My "dinner party from hell" with Caltech professors who recited research on gender norms without attaching any type of statistics to the results.

When they described research that concluded that most women rank lower in spatial skills than most men, it came out like this:

"Guess what -- women don't have spatial skills. It's just been proven by science."

That is exactly how it came out of his mouth.

But he's a nice guy actually. Physics is filled with nice guys who end up sounding like jerks.

This is typical behavior for someone with Asperger's. Black-or-white reasoning about humans. Being a nice person but coming out sounding like a jerk. Offending people and then feeling like you're the real victim because the people chose to be offended.

It all fits in with the syndrome.

It's hard to blame them for this behavior now that I understand that it's a mental disability, not an active choice.

This week we don't have to be subjected to the travesty of Joan Walsh posing as the enemy of all censorship.

If Berke did a cartoon supporting medical marijuana, then Salon would be the only place where you couldn't see the cartoon.

It's an Asperger's trait to prefer solitude and need actual written instuctions in how to make friends.

I wish I'd had that kind of advice a lot earlier in my own life.

If the LW has Asperger's, once the LW has friends, it's going to be a lot of hard, confusing work to keep them.

I'd recommend the LW seek professional counseling and see whether an Asperger's diagnosis emerges from the counseling.

If the LW does have Asperger's, it's important to have a diagnosis, and a few good books on Asperger's.

A serial killer who specializes in anti-feminist trolls.

By the end of the investigation, the investigators are so outraged by the behavior of the trolls, they decide to stop looking for the killer.

There's just one troll left alive by the novel's end. He complains bitterly at Broadsheet that his troll partners have been murdered by a serial killer the police have allowed to go free.

But nobody believes anything he says any more. He has zero credibility left in the world, because everyone knows he's a passive aggressive, lying troll.

Then he finally disappears, and the novel is over.

If you compare alcohol with cannabis -- the one you can use to commit date rape is legal and promoted everywhere in Salon, while the one you can't use to commit date rape is illegal and so politically sensitive that they can't even mention where the candidates stand on it in Salon.

Sorry, fetboy, but I don't think it's love per se.

Scientists have found that you can make rodents show all of the classic diagnostic signs of PTSD in response to very small traumas if you give them a drug called Rimonabant that blocks their cannabinoid receptors.

That's the same drug that the Bush administration has been bragging can actually reverse a state of cannabis intoxication.

I don't know what effect "love" has on the cannabinoid receptor system. Perhaps being in a loving, supportive environment can help the brain repair its own cannabinoid receptors?

Maybe that's how it works.

I'll bet whatever non-cannabinoid therapy works for PTSD works by either training another part of the brain to do what the cannabinoid receptors do, or by somehow helping to repair the damaged cannabinoid receptors themselves.

If they still had one of those shows on TV now, Heather would point this fact out relentlessly.

Where do all the Asperger's women go if they're not going into physics? Maybe they're going into feminism?

See, there's this paragraph in my Asperger's book that claims many girls with Aspergers make up for their lack of social instinct by using their cognitive skills to dissect and explain social behavior intellectually. They like to obsess over and compare social conventions the way boys with Asperger's like to obsess over and compare numbers.

An inclination to obsess over social conventions seems like a trait that could point a girl towards a career as a feminist cultural critic.

Just a thought.

A Wrinkle in Time is what I think ultimately led me to learn general relativity. That book made me think of curved spacetime as a place where people lived and had families and relationships. That was a stunning accomplishment for a children's writer, to introduce advanced concepts in physics like that and make them feel like a natural setting for a novel.

You know, even most physics graduate students have a hard time with that subject. It's hard to give up flat spacetime intuition and adjust to the idea of spacetime curving up on itself like a ball or donut.

She was brilliant woman. I think she could have been a physicist if she hadn't gone into literature, because her book shows a kind of intuition for relativistic thinking that as I mentioned above doesn't always come naturally to most physicists.

What's even better, she gave us a spacetime with a Triple Goddess archetype in the form of Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which and Mrs. Whatsit.

I wasn't old enough to appreciate the significance of the Triple Goddess back then, but now I sure do!

Advanced physics, a brave female heroine, and a triad of magic old ladies with the power to travel through time.

She was sooooo ahead of her time.

This is really sick. This is sick when two sick evil men like that are jumping on the environment bandwagon.

I mean what kind of sick evil monster puts people in prison just because they wrote something that was mildly critical of socialism?

Bin Laden needs to read what Marx says about the status of women. Oh yeah and about religion. According to Marx, Bin Laden is a heroin dealer.

And Castro just needs to die so his victims can find closure and move on.