Monthly Archives: November 2021

The Geek Cruise. In 2000, the first “Geek Cruise was held on the Holland America liner, the Volendam. More than 100 computer programmers were on board in a bid to replace technology conferences in lifeless convention centres with oceangoing ships … Continue reading →

Jim Sinclair. In addition to being on the spectrum, he was born with the physical characteristics of both genders (hermaphrodite). At a very young age, he began identifying with other disabled people and had the concept that you don’t throw … Continue reading →

TEMPLE GRANDIN (1947 – ). In 1989, she spoke at a conference of autism professionals and educators about “high-functioning individuals with autism”. “I am a 44-year-old autistic woman who has a successful international career designing livestock equipment. I completed my Ph.D. … Continue reading →

A strategic series of revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders, prompted by Lorna Wing and her colleagues in London, were chipping away at Kanner’s monolithic edifice from the inside. Pervasive Developmental Disorder – Not Otherwise Specified … Continue reading →

KIM PEEK Kim Peek had been born with cranial bones that had failed to fuse properly in the womb, so at birth, part of his cortical tissue protruded through a baseball-sized blister at the back of his head. His brain … Continue reading →

BRITAIN Britain passed the Mental Health Act in 1959 in response to a series of scandals about overcrowding and inhumane conditions in the country’s mental institutions and homes of the “subnormal.” The Mental Health Act dismantled the legal apparatus that … Continue reading →

BERNARD RIMLAND An obsessively curious Navy psychologist named Bernard Rimland wrote a book called Infantile Autism. With an autistic child, he was a self-taught outsider in the field. He firmly established autism as an inborn condition based on genetics and … Continue reading →

JOHN MCCARTHY   The modern digital age began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1950s, where a mathematician and engineer named John McCarthy offered the first undergraduate course in computer programming. He pondered ways to make … Continue reading →

The curious fascination that many autistic people have for quantifiable data, highly organized systems, and complex machines run like a half-hidden thread through the fabric of autism research. Asperger may have been the first clinician to notice that his patient’s … Continue reading →

HUGO GERNSBACK (1884-1967) The son of a wine merchant in Luxembourg, he became fascinated with electricity. At a young age he wired the family house for electricity, and in grade school, developed dry cells with solid electrolyte cores (portable as … Continue reading →