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A Savant Explains His Abilities
numLocked writes "Of the few hundred autistic savants in the world, none have been able to explain their incredible mental abilities. Until now, that is. It seems that Daniel Tammet, a mathematical savant who holds the record for the most digits of pi recited from memory, is able to explain exactly how he intuits answers to mathematical problems. Tammet is quite articulate and speaks seven languages, including one he invented. The Guardian is running an article about his amazing abilities."
Of the few hundred autistic savants in the world, none have been able to explain their incredible mental abilities.
They're too busy counting...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
...if the savants' abilities are compensation for "ordinary" cognitive abilities.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Question: why is autism associated with this kind of savantism? Granted there are 'normal' geniuses, but it seems like this sort of genetic brilliance is exactly the sort of thing that could be developed--ideally without autism--using gener therapy and modern genomics. Anyone remember the Orson Scott Card novels where the planet of Path is ruled by a class of people genetically engineered for superintelligence and obsessive-compulsive disorder, although the one could be separated from the other?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistic_savant
Since his epileptic fit, he has been able to see numbers as shapes, colours and textures. The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder. "When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think.
So presumably 69 is Jenifer Lopez, and 303 is the goatse guy?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
FTA: "Savants have usually had some kind of brain damage. Whether it's an onset of dementia later in life, a blow to the head...
Item 1, check. Item 2, check.
So how come I aren't a genius now?
This is clearly false advertising.
The one he invented doesn't count.
That sounds like Synesthesia, which Horizon did a program about last year. People with synesthesia can see numbers as shapes (A woman described being able to see 1 to 10 in a line, 11-100 stacked above them, and then on and on in blocks of 100), words as colours (Monday is green) and someone could even smell words (His best friend's names made him feel sick).
The program seemed to conclude that we all, to an extent, are synesthetic. Quite a large number of people assosciate colours with days of the week, and we all use words like a "soft/sharp sound", a "bite" to a tase, and so on. Although these words are ones of touch, we use them in other contexts. Cross-referencing the senses in a similar war to more advanced synesthesia.
...first post savants
Table-ized A.I.
Why is multiplying large numbers considered mathematical genius? Or memorizing PI to 1,000 digits? Perhaps arithmetical genius
If he solved Fermat's theorem over breakfast, that would be mathematical genius!!
I don't really know a lot about autistic savants or encryption technologies, so this may sound idiotic, but if these guys can so easily factor large numbers why don't they have them working for NSA breaking public-key encryption?
Le français vous intéresse?
"When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think."
I don't understand. There is nothing intrinsic in the number 2 and the number 5 that will tell you what they will equal when they are multiplied.
The way we arrive at the solution is extrinsic, namely in the form of the operator (multiplication in this instance).
But if it's extrinsic, I don't understand what the author of the article means by "instinct" and "shapes" and that sort of thing. As far as I can understand, the only explanation would be the ability to compute those operations at much higher speed, then any "non-savant."
If that's the case, then, theoretically, would there not be a limit associated with the physical properties of the nervous system that would cap out at a certain number of such operations per unit time? So theoretically might we not be able to test such a thing by running him through a long list of operations? That'll let us know if he's really just making those calculations really, really fast, or if he really is viewing the mathematics in such a fundamentally different way (something I find rather unsettling).
Then again, how would we design such a test? I fear that the number of operations we can demand his brain to perform per unit time will be limited by his powers of cognition (i.e. by the time he reads/hears all the stuff he needs to hear, we'll already be beyond that critical operating time interval).
Eh, I think I come off as somewhat difficult to understand. Oh well, I wanted to make sure my question appeared in the main thread of discussion (rather than being posted after most people have moved on).
The upside is that this can make it easier to remember things- it means you've got more things about the thing to connect to other things- his description of how he remembered pi as a story is a *classic* description of the mnemonic technique for remembering things- you basically turn what you want to remember into a series of pictures that you string into a whacky story. It works really, really well; people easily get upwards of 90% recall using it. And he has a built in picture or sensation to help him with this; which is the hardest bit of the technique.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I think he is saying math is completely intuitive to him. He sees the two numbers being multiplied and the product comes to him in a private visual way he can readily translate to base 10 digits. The human brain is very parallel and associative, but to the WinTel guys it would be a machine with 10,000 cores completely interconnected with a clock rate of 100's to 1000's of Hz. Humans are not at their best when they think sequentially - savants are the postive proof.
"He can't drive a car, wire a plug, or tell right from left."
Is it possible that knowing how to drive a car, wire a plug, tell right from left, and other banal things that we do require a ton of processing power? Since he cannot do these things, all that processing power goes to processing numbers and memorising words.
It we would be cool if on a math test we cold forget our ability to drive cars and concentrate on processing numbers.
The number two, for instance, is a motion, and five is a clap of thunder.
I'm wondering, do you think that perhaps if we could present someone with this man's abilities an interface to some kind for a programming language that he could also achieve amazing things?
maybe vocal recognition or a motion-capture interface? He did say he is making his own language.
For instance, if he combines these abstract ideas in his mind in a mechanical way he is showing the ability to visualize details of und use complex concepts with amazing precision.
what is a chunk of code if not merely an amazingly complex concept?
I speak Twi'lek. I learned it playing "Knights of the Old Republic". It's easy, there's only three or four spoken phrases, each of which means everything you can conceive of!
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
This man's abilities reminds me of a story, Funes, The Memorious.
Daniel's life story is not the same as Ireneo Funes' fictional life, but in a way they both lead to the same question - what does it mean to think?
Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.
In March 2001, there was an article in Science, "The Art of Forgetting" which touched on these issues, and more current research begins to detail the chemical methods of action for the brain's 'forgetting system'. Indeed, life would not be possible if we remembered everything. Human cognition seems to be defendant on removing details, as much of what we do is through abstracting away the differences... this allows us to generalize. Of course, over-generalization is a failure-point for human cognition as well, as we all know.
All of this will be very useful to AI research, especially if we are trying to model computer minds after the ones nature evolved.
... as "an idiot savant... without the savant part".
Most people can pretty easily memorize song lyrics and the sounds of a song, but yet the digits of Pi are incredibly hard to memorize. Might the digits of Pi be to this guy be like memorizing a song to most of us? I equally can't explain in a nice rational way why it's easy to memorize a song, but to anyone that can it doesn't need any more explanation.
AccountKiller
The "shyness about making eye contact" is a symptom of austim and is used as a dianostic criterion.
The ability to organize complex, structured data (which is basically all a jigsaw is) is a key requirement in database administration. Being able to visualize the optimal structure is a talent people will pay a LOT of money for.
As another person has noted, the ability to reassemble a randomly scrambled structure (such as a shredded document) would appeal very much to certain areas of law enforcement, intelligence and homeland security.
Being able to connect bits of image that are associated by some non-obvious connection may well be of interest to people studying image compression. There may be organizations which can yield better compression, which do not require too much meta-data to explain and which do not take significantly longer to uncompress.
If all else fails, she can simply put "massively parallel combinatorial logic" on the resume and apply as a maths lecturer.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"He met the great love of his life, a software engineer called Neil, online. It began, as these things do, with emailed pictures, but ended up with a face-to-face meeting."
..? Oh right, he's gay."
and say "Wha
A gay, churchgoing autistic savant in fact. That's a tough call for someone trying not to stand out.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
It's an unusual form of brain damage. Look at how he describes the way he does sums; he doesn't think about it consciously at all. He just sees two shapes morphing into another shape, which to him represents a number. He then simply recites the number out loud. On the conscious level, there is no "calculating" involved whatsoever. It's all done for him by the deep recesses of his brain, without him lifting a metaphorical finger.
I would say that this isn't any sort of "intelligence" in any conventional sense; it's simply that his damaged brain has given him the ability to access "hidden" subroutines of the neural wiring we all have.
For instance, it's no secret that the human brain can do maths in real-time with frightening speed. Just walking involves real-time feats of calculus that would choke a calculator. The problem is that it's all subconscious. Well, in Tammet's case, that "subroutine"-- which is supposed to be wholly subconscious-- now has a window into his conscious mind, expressed through pictures.
This is fascinating, but arguably it's no form of intelligence. At least, not in any conventional sense of "intelligence".
Mind you, I fully understand what it's like to be able to do something without mentally "lifting a finger". It's the way I've always been with language. I first spoke at age one, and I've been able to write and speak at an "adult" level since early childhood. My grammatical skills are quite high, but if you asked me to diagram a sentence, I'd choke. I usually can't describe why I know that a certain sentence structure is "right" or "wrong", since I can't consciously describe many of the rules of language.
I suppose this fellow is much the same way with the pictures in his head. He's described to us how he (as in the conscious entity known as Tammet) does sums: He just sits back and his brain feeds him the answer without any conscious sort of calculation. However, he hasn't described to us how his brain does the work, which is the really interesting question.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Not for his abilities, but for the beautiful, peaceful-sounding world he lives in. To most of us, numbers are either an obstacle or a challenge or work or whatever. To him they're his friends. That's so unique. I envy him.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
"Ema" is even closer to "emä", which is often used as "mother" in the context of animals. "Emo" is especially in archaic texts (compare Kalevala) often a word for even a human mother.
I must admit I am not awfully impressed by this guy's invented language without seeing more of it. Interesting, though, that he is stated as knowing Lithuanian and not Finnish -- Lithuanian is after all very different from Finnish, and he cannot have got those words from there.. he must know Finnish at least subconsciously, or then they screwed up with the languages in the article.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
Well, although I like the article, the summary up top is inaccurate. The Pi Memorization record has been above 30,000 for over a decade (not that nearly 23,000 isn't impressive). I used to work in a lab with the a friend who was the record holder for 5 years with a 30,000-35,000 span for Pi (he could recall that many digits, I can't even remember the single five-digit number to descibe his feat). A link to Rajan:/ shanks_e xpertise.html
http://www.psychol.ucl.ac.uk/david.shanks
I am a teacher and have had nearly a dozen autistic students (none of whom were savants). There is a huge increase in Silicon Valley, and it is a fascinating, frustrating, and a lot of work for most of the support staff.
For anyone interested, I'd also recommend the book "Thinking in Pictures" by Temple Grandin (an autistic woman who has redesigned livestock handling machinery). She is quite eloquent and probably the most famous autistic person (she has also been interviewed by Terry Gross, which I suppose is online).
He hasn't proven any new theorems or developed a new field; why is he being called a genius?
Because it's not generally called "mathematics" once you get past arithmatic, until you get to the sign on the college department's door.
Which means that a majority of us don't think "complex equations" when we think "mathematics." Which means that the word is getting itself re-defined, just like "hacker" or "gay."
Tammet is creating his own language, strongly influenced by the vowel and image-rich languages of northern Europe. (He already speaks French, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Icelandic and Esperanto.) The vocabulary of his language - "Mänti", meaning a type of tree - reflects the relationships between different things. The word "ema", for instance, translates as "mother", and "ela" is what a mother creates: "life". "Päike" is "sun", and "päive" is what the sun creates: "day". Tammet hopes to launch Mänti in academic circles later this year, his own personal exploration of the power of words and their inter-relationship.
Disregarding the misspellings, all those words are straight from a Finnish or Estonian dictionary. "Mänty" is a pine tree, "päivä" is day, "pälke" means glimmer or glint. "Emä" and "elä" are the root words of mother and life, respectively. And "tammi" (tammet) is oak.
Finnish is a weird but logical language with a lot of nuances and forms that are not present in other languages. I'm not sure what Tammet is trying to do, but he's apparently just exploring the relationships between words in Finnish. Anything else would either not make sense, or be simple plagiarism. Too bad the reporter got stuck on the words and made such a big issue of it.
Tammet's not the first one to ponder on the Finnish language. It's well known that J.R.R Tolkien got hooked on Finnish at an early age and re-used some ideas in his works.
--Bud
A year or two ago the New York Times had a neat article titled Savant for a Day about research by Prof. Allan Snyder. Basically, he uses a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to temporarily induce savant-like symptoms in volunteers. The journalist writing the story also acted as a volunteer, and experienced greatly-increased drawing ability while the device was turned on.
...
From the article:
As remarkable as the cat-drawing lesson was, it was just a hint of Snyder's work and its implications for the study of cognition. He has used TMS dozens of times on university students, measuring its effect on their ability to draw, to proofread and to perform difficult mathematical functions like identifying prime numbers by sight. Hooked up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experiment is more than just a great party trick; it's a breakthrough that may lead to a revolution in the way we understand the limits of our own intelligence -- and the functioning of the human brain in general.
Snyder's work began with a curiosity about autism. Though there is little consensus about what causes this baffling -- and increasingly common -- disorder, it seems safe to say that autistic people share certain qualities: they tend to be rigid, mechanical and emotionally dissociated. They manifest what autism's great ''discoverer,'' Leo Kanner, called ''an anxiously obsessive desire for the preservation of sameness.'' And they tend to interpret information in a hyperliteral way, using ''a kind of language which does not seem intended to serve interpersonal communication.''
In a 1999 paper called ''Is Integer Arithmetic Fundamental to Mental Processing? The Mind's Secret Arithmetic,'' Snyder and D. John Mitchell considered the example of an autistic infant, whose mind ''is not concept driven. . . . In our view such a mind can tap into lower level details not readily available to introspection by normal individuals.'' These children, they wrote, seem ''to be aware of information in some raw or interim state prior to it being formed into the 'ultimate picture.''' Most astonishing, they went on, ''the mental machinery for performing lightning fast integer arithmetic calculations could be within us all.''
And so Snyder turned to TMS, in an attempt, as he says, ''to enhance the brain by shutting off certain parts of it.''
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Leviticus also states that eating meat on Fridays, shaving your beard and wearing blending fabrics are crimes punishable by death. Will you be casting the first stone?
When you get down to it, though, we do most of our "thinking" in sounds or visuals. Everything else is translation. For instance, LANGUAGE is incredibly complex, but we can do it with ease since our brain has such an amazing "processing chip" for sorting sounds. Reading is simply converting things to sounds (or visuals - when you "remember" a quote you will normally either remember it by sound or by a visual memory of the words.)
Even math is, at it's root, visual for all of us. Take 2 + 2 = 4. There is cold memorization of the result, but if you were learning math for the first time, you would break it down to:
|| + || = ||||
ie. a visual representation, or counting fingers etc. The reason many people have so much trouble with math is they end up doing too much cold memorization - the brain remembers associatively, so this doesn't work well (but it explains why mneumonic devices DO work well). Unfortunately, that's how they teach it.
I tend to believe that we have an amazing ability to remember sound and sight (makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint) but we're NOT hard drives and "cold memorization" just doesn't work. By knocking out some part of the brain, the brain is forced to take in math through the visual/sound process, inventing a network of logic that handles all the work in the subconscious.
I think you are the one who doesn't read much. The parent's point was not the stoning, but rather the selective nature of the quote from Leviticus. If homosexuality and wearing blended fabrics are both sins with the same punishment (nevermind what it is), how do most Christians justify the picking and choosing of the ones that are most convenient or tolerable?
This was exactly my point. Leviticus is the "moral code" for the perfect Christian. No Christian I have *ever* met follows even a fraction of this code. So how can they justify taking one quote out of context and hold homosexuals to it absolutely? I say that if Christians want to make homosexuality an unforgiveable sin, they need to make every "abomination" in Leviticus an unforgiveable sin. It's only fair.
For the love of Pete.
How could you turn an article about an Australian Autistic Savant who happens to be gay into an "America sucks" comment?
For once, put your hate of your nation aside and read the fucking article.
I can't explain it, it is just a natural ability I have.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
They need to have a placement agency targeted towards the unique needs (and disabilities) of Savants.
I'm sure it'd be welcome to many.
How do other savants get along with one another?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Actually, Leviticus is the moral code for the perfct Jew...there nothing Christian about the old testament...it is the historical/cultural text of the Jewish people...Christianity did not exist until thousands of years after Leviticus...I bet 99% percent of "Christians" don't even realize that they only reason the old testament ended up in the "bible" anyway was because a small group of people voted on it 300 years or so after Christ....oh, but i forgot, its god's word...well 51% of the guys in the meeting felt it was god's word
I'm not a christian anymore....but I used to be a pastor and taught a lot of bible studies in my time, so I think I might be able to help you here. When modern day christians talk about certain things they take most of their cue from the new testament, which (recursively) according to the same new testament is the substance of which the old testament was a shadow Heb 8. Paul is a focal point because he usually interpreted the old testament in his writings and tried to show what they foreshadowed. In Roman 1, he specifically counted homosexuality as one of the grieviances that the christian God had with certain generations. Hence the preoccupation of new testament christians with homosexuality as a perversion of 'Gods' original plan for relationships between man and woman. So while the practitioners of Judaism hold to a lot of the stuff in the old testament, christians are not bound by the literal text of the old testament. The 'spirit of the law' 1st of 2nd Corinthians chapter 3 talks about the danger of literally interpreting the law and instead advocates imbibing the spirit of the law instead. I hope I've been able to throw some light on these things. I might not be as coherent as I'd like to be but you have to blame that on my just having just woken up.
All straight things must come to a bend
Spoiler Alert: It turns out the zebra did it!
and I invented 7 of them!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Easy. I hate being stuck here but I have no hopes of being able to afford to leave for greener pastures (EU). BTW I did read the article. Very interesting. I can relate to the guy quite a bit in terms of having the compulsion to count. When I was a kid I had a collection of notebooks in which I wrote numbers by hand in the following fashion:
:)
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11-12-13-14
etc...
I couldn't stop. I would spend hours doing this because it was fun and comforting. I also get very bothered when objects on my desk or in my bedroom get moved out of the order I placed them in. I need patterns. I also will not cross a a crosswalk unless the sign says "Walk" even if there is no car coming or everyone else is crossing anyway. I feel like I am part of a machine and I must obey all rules. I also have a very hard time knowing how to react to other people. I actually have to think about what reaction to project in most situations. But these are just personality quirks though as I know I'm not autistic or obessive compulsive and I'm definitely not a savant. But I definitely feel for the guy and people like him.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I've been around the whole spiritual block as it were. I was raised by roman catholic parents, who, by the way didn't start out as Catholics. Mom was from a muslim family so I had a lot of muslim cousins. My father was of the Apostolic denomination. I suspect they 'agreed' to be catholics (i say that because my mom became fascinated with catholicism having gone to a high school run by British/Scottish/Irish nuns so I think it was her idea of a compromise). I got involved with AMORC (Rosicrucians - it's just a modernization if you will of an ancient egyptian religion or bits and pieces of various ones) at age 9/10 through my mom - she was a member for several years. I won't even go into how that ties into Roman Catholicism. Well I got born again in my first semester of college and was serious enough to remain a virgin until I left (or backslid if you prefer the term). I gave you the background because it helps I think to know that I didn't arrive at christianity without having been around the block a few times. Getting back to your question, I gave God 10 years of raw, faithful service, no compromises. Just to let you know, I wasn't practising Christianity in america where it's relatively easier to be a christian, I grew up in Nigeria where to get anything done (even getting a driver's license means you have to bribe somebody) you had to soil your hands, apart from having to deal with family - I'm talking about 50/100 family members as we have an extended family structure unlike anything in the west - or even the voodoo guys and if you've never been to a village evangelism where the local juju man can make a leaf dance to the beats of a drum you probably think voodoo is just balderdash. Point it to be a real Christian was hard with a capital H but I didn't mind 'cause I felt God had my back. Imagine my surprise when after getting an electrical engr degree (everyone that meets me from elementary school till grad school and even out of class are usually impressed by how intelligent I am - not boasting just trying to give you an idea), I couldn't get a decent job, first I thought it was because I was in nigeria and you had to know someone who knew somebody...to get a job, so I packed my bags and came to america got in grad school and even though I was poor did my best to get a simple internship just to be able to afford to live in the basement (i'm not a materialistic person) and pay my rent and afford food and tuition (had to pay as an international student thats about $7k/$8k per semester), but apparently my dear God was nowhere to be found. I prayed fasted. YOu see all those things you see in the bible like fasting without food and water (no orange juice like you guys do here), I've done it before (not because I wanted anything from God by the way, except to just open myself up to Him to use me in anyway He wanted, in college we would go on 24hour prayer binges - on public holidays - just to immerse ourselves in his presence so he could minister through us). I've done 3 days straight several times. I've done 7 days straight once. I know a personal friend (he's a medical doctor now) who did 21 days before, so don't think I chickened out at the first sign of tribulation. God never showed up, now after almost seven years of graduating college, I'm too old to be a first career job hire (i'm 30) so my dream of contributing to the field by getting into telecoms/dsp as a career is not going to materialize anymore. Just in case that sounds contradictory, I was willing to go anywhere, do anything if i was called but as far as I know i wasn't so my thing barring that was to keep doing my one on one preaching and doing my thing in church while practising engineering but look where it got me. So there you go bro. Where is God? Looks to me like I wasted 10 years of my life, it was my choice so I think I was stupid but I don't blame anyone for my situation. To answer the second part of your question, I was evangelical/pentecostal i.e. your regular born-again, bible-believing, holy-ghost filled christian. This is a public board so this is a lot of dirty laundry but once in a while I like to answer that question because I used to ask the same question when I was on the other side.
All straight things must come to a bend
to put it in terms any slashdotter can understand: leviticus is deprecated.
the point of Christianity is that there IS NO SUCH THING as an unforgivable sin. You just have to ask forgiveness (the sacrement of confession, which is done to a priest individually for Catholics (me), and usually as part of the mass as a congregation for protestants). However, when one knows that they do is a sin and repeatedly do it, asking for forgiveness doesn't really have the same weight. It's like, multiple offender thing in the court system. For instance, it's a venial sin to masturbate. But if you keep doing it even if you know its wrong, it becomes a mortal sin. Mortal sins send you straight to hell (if you don't get last rights and that sort of thing) if you haven't confessed them. Venial sins are not so bad.
For instance, yes, theoretically, Hitler could have confessed his sins, been given absolution, and gone to heaven. But not bloody likely, of course any actual "documentation" of the last hours must be suspect in its truth. If a gay person keeps on keeping doing gayness and doesn't ever feel remorse or confess his sins, then yeah, that's hell-bound. If he does, it's not hellbound, likely.
What Christians need to realize is that the Old Testiment and the Jewish laws were pretty much done away with by Christ. There is a new set of laws. Do what he said, and that's fine. He never mentioned gays in the new testement. I don't know what the rules are. Old Testement God was a hard-core bad-ass who killed people. New Testement God is not. Yes, Jesus talks about hell. Yes, I believe there is hell (that Stalin and St Francis would meet the same fate is not something I wish to believe. It makes no sense).
Now, does the fact that Christ did away with it mean that sin isn't there anymore? No, there is sin. But a lot of the shit in the old testiment is just bullshit. Like Kosher. No one is going to go to hell for eating pork. Kosher makes sense in the days before refridgeration and stuff, but now it does not. Et cetera.
Do I think gayness is wrong? Yes, absolutly. But my best friend is gay. Do I believe God created the universe and everything in it? Yes. But Genisis is more of a poem on creation. I believe it may have been divinly inspired (I am a poet and English major and I do believe in muses and things because whether it's a literal thing or not, the principle is sound), but it is not literal truth. Even the notes in the new bible I bought last year (my old family bibles are like, 200 years old and I don't like to handle them) say not to take Genisis seriously (Catholic bible).
The point is that God loves us, Christ died for us, and because of that all sins are forgiven. But as it also is said, "God helps those who help themselves" -- ie, one must ask to be forgiven. It's like how showing remorse effects sentencing phases in trials. In fact, it's exactly the same. Last time I went to confession was a month ago in St Peter's in Rome. In the part of the Priest's schpele were he tells you your penence, part of it is "for your own peace of mind" -- people have a need to confess otherwise guilt builds up. This is a kind of hell. So, whether one believes in an afterlife or not, yes, telling the priest what you've done does help your own peace of mind and makes you feel better. Guilt weighs heavily.
It's lent. I ate meat on Friday. I'm Catholic. I should be going to hell like a fag according to ultra-radical militant puritan fucks in this country who take shit way too seriously. Boo Fucking Hoo. I can go to confession and get away with it. But it's not like the methodist-affiliated college I go to is going to serve fish on friday for 6 weeks to make me feel better.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Now go look that up in a few other translations. It is quite a bit different.
I've never understood how people can believe that the Bible is true, yet at the same time not find it important enough to read in the original languages.
New International Version
Well there's your problem. You need to get the KJV and a good set of translation notes. The NIV and other "modern" bibles are the word of Bob the fallablle translator, not the word of God. I'll never understand why you people waste your time on those things. It's like trying to understand Shakespeare by reading only the Cliff's Notes.
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.
That's both more accurate to Paul's original text and more beautiful to read. If Paul had intended to say "homosexual", he would have used the well-known word "paiderasste." Instead, he uses, "malakoi" and "arsenokoitai," neither of which have ever had clear homosexual connotation. Do a Google search on the Greek words if you want to learn more. It's fascinating.
about AIDS...
Lesbians have the lowest infection rate for these things... it seems to me that it's not homosexuality that's harmful... it seems it's more a matter of going anywhere near a penis.
Same for those idiot churches that say AIDS is a punishment for homosexuality... if that's the case it seems lesbians are God's chosen people.
1) Homosexuality only disrupts the nuclear family when said family or society deems it necessary to harm homosexuals. Many children are thorwn out of their homes for being gay without a second glance. In several states it is illegal for homosexuals to even try and have a family via adoption or fostering.
2) Homosexuality is not a vector for disease spread. The vector is massive ammounts of sexual activity without proper precautions (such as condoms, limiting partners [to a perferred one], and plain ignorance). I will not say that there are not a large number of sexually over active individuals and I will not condone actions which are well known to be stupid and dangerous, but just because a large portion of a population engages in a dangerous activity is no reason to attack this population en masse. There are no laws preventing smokers from adopting children or raising children they alreayd have, but there are similar rules against gays. While it is known that being around smoke and smoking is dangerous to your health and to the child's health, being around gays is not dangerous to the child or to the homosexual.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
Jerry Newport is a mathematical savant who has been able to talk about his abilities for a long time, and he has described talking to other savants so they must exist. He wrote a book called _Your Life Is Not A Label_ in which he devoted some space to the discussion of savant skills. Donna Williams, an autistic woman, has also described savant or savant-like abilities, for instance never sculpting and then the first time she took a sculpting class, being able to create expert-level detailed life-sized sculptures. She describes in some of her books what she believes the basis for these seemingly out-of-nowhere talents to be. I have known a few autistic people who are instant calculators or other kinds of savants and perfectly able to describe and talk about this. I know this person is not the only autistic savant to describe his abilities, so I have to wonder if he's more the only one certain aspects of the media could find who wanted to talk to them. Similar to how when Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay wrote a book relatively recently, it was hailed as the first book by a non-speaking autistic person, when in fact there had been several before him and the first book by any autistic person (who disclosed their autism at any rate) was by a person with a story very similar to Tito's.
When you use the framebuffer memory to do ordinary calculations, seemingly random crap will appear on the screen when the program is run, and the answer will technically appear as an image as well.
If we think of our brains as highly sophisticated computers, it makes sense that somewhere inside exists the "circuitry" to do complex calulations like a computer in the blink of an eye, however, we somehow can't accesse these mechanisms, as hypothesized somewhere in the article. Perhaps (I'm just taking a random stab here) something happened to these people where some of the "wiring" of their brains got messed up so that they can actually use different parts of their brain. These "images" might not have anything "intrinsic", but might just be the effect of something else, like the example above.
read the gender though. Man lie with a man as he would a woman?
The gay guys I know lie with thier men like men.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Wow, that's quite a leap. Let me start off by saying that my goal is only to analyze this a bit and not attack you.
First, the nuclear family is a relatively modern concept in the grand scheme of Humanity's history. Second, how is a nuclear family more stable, than say, the larger extended family of your village, which is a more traditional family structure? Third, if the nuclear family is so "stable" why is it that we have a 60% divorce rate, lots of domestic violence, and other seriously family issues in this country? I can honestly say that I have yet to encounter a "stable" nuclear family. Fourth (I am going to make a leap of my own and delve into what I think you're implying), if nuclear families are so effective at raising quality individuals, why are advocates of nuclear families always complaining about social decay in a country where nuclear families are ubiquitous?
I cannot comprehend how so many people can advocate this family structure so adamantly. Where is the evidence?
Why bother.
Daniel Tammet's web site is here and looks quite nicely done.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
neither science nor religion will paint a perfect picture. Philosophy, from which both grew out of, would. Religion is stupid in the face of Plato's theory of forms, as any God we can concieve of is merely a shadow of a perfect God we're too low to recognize. Science is "natural philosophy" -- today we are a far cry from Pliny the Elder, but it's still an attempt to say how the world works, just as other branches try and tell us the "whys" and "hows" of other things.
:-)
But the general and special relativity theories combine with the laws of motion, into a way which i would say proves predestination if one thinks about it right. If energy and matter are interchangebale, and all of it's linked together, and everything moves in predictable fashion, and their is only so much matter/enegery in the universe, than from the moment of creation (big bang), every particle and wave has been moving on a course which can be charted. Theoretically, we could know everyhing which will ever happen and has ever happened if we could track everything bit in the universe. Free will would then just be an illusion. Just like billiard balls, everything's movement effects the particles it touches next. that includes the chemicals in our brains every bit as much as the asteroids in space. But that's not fun to think about, not that we really have a choice
A relative of mine is such a savant. If he ever hears a phone number once in his life, he'll never forget it. Same with anything, license plates, credit card numbers, winning lottery numbers, etc. etc. whatever.
It's sort of impressive, but it's also a horrible condition. I'd rather lack that ability and at least be more able to function normally in the world. He's still a great person but obviously life is much more difficult for him.
I may not read much, but I read my Bible, and all I need to know is I don't care what you liberal city boy types think about the Word of God: what's wrong is wrong, what's a sin is a sin, and you degenerate sickos better watch yer asses when you see my pickup comin' cos I'm gonna take a 2-by-4 bash in the head of the next GOLLDAMN PREVERT I see wearing a cotton/polyester T-shirt.
Met any gay parents lately? My best friend and his partner have two children with four parents. Two Moms and two Dads and are their children growing up just fine. Our society is developing new ways of parenting and allowing people express their sexuality as they biologically feel. All the while creating new definitions of families that are arguably stronger than the nuclear family.
It's only in the last 30-40 years since Stonewall and the human rights movement that gay, lesbian and bisexual have had an opportunity to participate in society as who they are. Perhaps you'd like GBLT to go back in the closet and have sex with multiple partners in secrecy? The "prime disease vector" you speak of still exists, gay parents or not. Although I question your data on HIV infection rates in populations. There are an awful lot of people who have sex with multiple partners who are heterosexual. By shear volume of heterosexuals alone. Adjusted per-capita you might perhaps a point but I suspect it's a lot slimmer than you'd imagine.
So you're right, it is a disruption but it's also progress. Your assertion that homosexuality is an intrinsic sin due to the risks that population faces due to AIDS seems like hubris to me. Arguably the lack of recognition of homosexuality and same sex partnership has lead to lifestyles that include multiple partners of the same sex. The data on men who have sex with men (including men who identify as homosexual) shows a large quotient identify as heterosexual and are even married to a partner of the opposite sex or "MSMs" (men who have sex with men). This is because society does not recognize how they biologically feel as acceptable. So they are forced into hiding. This is known factor and has been for quite some time in the epidemiology of HIV. The creation of the "prime disease vector" you speak of is a societal construct of the supposed moral majority such as yourself. And it is not limited to homosexual people as HIV is outstandingly non-discriminatory.
So really I do believe your lack of acceptance of GBLT people is a sin of your own that falls under the first category you outline "doing harm to[wards] others". But really I question your whole belief system as, best to my knowledge, God does not hate. I hope you find it in your righteous heart to love GBLT people for who they are so we can all come together and make this world a better place. Because I am a gay man and that is never going to change. I believe it was the super deity in question who said "I am who I am".
_nfotxn
Nowhere have I been able to find a citation or clear reference to the paper that Snyder presumably was (going to?) publish about this TMS-creativity connection. The closest I find is his own page. This page is somewhat telling in my mind of the level of "seriousness" of this research. One would think from the "Autistic genius? Nature, 1 April 2004, by Allan Snyder" pseudo-citation that Mr. Snyder had an article published in Nature, but closer examination shows it to be a book review (follow the link to the pdf on the page above and see for yourself).
/ apr/01_snyder.shtml.
On the other hand it appears that he at least exists, and that his story is not fabricated from whole cloth: http://www.usyd.edu/news/newsevents/articles/2004
Finally, in reference to the Guardian article, I find the parroting of autistic savant folklore such as the tale of the savant able to play Tchaik 1 without having taken a piano lesson (or touched a piano depending on the retelling) extremely galling. Playing a piano concerto depends on technique, muscle memory, and many other things besides pure mental contortion. To think that someone who has never played scales would be able to wrap their untrained fingers around a concerto of non-negligible complexity is positively ridiculous in my mind. I suspect that the story arose as a vast but innocent exaggeration initially and has taken up a life of its own through repeated retellings by reporters too lazy to check the source material of their stories.
I do not know alot about savants but it seems to me that people who are able to instinctively perform arithmetic operations quickly suggest that mathematics is innate in humans, and possibly in nature, instead of being purely invented. Can anyone offer any further insite into this?
In all fairness, don't you think the same could be said for many (perhaps even the majority) of mental illnesses?
I'd say it's natural to be depressed every so often, but we still have such a thing as "clinical depression". I'd wager that lots of people falsely decide they need treatment/medication for their depression too, when they don't really have a mental problem.
Even defining an "alcoholic" seems to be rather difficult. I remember reading the list of "signs" back in school, and the running joke was that "Hey, we're almost ALL alcoholics and we didn't even know it!"
It seems to me, Aspergers is just a definition of extremely mild autism -- and the diagnostic criteria have to be broad, because it's nearly impossible to draw an absolute "line" as when this transcends "slightly geeky" and crosses over into the territory of an actual disease/illness.
Truth is, these things only become "problems" for an individual when they interfere with their daily lives to the point where they're unable to overcome them on their own.
So yeah - if you're simply not making an effort to overcome some problem you're having, then you're correct. It's time to stop with the excuses and time to take a little responsibility to change.
But I can certainly see value in parents being made aware that something like Asperger's exists. I'm pretty sure I have a touch of it myself, actually, but nobody ever brought it up as I was growing up. I struggled quite a bit with social skills and to some extent, with physical clumsiness. To this day, I have a habit of rocking back and forth in my chair while thinking, reading, or trying to work on a project, and I have a tendency to twiddle pens or pencils and so forth. I also tend to "hyper-focus" on specific problems or items of interest. I put up with a lot of teasing in school, until I got much of the way through high-school, and started making a real conscious effort to "fit in" and to succeed in being more "social" with other people.
To this day, I naturally want to avoid eye-contact with people when I talk to them, and I have to pretty much force myself not to do that (reminding myself each time about it).
I suspect that what I've really done over the years is teach myself how to cope with and work-around my own problems. That's fine, but I might have gotten to this point a lot more quickly if someone helped me along a little bit when I was a kid. About the only "advice" I got was that I was "shy".
What Christians need to realize is that the Old Testiment and the Jewish laws were pretty much done away with by Christ.
(Contemporary English Version)
Nm 15:15 This law will never change. I am the LORD, and I consider all people the same, whether they are Israelites or foreigners living among you.
Dt 4:2 and now he is your God. I am telling you everything he has commanded, so don't add anything or take anything away.
Seems to me that he didn't have the jurisdiction to do away with anything, at least according to the very book that gives him authority in the first place -- the one written by his father. I suppose you can totally disregard the Old Testament, but then where the heck did Jesus come from and who is he speaking for?
Ah well, Christian Logic is not something I'll ever wrap my head around. The LORD works in mysterious ways indeed.
Cheers.
Seriously, chess is a problem in combinatorial logic, over multiple-step sequences. It relies on the ability to analyze massive amounts of future data, based only on past experience and present status. A good chess-player would likely do well in meteorology or the stock market. I imagine it is also useful to tacticians. The advisors who set up the formulae for risk assessment in insurance are likely fans of chess, too.
Bridge, poker and other card games are statistical, rather than logical. Statisticians are employed by very similar organizations to those above, because they tend to be rather good at picking out patterns from apparent chaos, too. The chief difference is that chess is a "full information game" - that is, it is possible to determine at any given time if a play is going to be a winning play or not. It is hard, but it is possible. You can't do that, when there's a random element. All you can do is say the odds and maximize the probabilities. Card players will likely be good racing drivers, for that reason, as racing is all about maximizing the probability of winning, in a very random and fluctuating environment.
Scrabble, jigsaw puzzles, "memory" and jackstraws are all games about patterns, structure and sequence. They are all about identifying what goes with what and how things are connected. I imagine the celebrated scientist/TV host James Burke is good at one or all of these. The key is in recognizing what sequences are better than others. Anyone involved in scheduling, code-breaking, language translation and organizing of any kind is certain to be excellent at this class of puzzle.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I have synesthesia, and as a child I thought it was normal until I realized other people didn't see numbers and letters as colours. I believe synesthesia can link any kind of sensory input to abstract forms like letters and numbers, but in my case (and in most), it's simple colours. This makes it easy for me to remember trivial information like phone numbers, account numbers, historical dates, and pi (2.141592653589 is how far I remember without looking it up). Every string of numbers and letters forms a composite colour based on those of its individual characters. I've studied Japanese for a few years and now find that Japanese syllable characters also have colours for me now. I imagine that with extreme synesthesia, a person might understand abstract notions like numbers and math in a completely different way. I remember once showing my sister two Smarties (they're like M&Ms) and telling her they were "3" and "6" instead of yellow and green. It took me a moment to realize why she didn't understand.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
So what if he held a gun to a priest's head and force him to give absolution? Does that still get Hitler into heaven?
No, the priest needs to be clenching his biceps the right way and think of lingonberries to grant an absolution. If he only does the other thing, the patient will "feel" like having given absolution, but will still go to hell.
You atheists fail to grab even the most basic realities of religion...
Can a priest give himself absolution for having sex with the children in his congregation?
"Making love", my friend, "making love".
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Not for his abilities, but for the beautiful, peaceful-sounding world he lives in. To most of us, numbers are either an obstacle or a challenge or work or whatever. To him they're his friends. That's so unique. I envy him.
Don't forget the language genius. This guy seems a lot like somenone who might have been one of the inventors of Qabbala and influenced Judaic mysticism. There is no reason to expect that people of his kind weren't around back then.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
What you may or may not realise, is that you are quoting a well known (fallacy?) from Boswell's book, Christianity, Social Tolerance & Homosexuality (1980)
. html
There are quite a few flaws in his argument, and therefore, flaws in your argument.
The fact is, if he was refering only to male prositutes, Paul would have used the word pornos (which was the word used at the time for male prostitutes), since that is related to the purchasing of sex.
Even if you know greek and hebrew, you will be unable to understand completely the words in the context of the times they were written.
If you do a Google Search for "Boswell Critique" you will find a lot of information regarding this.
Here is some text from http://www.mindspring.com/~scarlson/greek/boswell
Often the evidence about a word's meaning in a certain context is not conclusive but merely indicative. When the best and strongest evidence consistently points to the same conclusion, however, we can become more confident. In this case, the immediate context of the word arsenokoithV (arsenokoitês), all throughout the New Testament, its Septuagint parallels, and its usage among the Apostolic Fathers, like Polycarp, all point to a meaning of a homosexual and not a male prostitute. Boswell's general argument, apart from a facile consideration of the context, relies too much on the argument from silence and an egregious etymological analysis.
It is very important to note the context from the other parts of '1 Cor 6'.
Paul's message is not one of fear or hate, but rather joy and thankfullness for forgiveness; he goes on to say:
"But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." NIV.
The point of this story is that modern medicine may develop a basis for understanding savantism and then maybe autism. The real goal with this guy is to get him to write a diary, so shrinks can pick his brain. This guy may be the greatest discovery made by psychology ever. And it seems to have been completely missed by everyone here on /.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
Homosexuality is a religion now?
"The NIV and other "modern" bibles are the word of Bob the fallablle translator, not the word of God."
The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the New in Greek. Neither of them are English, of any time period.
In Finnish,
Mänty, äiti, aurinko, päivä
So he's actually making a mixture between two...
maybe more.
Guardian article (and Savant) only says european record which appears accurate.
;).
Slashdot story should probably say holds "a record" not "the record", which in typical Slashdot context would either imply world record or USA record
Absolutely, more info here
http://www.isn.net/~jypsy/whataspe.htm
I too have come to realise that I have AS and would be pretty interested in talking to you. Drop me a mail at richard dot amos aaaat gmail dot com
Ta mate
I agree. It's like having access to inner private parameters of an object/class that's normally not exposed publicly.
It is likely that people actually know exactly how many objects they see e.g. walk into a room and know instantly how many chairs there are.
However that info is abstracted away under layers and layers of abstraction - e.g. one, two, many, dozens, hundreds, thousands, enough, not enough - after all most people spot desks without chairs quite quickly, this is not necessarily such an easy thing.
These abstractions were probably very useful millenia ago. There's no point knowing that there are 23312 wildebeest on the plain if you don't even have a number system, much less express it to someone who doesn't. Just have to give the appropriate grunt(s) or clicks.
And these abstractions probably allow us to avoid the detail and focus on the big picture - the guy has problems going to the supermarket or the beach.
Even if you can count the number of hairs on a lioness instantly, I doubt the lioness bothers remembering how many bites of meat you make up - it's probably "enough for me and cubs, or need one more".
I suspect some of these people would be troubled and have difficult working if you gave them 1001 bolts and only 1000 nuts and told them to fasten stuff together. Most normal people won't even notice till the last one, and then they'll just shrug and go whatever...
Modern software can easily count how many light and dark pixels there are in picture. It has difficulty seeing how many chairs. But soon programs will count X chairs of type A, Y chairs of type B etc, but the next step then is "few, many, enough, not enough".
Imagine my surprise when after getting an electrical engr degree...I couldn't get a decent job
I appears you are saying that you lost your faith in God because you couldn't get a job.
Consider: if you had gotten a job you might still believe in God, which you now think is wrong. So the question is, which is more important? The job or knowing the truth?
Where is God?
Even people with fulltime jobs still ask this question.
It's a bit late to answer this, but what the hell. You have greatly misunderstood the nature of spectrum disorders. Autism, like many neurological or psychological conditions, is a spectrum disorder -- it ranges (possibly continuously) from severe to normal, and there are probably multiple factors (perhaps most genetic, perhaps not) involved. With any spectrum disorder, people who are near the normal end of the spectrum are just a little different from the norm, and those differences present as personality quirks (the same being true for mood disorders, schizoaffective disorder, and possibly many of DSM-IV Axis II disorders). Kids show different personalities from a very early age; where do you think those come from anyway, if not differences in how we're wired up? I also think you overestimate psychologists. Until we have some sort of physiological test -- a genetic test, brain scan, whatever -- that can objectively determine who has a particular condition and who does not, it's all subjective anyhow. While a psychologist or neurologist is certainly better educated and has more experience, and thus in a better position to say who might have Asperger's syndrome than a layperson, they're still making a judgement call, one which other psychologists may disagree with when the patient is close to the normal end of the spectrum. Are geeks towards on the Autism/Apserger's spectrum? I certainly don't know. I don't see any reason why it couldn't be the case -- for example, discomfort with, and avoidance of, socialization is sometimes a response to innately poor ability. But my personal feeling, having known several people with Aspserger's syndrome when I was a mathematics major, is that most geeks probably aren't; the most obvious difference I noted was humor (much geek humor delights in playing with ambiguity, blurred levels of abstraction, and metaphor, and the people I knew with Asperger's syndrome were poor at those). However, I do think it's possible that if, say, genetic (or developmental, or whatever) conditions C1, C2, ..., Cn are necessary for Autism spectrum disorders, some subset of these conditions, perhaps with other conditions, may contribute to geekiness.
Oh, and frankly, I'm getting sick and tired of all the "victim victimhood", myself, and I hear a lot more bleating from people whining about how we've become such a victim society than I do from any of the supposed "victims". There's nothing wrong with wanting to understand one's nature, one's strengths and weaknesses. Doing so is NOT the same thing as expecting special treatment. I'd be delighted, for example, if I could see a "road map" of my own neuropsychological development, and know where and how the elements of my personality arose, because it would make it easier for me to work on changing (or compensating for) those elements if I saw fit to do so.
For example, I'm mildly bipolar -- diagnosed as such by several gen-yoo-wine psychologists. I've never gone completely off the deep end, and I've never understood that annoying, narcissistic addiction to hypomania some bipolars have that makes them regularly go off mood stabilizers and act like fools, but it's still had profound impact on my life. I don't generally tell people about it in real life unless they ask or it's topical, and I certainly don't expect any special treatment (or a get-out-of-jail free card when I fuck up) either. From my perspective, it's just an element of my personality, and I deal with it like any other element. Does it occasionally make life difficult? Sure, but we all have burdens to bear and I know plenty of people in much worse shape than I. But knowing a major contributing factor to my behaviour and personality has been enormously useful to me, so I'd appreciate it if people would stop crying "poor me, I'm surrounded by victims" every time someone speculates about contributing factors to personality.
Trying to force everybody into the same mould *does not work*. That is my point. Why bother with the pretense that everybody's the same when it simply doesn't work? The best way to counter bullying is by *encouraging* difference, not shying away from it.
FWIW, there are plenty of teenagers who attempt suicide because they're forced into this silly pretence of normal/mediocricy.
So yeah, the kid's probably going to have a tough time, but guess what, the same thing happened when house-husbands started appearing. The same thing happened before divorce was the norm. Unfortunately, societal change means some people will get burned. Sorry, it's rather unavoidable.
I think that some heterosexual people have fucked up their kids enough that even super-gay people would have a pretty tough time competing. If we can't have a law that prevents warped heterosexuals from reproducing I don't see why we should have a law banning a gay couple from adopting on the same premise.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.