stop doing the over-the-top monkey gesticulations which people seem to expect as feedback: grimaces and rubbery faces, where a simple raised eyebrow and long-held look feels more natural. Where it is understood that we get overwhelmed, and not pushed past our limits. That we do get upset at stuff which seems trivial to other people. We know it's trivial, we don't want to get upset -- not least because we know it upsets those around us -- but we do. Giving us warning of change takes some of the sting, else allowing us to hide away and get good and angry until it's out of our system, or else hide away and cry for no reason we can articulate. Where people remember that we hate the telephone with an abiding passion, and don't make us make calls unless we have to. Where we don't have to talk (I'm highly verbal, but sometimes it takes more effort than it seems worth to force the words out, when I don't have the energy to be other than silent).

I've been blessed in finding such a place, and such people.

I hope that in this, at least, it's not just me.



(My effort from last year.)

Like stabbing rusty forks into my frontal lobes for a couple of hours.

Lemony Snicket on Occupy Wall St:
...

11. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.

Dr Simon Baron-Cohen wrote a book. Its title is “Zero Degrees of Empathy”, or else “The Science of Evil”, depending on where you buy it. The general consensus is that the correct title is the former, the latter being typical hyperbole for the American market. This is Dr Baron-Cohen's view, if nothing else.

( I'm not sure this makes sense, and there's probably a lot I've forgotten to add. )

Not only every project manager in the building shouting their conversations at each other as they pass by my desk, but right behind me is a very loud speakerphone conference going on.

This is why I'm not allowed to keep weapons at my desk.

A week ago today, Miss A was away from school. She, and the other girl in the school Chess Club were representing the school in a Girls Chess Tournament being held at Lauriston.

Now, I want to make it clear that it didn't matter how well the girls played, they had next to no chance whatsoever of winning. There were only two of them, and the scoring was done by teams: the best scoring four had their scores totalled to determine the winning team, and some teams had seven players to pick from. Even if Miss A and her teammate won every match, they weren't going to win the tournament.

As it was, of seven games, Miss A won one, drew three, and lost three. Which is a creditable result (and probably influenced by her tendency to play very defensively).

I took Miss S in to school on that day, and hung around for the Monday Assembly. There was no mention of the Chess Tournament, or the two girls representing their school -- both of them for the first time.

Later in the week, when the newsletter came around, I searched for even a mention of the tournament. In vain. There were, on the other hand, many columns devoted to football and netball and athletics and collecting tshotshkes from a supermarket to buy more soccerballs and cricket bats.

Mim made a point of telling Miss A's teacher and principal about the tournament, and asking for the two girls to be at least recognised for their efforts.

And at this morning's assembly... oh go on, guess.

The Grade sixes who participated in the Tournament of Minds were called out and recognised. Which is something, at least.


But fuck it pisses me off. Once again, those who use their brains are ignored and rejected in favour of boofheads chucking balls around. And more the point, girls who use their brains are ignored and rejected in favour of chucking a ball around in short skirts.

They might say they support intellectual pursuits, but this is given the lie by their actions: all praise, all attention to the jocks. The 3rd division under-10s get a mention for coming 9th place, but you smart kids shouldn't bother looking for recognition until you've got to Nobel levels. Encouragement along the way? Why would that be relevant? It's not like anyone cares.

And even if we do manage to beat into these people's minds that maybe they'd get more participation in the Chess Club (and more female participation -- right now there are exactly three female members, and two of those are Miss A and Miss S), why do we have to fight to get the merest nod of barest grudging acknowledgement, when the Netball team(s) and Football team(s) and the rest are lavished with praise and attention and money and support merely for existing?

To look at it another way, when you compare the love lavished upon the ‘jocks’ and the ‘geeks’, I don't think you could actively drive children away from intellectual pursuits (and thereby freeze out those who aren't physically inclined) any better, short of outright punishment. AND EVEN THAT WOULD CONSTITUTE MORE ATTENTION THAN THEY'RE GETTING NOW!


Why is it that the geeks get to build the modern world, and the jocks get to treat running it for their own benefit as their goddamned birthright?

'Rewriting of Act' puts offshore deals in doubt.

Well, yeah, duh! That's the whole point! ONOZ, go the media, what an embarrassment for Julia and her government! Maybe they have to fall back to Nauru or Manus island!

Um... no, no they can't, because Nauru and Manus are not legal dumping grounds for exactly the same reasons Malaysia isn't, namely, our international treaty obligations forbid us from dumping refugees in a country which isn't a signatory, or which is a technically a signatory but has ‘reservations’ (ie., “except this bit”) for all the sections which matter.

And no, it's not “rewriting the Act”, it's a finding that the Act is, and always has been, incompatible with an international treaty, and therefore basically nullified. It is not a lawful law. It never was.

And you in the media? Yes, you. Do you think you might see fit to mention that these offshore dumping laws were just as illegal when Little Johnny was doing it, it just didn't get tested. The treaties and obligations haven't changed in the meantime. The only reason this didn't happen to
Johnny and his happy gang of smug sociopaths is the vagaries of the legal system (ie., the refugee advocates pushed harder this time). If this had been pushed to the High Court then, it's really difficult to see how they could have come to any different conclusion: the law which allows demands offshore refugee dumping is an illegal law.

If they really want to pass a law to allow it, then they're going to have to, one way or another, repudiate the International Treaty on the Rights of the Refugee. Let's see if they have the testicular fortitude to plainly and openly do what they so badly and obviously want to: go backwards in our adherence to international Human Rights Law.

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Senator Boswell says his constituents want him to uphold traditional family values.

"It's very easy to think gay marriage is sort of a victimless act and it doesn't hurt anyone," he said.

"But when you think a bit more deeply, if the basic unit of society is family, then marriage underpins that basic unit of society."

Wait... that doesn't make the slightest lick of sense.

I'll try and translate:

Senator Boswell says his constituents want him to uphold traditional family values bigotry and my invisible friend told me so ‘logic’.

"It's very easy to think gay marriage is sort of a victimless act and it doesn't hurt anyone," he said. "This is, of course, ridiculous; because it hurts every straight bigot who wants to send us back to the 1950s, when poofter-bashing was a time-honoured tradition and two blokes kissing in private was grounds for a jail term. You know: the Good Old Days."

"But when you think a bit more deeply, and by ‘deeply’ of course, I mean ‘don't think about it at all, just accept what I'm telling you’, if the basic unit of society is family, then marriage underpins that basic unit of society. Note how I repeated the assumption in its entirety on the understanding that you wouldn't ask whether the necessary and unspoken other assumptions -- that gay families are not families, and that it's somehow a zero-sum game where giving human rights to gay people somehow take them away from everyone else -- are completely risible on their face, and give the lie to the conclusion. Also: if the basic unit of the economy is children's birthday parties, then rainbow sprinkles underpin that basic unit of the economy."

There you go: fixed it for you.

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Coming back from morning tea, as we do every day.

Returning via the carpark, as we do every day. The carpark which has been partially claimed as offices and workspace for the builders who are constructing the new Data Center.

Smelled burnt metal, as if someone had been angle-grinding something. That wasn't as it was every day.

And neither was the asthma attack which came on me in the space of a few meters walking.

I have never gone from clear breathing to struggling for breath in that short a time before.

I wonder whom I should ask to try and make that sort of thing Not Happen Again.



UPDATE:

I have contacted the EHS rep, and also put in an official report. I was OK in the afternoon, but a huff when I got home still helped greatly. I have no idea what will happen next.

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