#WildflowerHour yesterday, when it was 10deg warmer. Fairy foxglove basking in the sunshine.

A very much needed paper.

Was hoping the last chapter would be called Horrible and Difficult

At the end of autism month, I want to make a bit of a contribution. The main progress that we need, as I see it, is to understand that autism means to have a different experience of the world. And then to value that because it is complementary to what others experience.

I have been reading this slowly and with great pleasure by @k2mey.bsky.social and Angelo Cangelosi. psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-...

This is taking the piss.

#WildFlowerHour Late for wild flower hour...and in my garden, but they're happy and so am I.

This is the untold story of higher education. Everything only works because staff do more work than they can really be expected to do.

Developing diagnostic criteria that 1) assess autistic people’s own lived experiences, rather than inconveniences allistic people think they face when interacting with autistic people; and 2) reflect women’s experiences as autistic people, not just men’s experiences.

The sun is splitting the sky! It puts me in the mood for music from sunny places. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RetF...

FUCK AND I CANNOT SAY THIS LOUDLY ENOUGH OFF

Today we received our mail-in ballot papers. Very disappointed that trump isn’t on the list. But I guess it explains his point that mail-in voters don’t vote for him.

A question for AI, a bit of a thread. Years ago, Roger Sperry was doing split-brain surgery and arguing about one or two consciousnesses. Donald Mackay, the prof at Keele where I was doing my PhD, had this idea: why not get the two brain halves to play chess against each other.

Moon and the Pleiades

we will win

Following on from my comments about Alice Heim, here is a photo of the Cambridge Dept of Exp Psych from mid 1970s. The front row has the three people who changed my way thinking the most, including her. They were Alice Heim (extreme left); Oliver Zangwill (centre); Paul Whittle (3rd from right). ⤵

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

I would actually like to start seeing participant information sheets being clear about whether or not LLMs will be used at any stage of the research pipeline. Note to self start doing this (with the caveat that I currently can't because work won't give us a copilot opt-out)

Nope I was wrong. Completely wrong.

Peak retired academic moment. 1. One of those emails: Are you the R Watt who wrote xxxxxx? 2. Nope, but it sounds vaguely interesting. Wonder what they found. 3. Google - read it and discover that I did write it.

If autistic people are saying ‘this is part of who I am’ and the response is to continue to fund ways to reduce and eliminate autism, while making very sure our voices are not heard. That isn’t neutral. It's chilling. 😨 12/12 End of 🧵 Refs in link below 👇

Which brings us back to those questions: 1/ Whose problem is autism being treated as? 2/ And whose interests are being served by that? And... 3/ What kind of future is being imagined?? 11/12

So what could ethical research look like, instead? Here's the proposed researchers’ code of ethics: - Co-participation - Respectful language - Autistic differences not always as deficits - No alignment with #ABA, eugenics, and similar harms Far from today's reality. 8/12

Is empathy political? An article on autism empathy. With reference list. www.neurofabulous.org.uk/autistic-emp... #Autism #ActuallyAutistic #Neurodivergent #Empathy #DoubleEmpathy

No arguing with that

I'll say more about this 1994 BBC Synaesthesia prog later (after shopping). It is well worth its 47mins. It's so rich with positive lived experience. And a lot of it is probably about autism. I would love someone to make something like this about autism. #Autism #ActuallyAutistic 1/4

Still quite wintry.

This afternoon I made scones: butter, flour, sugar, sultanas but with double cream instead of milk for once. That's going to be the plan going forwards.

Are autistic people ‘just making it up’? In a recent podcast conversation, I was asked a question that carried a striking implication: What if increasing numbers of people identifying as autistic are just not coping? 🧵 1/11 #Autism #Neurodivergent #ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD

I wish there was a way of visualising in one go the whole tree of posts and quotes that this has generated. There are so many interesting branches.

First of the year. Dandelions are up there alongside tulips as colour made intoxicating.

It's sort of the opposite of self-referential. My humanity means... ... that I don't ever look at the Tgraph. My autism means... ... that I can explain why I don't.

#AutismCelebrationMonth I recently explained to my wife what stimming is - and how it perhaps has positive benefits for the person. Now she is like a person with new found liberty. "It's just me stimming" apparently justifies any behaviour at all.

Your dad, the most singularly unique individual you’ve ever met, reportedly has no idea where you got your autism from.

And my phone is telling me to clean the camera lens. Maybe hasn’t heard of the simmer dim

Eventide

I’m reading “Feet of Clay” by Anthony Storr. It is unnervingly relevant.

Very glad to share the news that I’ve been elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh; it’s a remarkable honour to be part of its long history. Congrats to everyone in this year’s cohort of Fellows! Nice to see some friends in there too.

Your clocks example is really good. My version, reflecting my world, is about locomotives. I regularly travelled with my family on trains between London and Glasgow as a pre-schooler. Great big steam locomotives and we always thanked the driver/footplate man as we left the train. Me:

Ich see trees of grene Redde roses too Ich see them bloome For me and you And Ich thynke to myselfe What a wondirful worlde Ich see welkin blue And cloudes of whyte The brighte blessid daye The darke sacred nighte And Ich thynke to myselfe What a wondirful worlde www.nasa.gov/image-articl...

I've been researching the history of scepticism about AI and found an early example. Red Dwarf 1:2 Rimmer to Hollie "you jumped up Filofax"

Beetroot and ginger soup. 👌

I’m new to the idea of a blog. I’ve just found that I can schedule when a post is published. So, just sorted one for my 100th birthday which says “Watch this space - big announcement coming soon”

“Who’ve never been told no”

Incoming shower of rain

So this evening I’m going to sit down and try to work out why the oceans are blue.

Dave without Rimmer seems like an unwise experiment