this was in 2015 btw
not that it’s super important, just in case someone reads it as a contemporary news headline rather than fun historical trivia

Every time I hear this observation, I automatically hear Jim Carrey’s voice in my head saying “It’s dead people laughing! Those people are dead!”

I guess he said it in the 1999 movie Man On The Moon and the line has somehow been permanently lodged in the back of my brain for the last 25 years

Sweet vegetables. Anything that is unambiguously a savory main course plant, but has some sugariness to it. Peas, carrots, sweet potatoes, turnips, beets, etc. I can eat them, they’re just even more work than most food (I agree with the other commenter who said that food in general is just a chore like brushing your teeth, although really good food is basically a neutral experience for me, where the enjoyment is about worth the effort)

Oh I guess now that I think about it maybe there are exceptions, like I think a lot of people would consider red onions sweet but I am fine with those. I think it needs some sourness or sharpness to offset the sweetness, the problem is if it’s just sweet + savory and not much else.

Heh, I just posted a comment without reading the others first, in which I said something very similar about taking a long time to “come up with 2 sentences”. I was briefly wondering whether to write “two” or “2”, so it’s funny seeing the same wording pop up in another comment.

Lol, the timing of this is pretty crazy. Today is a big milestone birthday for my brother, and texting him some birthday wishes is my major task for the day (you know, the thing where, as long as I do that, I have completed today, even though there are other things I will hopefully be able to do, but might not because the main task might take all my energy).

We live pretty far apart, and I don’t have too clear an idea of his current interests, and his job doesn’t leave him with a lot of spare time. Usually I buy him a digital gift of some kind (ebook, switch game I think he’d like, etc) and send a happy birthday email that’s like 2 sentences that I spend all day composing in my head. I haven’t figured out what to get him this year, but also, for my birthday earlier this year he just texted me instead of buying me a steam game I’ll never play, so I’m sort of taking that as a signal that it’s okay for me to do the same (I’m relieved, rather than offended - I’m totally fine with not receiving any particular birthday greeting or gift myself). I ran that idea by my NT mom, and she agreed that that sounds absolutely fine.

So I guess I’m about to text him something like “Happy xth birthday! Hope you’re having a great day! Any big plans to celebrate the milestone?” And then have a brief back and forth on the basis of his response. “About to” here meaning in the next few hours I guess.

On the topic in general, I run into this with Christmas presents as well, who to get presents for at in-person gatherings of various sizes, or for close family that live far away, etc, and what to give them.

It means the overall death rate in the sample group was decreased substantially. The number of people who survived because they didn’t get lung cancer or blood clots was so large that it had a noticeable impact on the number of total survivors, even when you include death by bus. This is a useful measure for a couple of reasons. One, it accounts for the prevalence of the disease being prevented - cutting all pork from your diet prevents 100% of deaths by trichinosis, which accounts for like 0.00001% of deaths from all causes (completely made up numbers and example, without consulting any sources). Two, it could account for net change in survival, for a treatment or behavior that has both positive and negative effects - giving radiation therapy indiscriminately to everyone with any kind of lump might decrease rate of dying from breast cancer, but increase death “from all causes” because it causes more problems than it solves.

I guess an additional way it might be useful is if we don’t yet have data on the exact mechanisms by which the treatment helps or what exactly its preventing - all we know is that we gave group A the treatment and not group B, and after 20 years there were a lot more people alive in group A, but we haven’t yet found a pattern in which causes of death were most affected and how.

I was curious to learn more about this, because it sounded interesting, so I googled it. I’m guessing you’re talking about the interstitium? There’s a lot of criticism of that episode for inaccuracies about the interstitium (known for much longer than the 5 years the episode claims - it’s been mainstream since at least the 80s), traditional Chinese medicine (the treatments they mention have been proven to be no more effective than a placebo) and the connection between the two (there’s no relation between the interstitium and the lines predicted by chi). Everyone in the discussions I found sounded pretty disappointed in the episode.

Even if it’s usually pretty accurate (I don’t actually know whether it is), radiolab is not the same thing as the scientific establishment, and this is probably why the OP asked if anyone who does science for a living rather than reading pop science articles could reply.

That’s fair, although the tone of the conversation definitely involved her being less happy with my behavior now than before the diagnosis (as I mentioned, she attributed my recent lack of conversational energy to the diagnosis). It felt like it was at worst “complaining” and at best “concerned”, with “celebratory” not really being in the ballpark.

I guess from a combination of what I’ve read in the past about people struggling with autism disclosure, and the fact that my mom is a retired GP who should have a handle on how sensitive a diagnosis might be, led me to assume that it was understood to be a sensitive subject.

Anyway I guess I’ll calmly broach the subject with her tomorrow, prefacing it with a mention of my usual tea-making habits, segueing into what I heard, then mentioning a) how I’d prefer to handle my own disclosure, b) that my conversational reticence is not a result of a newfound distaste for neurotypicals, and c) that maybe she should discuss that sort of thing with me instead of just guessing and then telling other people how I feel.

Thanks for the reply, there’s a lot of good thoughtful input there which I’ll think about.

I was going to just upvote and not reply, but I had an amusing moment while reading your comment (and then felt that if I was going to reply at all, I should first acknowledge that this is some good substantial advice). I’m usually pretty good about understanding figurative language, but when you said “spilling your tea”, there were several seconds of confusion and rereading, with me thinking “but I didn’t spill my cup of tea, I didn’t even get around to making it”. I understood eventually, but kind of a funny autistic moment.

in my experience, most things will mobilize the squirrels to hide

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apparently not

that phrase is to biology as “donde esta la biblioteca” is to spanish

Large language models (chatgpt etc, basically any of the AIs you’ve seen recent headlines about) aren’t especially good at distinguishing true from false claims. It’s one of the biggest weaknesses that AI researchers are actively trying to find solutions for.

I was literally just thinking about this, like a few minutes before seeing this post. It sounds like for some reason this political usage of “weird” is working, and annoying me is a small price to pay to stop Trump. But it does bug me, mostly because anything the left starts using, the right will eventually appropriate, and then it will spread and get widespread use outside of politics. I can see it becoming like “snowflake”, which used to mean “special and unique”, and then started being used in political discourse to mean “oversensitive”, and is now being used everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised if this trend means that a couple of years from now, “weird” is a very popular go-to insult even outside of politics, which will habituate people to associating weirdness with negativity (not that people need any incentive to do that).

Obviously it’s a better outcome than a lot of other things that can result from politics, but it’s irksome now and I can imagine the world being mildly more uncomfortable for everyone who doesn’t conform to mainstream social standards in a couple of years than it is now.

Tl;Dr - sounds like you’re thinking exactly what I was thinking, down to the mild-to-moderate level of discomfort and the acknowledgement that it might be necessary

Mine (as of last week) is Autism Spectrum Disorder Level 1. Asperger’s syndrome is the old name for the same thing, mostly ditched because it doesn’t make sense to just decide that an arbitrary segment of the same continuum of symptoms needs a whole other name (especially when people on the border between Aspergers and Autism would get a different diagnosis depending on who you asked, because it was so poorly differentiated). Some people also object to the name because Hans Asperger worked with the nazis, but it’s mostly because it doesn’t make sense as a separate category.

Level 1 can be referred to as “High functioning” or “low support needs”. I’ve seen some people say we shouldn’t say “High functioning” any more, but I don’t see a real problem with it, and my assessor used the term so apparently it is still used by some professionals. “Low support needs” is also commonly used (and seems more common on up-to-date official material), and some people prefer it because instead of categorizing people according to the function they can serve in society, it thinks about people in terms of how much help they need, which is less dehumanizing and more compassionate. Just like Hans Asperger, there are nazi-related objections as well - apparently the term originates in differentiating “high functioning” people who could serve a role in society from “low functioning” people who would be sent to the gas chambers. Nobody who was personally affected by those implications 80 years ago is actually objecting to the terms today though, so I don’t really see why it should matter.

Basically, “High functioning autism”, “low support needs autism”, “level 1 autism spectrum disorder” and “asperger’s syndrome” are all the same thing. The official diagnosis in most health systems is Autism Spectrum Disorder, but you might find it useful to specify that you’re high functioning, and if you’re talking to someone who isn’t up to date on the terminology it may be easiest to tell them you have aspergers, because they might think that “autism” only applies to level 2 or 3 autism spectrum disorder (people who have much more visible symptoms and a lot more difficulty with day to day life, often including intellectual disabilities), which might confuse the person you’re talking to.

I just say I’m autistic and have autism spectrum disorder level 1, because I like using the official terms for things and am comfortable explaining if the person I’m talking to has misconceptions, but I think it’s fine to use whatever terminology makes things easiest for you. I also use the term “high functioning autism” if I need to explain what Level 1 means.

(While we’re really getting into the weeds about terminology, there are people who prefer to say “I’m an autistic person”, not “I’m a person with autism”, because it emphasizes that autism is a core part of who they are, not something separate that they have. There’s also people who prefer the opposite, because they want to emphasize that they are a person first of all, just like everyone else. Some people also prefer to call it a condition rather than a disorder, to show that there is nothing wrong with being autistic. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone who has these kind of preferences actually get mad about it though, as far as I can tell people are pretty accepting of whatever works for you)

Probably Wayne Gretzky? I don’t even know anything about ice hockey and I know he’s supposed to be the most dominant player of any sport. Like he and his brother have the record for highest combined goals of any pair of brothers: 2,857 by Wayne, 4 by Brent. If you take away all his goals, he’d be the highest scoring player of all time on assists alone. There have been 13 times when a player has scored over 100 goals in a season in NHL history: Lemieux (once), Orr (once), and Gretzy (eleven times in a row). He retired last century and still holds 57 records. I’m not gonna keep picking out examples but there’s a bunch more facts like this that sound like the old “chuck norris facts” meme but are actually true.

“If you don’t know anything about ice hockey why do you have all these facts on hand?” - I remembered seeing this kind of list before so I did a quick Google.

Edit: I’m seeing some different exact figures for some of these, but the general principle stands and I’m not invested enough in hockey facts to nail down which numbers are exactly right.

Again? This was a headline in January as well. I guess people are gonna get mad every time they perform it now, and we’ll get news stories every time people get mad.

Autism coded characters are 100% a thing - I’d go a step further and say it’s possible for a character to be Autism coded without the author realizing. Ultimately, all characters are based on experience (either the writer’s own, or the experience of other writers they’re influenced by), and I think it’s fairly common for writers to draw on a particular archetype, inspired by someone they know or a character they’ve seen elsewhere, and implement that archetype without realizing that their inspirations (and hence their derivative creation) are autistic.

One of the most famous ones is Abed from the TV show Community, who supposedly wasn’t initially written to be autistic, but when everyone pointed out that he was it led the showrunner to realize he himself was probably on the spectrum as well.

I’ve seen people suggest that Peridot from Steven Universe is autistic coded as well (although I’m not sure it makes sense for her to be literally neurodivergent, since she is an alien rock and doesn’t have actual neurology).

I feel like I had a bunch of examples of characters who are autistic coded but not confirmed to be autistic, but they’re not springing to mind right now. I’ve thought about this before because a bunch of them are great characters that I resonated with before even noticing their autistic traits (or mine). Someone already mentioned Judah Mannowdog from Bojack Horseman.

Oh, I’ve seen people say Lilo from Lilo and Stitch is autistic coded, and I guess I can see it. Also, obviously Sheldon Cooper is a negative portrayal of autism that the creators will never admit is autistic because then they’d have to admit he’s a mocking caricature of autism.

There are some great characters from one of my favorite shows who I’m pretty sure are autistic, with differing presentations. But, while I’m happy to identify as a fan of that show, and happy to identify as autistic, I worry that identifying as both at the same time is playing into some negative stereotypes about both groups. But one of the characters is really into rocks and the other is really into kites. Iykyk.

I briefly googled autistic coded characters to try to refresh my memory, but have only included characters I have personally previously formed opinions about, since that seemed to be what you were asking for. But if you just want a bunch of discussions and lists, googling “autistic coded characters” will get you a lot of different takes.

In general I feel like autistic coded characters are often better representation than explicitly autistic characters, because when a piece of media explicitly labels a character as autistic, they can often lean into making Autism their only personality trait, or even make it a selling point of the entire work. Autistic coded characters have the luxury of being an actual person that happens to be autistic, instead of a walking billboard for the writer’s research on neurotypes.

Aha, thanks! I guess that concludes this thread, as I don’t really expect to get a dev chiming in explaining why.

It’s not my preferred way of handling it but I don’t have the energy to make a fuss. I guess if I click a link that needs to be http, I’ll copy it to a browser, and if I post one I’ll remind others to do the same. Probably won’t come up often enough to care about.

At least you’ve satisfied my curiosity as to what was going on 😀

Edit: I was repeatedly told while trying to post this comment that the request timeout had expired. When the error stopped appearing, I had posted 4 copies of this message. I have deleted them but I apologize if they still spam your inbox as [deleted] or something.