Notices by Don Romano 🍹 (thj@mastodon.cloud), page 10

@philcolbourn Also, you want such questions to feel non-judgemental, because a questionnaire where one answer feels good and the other feels bad will cause one to skew toward the feel-good answer. In other words, for screening tests like these, you have to ask in a roundabout fashion.

@philcolbourn Oh, trust me, it's not about "like" or "not like", it's about "able" and "not able".

The test doesn't ask those questions directly, because you can't really check social skills or sensory processing on an automated multiple-choice test, and you also can't expect people to self-assess accurately compared to others.

What tests like these do is ask easily answerable questions whose answers have been found to correlate with the severity of your autism symptoms.

@philcolbourn @byllgrim This isn't a test you're meant to pass or fail. It's a measurement of how much you lean toward being normal versus being autistic. If your AQ is low and your IQ is high, that's probably a good thing, because then you can be both smart and suave at the same time, which is basically a killer combo.

@philcolbourn @byllgrim All of this is, in the extreme case, about devoting a great deal of attention to objects, while paying little attention to people, including your own family. A person with severe autism will basically treat other humans like scenery or moving trees, which is why they often don't learn to talk.

@philcolbourn @byllgrim If you *don't* enjoy memorising meaningless bits of information, that just means you're not as autistic as some people, and if you would rather be at a party than a library, that, again, means that you're not quite as autistic as some people. When it comes to numbers, that's just another way of asking about the car plates, i.e. are you fascinated with objects or strings of information, do you categorise, memorise or collect them, etc.

@philcolbourn @byllgrim Yes, it was this one: https://psychology-tools.com/test/autism-spectrum-quotient

Maxwell's Silver Hammer has got to be one of the weirdest songs The Beatles ever made.

It's an upbeat vaudeville number, in the vein of When I'm Sixty-Four, about a medical student who kills people who annoy him with a hammer.

The other beatles hated the song, but McCartney had the group spend days recording it.

The song features a Moog synthesiser. Beatles songs rarely feature synthesisers, and the only other example I can think at the moment is Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

The average AQ (Autism Quotient) score is about 16.

Computer scientists and mathematicians score 21-22 on average.

The average score for British Mathematical Olympiad winners is 24.

My score is 31.

I took an Autism Quotient test and got 31 of 50.

Scores in the range 26-32 are supposed to indicate "some autistic traits", a.k.a. Aspergers syndrome.

I've met people with that diagnosis who are deficient in far more areas than me, yet I'm somehow at the top of the Asperger range?

It helps to know that autism is just a label for any random brain growth problem that happens to manifest as a reduced ability or interest in social relations.

I try to give the commuter trains in the Oslo area a chance from time to time, but every time I do, they're always delayed, cancelled, or diverted to a different platform at the last minute.

Officially, the government suggests that people should use more public transportation, but the reality on the ground suggests that they don't care.

I'm completely enamored with notebook interfaces. They're everything I ever wanted for taking technical notes and explaining ideas to people.

I love the word "aggressively" when it's (ab)used in contexts such as "aggressively fat"., as if the subject being discussed is really intent on being that way.

I woke up with sleep paralysis last night. I have it quite frequently. You're awake but you can't move. If you make an intense effort to move, it eventually goes away.

Once I closed my eyes again, I saw geometric patterns dance in front of my eyes. It reminded me of a rather intense cannabis experience I had in Amsterdam a few years ago.

Never go full Danish. You'll just end up with kamelåså, like these guys:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

Butter cookie tins have a sound, when you strike the lid, almost like a steel drum. I suspect you could turn them into instruments with a little bit of metalwork.

The Internet perpetuates the old myth that a computer science degree will get you work that involves computer science.

Hardly any of the jobs a computer science degree qualifies you for actually require any knowledge of computer science.

An old joke says that "computer science" is a misnomer, because it's not about computers, nor is it a science.

For the average software development job, what you need, first and foremost, is the ability to write working code, mostly glue code, on a deadline.

In the programming world, we rely on the concept of libraries to abstract away details.

In the math world, there's no equivalent concept. You can't import the classical mechanics module if you want to do physics.

Math already has "standard libraries" for the various branches. Cross and dot product operators are defined for vectors, for example, but everything is quite low level, and the operators/functions often mean different things depending on the context.

I saw a large set of equations produced by one of our clients' engineers at work. It was a kinematic model consisting of a large jumble of trigonometric operations, devised to calculate the angles of various moving parts.

It was very tempting to rewrite it in terms of linear algebra to make it easier to read and manipulate.

Anyone working in engineering could benefit from learning linear algebra. With homogenous vectors, you represent the positions, orientations and rotation axes of what you're modeling, and with affine transformation matrices, you represent an indefinite number of successive translation, rotation, scaling, shear and even perspective projection transforms in a single matrix, which can be multiplied with your vectors to apply those transforms.

I find it difficult to deal with situations where, if you ask for permission, you get a no, because it's against the rules, but if you just do it, there are no objections.

Similarly, I find it difficult to deal with situations where no one will tell you about the rules, but if you break them, you will be reprimanded.

It feels like some sort of sadistic test of my ability to read other people's minds. You're supposed to just know these things, but I just get confused.