Category Archives: Uncategorized

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 →

Autism was first discovered in 1943 by a child psychiatrist named Leo Kanner from Baltimore who had 11 unusual patients – children who inhabited private worlds, ignoring the people around them. They could amuse themselves for hours with little rituals … Continue reading →

HENRY CAVENDISH (1731-1810) Every evening in the last years of the eighteenth century, at precisely the same hour, a solitary figure stepped forth from the most unusual house on Clapham Common to take his nightly constitutional. To avoid the prying … Continue reading →

Day 7 On Sunday October 31, I was up at 4:45 to catch the 06:30 bus to Siwa Oasis. It was a 17-minute walk to Cairo Gateway ((Torgoman) Bus Station. The bus line was Western Delta to Marsa Matruh (5 … Continue reading →

MINIMALIST FOOTWEAR I hike in lightweight trail running shoes in all seasons: Lightweight trail shoes maximize comfort, minimize injury, and minimize energy expenditure? Is this a little misguided? It comes from this ism: That a pound on your feet results in … Continue reading →