Asperger's Syndrome

[Sunder]

I've never met BillG, however, I do have an anecdote to share.  I was at
some MSFT bells and whistles demo a long while ago - before even WIn95
came out.

Bill came out on stage, did some short intro, and went off stage, some
mimes came on stage, did their dance.  Now, meanwhile I heard lots of
shouting from the right side of the stage (I was in the front rows on the
right) and after the mimes went away, out came BillG with now messed up
hair.  Apparently he took offense at his hair dressers.

Admitedly this has little to do with your message, on the surface, but to
me it does indicate that he's far less tolerant than most people of
whatever it is that pisses him off, and isn't opposed to show it.  Various
books on BillG take this view of him a well.  

Perhaps BillG doesn't alow others to interrupt or disrupt his
concentration?  Or perhaps he's just plain old anti-social?


I don't see this as a disease that we'd need a new drug for.  If anything,
the public's being dumbed down and exposed to repeated bullshit in the
form of advertising every few minutes, cheap TV programming, etc. I'm not
saying that this causes a real disease, but it takes away from one's
ability to concentrate for long periods of time.

>From my own personal experience I find that most humans can deal with
about an hour and a half to two hours of information when learning before
tuning out.  Some much less.  But things like commercial interruptions,
and the annoying pop-up mini-ads at the bottom of the TV screen are
hurting the ability of the viewer to concentrate.

Perhaps the long term effects of this is that people are being dumbed down
and losing their ability to concentrate - thus ADD like symptoms might be
appearing from this.  (I don't know - I don't play a neurosurgeon on TV
either.  It's just my guess of what I see.)

IMHO - things like video games enhance this ability - you have to
concentrate on the game to win - and if the game can go on for a long
time, I suspect the excercise in stretching the time spent will help you
be able to concentrate for longer periods of time.


Perhaps being intelligent or being able to focus on a topic for a long
time makes Joe Mediocre Psychoanalyst uncomfortable, so he invents
Asperger's Syndrome to cope?


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Tue, 6 May 2003, Tim May wrote:

> A symptom of our weird, statist, collectivist times is that many who 
> excel at math, science, and business are now being increasingly 
> characterized as "having Asperger's Syndrome." (Cf. www.google.com for 
> hundreds of references.)
> 
> In one line, Asperger's Syndrome is said to be a variant of autism, a 
> kind of "able to function in society" variant on autism.
> 
> Bill Gates is described as having Asperger's. In the past few weeks, we 
> hear that Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were "probable Asperger's."