Sometimes it is difficult not to weigh in on the less than enlightened comments on Twitter regarding autism. In the middle of August, the academic Simon Baron-Cohen expressed outrage at #EndAutismNow.  Although the Theory of Mind (which Baron-Cohen researches) does not apply to those with a language delay, and his extreme maleness spectrum is not […]

I highly recommend this festival.  My fellow attendees tend towards the Left of Centre, but the invited speakers range across the entire political spectrum which provides an environment for interesting and healthy debate.  There is occasional booing and hissing at the Right of Centre speakers, though not as much as two years ago.  As a […]

As seen in previous posts, I have been pondering where the women computer scientists went (post-1990), and then today I was referred on Twitter to an article about the publishing of AI research.  The article didn’t help with the answer, but I found the first sentence to be infuriating.  It read that the history of […]

Women’s preferences.  You hear this a lot lately if you are paying attention to the women in STEM discussions and it’s worth dissecting.  Firstly I would like to coin the phrase O’Rourke’s Law, where you have gone off on the wrong tangent if you end up talking about Sweden (a mashup of P. J. O’Rourke’s […]

A short comment on the recent article by Geoff Sutton in The New European regarding the “undoubted geniuses” running the big tech giants. The Big Five founders are (or were) undoubtedly smart, business savvy (or smart enough to hire in that expertise), and lucky.  But to ascribe them the term genius is a bit of […]

My friend and colleague T and I are travelling on the Eurostar to Brussels.  I can’t remember how we decided that we should travel together, but the travel agent does our bookings for flights and international train trips and knows to make this happen.  T is at least fifteen years older than me but dislikes any references to […]

Contributions to this blog will be more intermittent than I would like.  My ability to write is directly proportional to my annoyance at someone saying something less than well considered in an area which I know something about – autism, computer science, mathematics, and this week, what it means to be a woman.  A week […]

I first started coding when I was ten.  My school ran a summer class in BASIC and had three TRS-80s (affectionately known as TRASH 80s).  Computers in schools were rare then.  I was happy to attend summer school because there was nothing else to do in the desert that with my complexion wasn’t going to […]

I am seeing more and more articles about what men will do in the future of work. This is a typical example, from Simon Kuper of the FT: “Soon, working-class men will lose driving jobs to autonomous vehicles…. Young men will develop new notions of masculinity and embrace this traditionally feminine work.” Which is hilarious […]

Raising a child with a severe language delay presents many challenges in daily life and highlights how complex verbal and non-verbal communication is in human interaction.  My son has autism with minor sensory issues and is highly intelligent in ways that cannot be measured without verbal and therefore written communication skills.  The process of socialisation […]