is not an excuse. The law itself may be unjust, but I don't understand why this is so hard to understand. There may be a reason you run a restaurant instead of work as a quant, but still.

To get a PhD at 20 I imagine you've spent a lot of your childhood reading and doing maths and physics. What is it about physics that draws you? Why does it keep you interested?

Lack of interest in fiction is not a diagnostic criterium when it comes to being placed on the autism spectrum (also, Asperger's syndrome no longer exists as a separate classification but is now merely defined as being on the autism spectrum combined with normal language development and a few other criteria). In fact, an obsession with fiction would be one, just as a very strong interest in trains or squirrels or tarantulas or whatever else would be. Just look at comic con.

Just wanted to make that clear.

Well that certainly sounds like a standard undergraduate engineering program to me. Don't most of them have students publishing widely in well-respected journals before they've even entered grad school?

Oh wait, no they don't.

I spoke about engineers in general. And as you know, as someone who apparently lives at the end of a bell curve, when speaking in general there are always edge-cases that can seemingly contradict the general statement being made, but that doesn't stop that statement from being true.

That's the point. When it comes to engineering, "in the real world" is the overriding concern, not "why is this this way rather than another?"

It does seem to be the case here, because in the public imagination it is expected of Silicon Valley to be more science-literate than the rest of the nation (since there is a larger concentration of people with STEM education there than in the general population), which is why this is news, because its failure to match the standard set IS notable.

Also, you missed the s in the wikipedia description. "QuaterionS are a number system ..."

No, that's not how that works, because you assume a number of propositions to be true about me that aren't. Thank you, come again.

You know what a vector is, right? What is a quaternion?

I am an adult with autism. If you want I can contact you on the email address in the header of your post, and we can mail back and forth.

Below average compared to the national average, not compared to the group of 12 daycare facilities.

They're dogmatic. They spend their entire university career learning formulas and recipes (excuse me, algorithms) without questioning them the way physicists or philosophers do. They spend the time, and they know their science, but they don't know why what they know is right, they just know that what they know IS right. This is also why there is a far greater number of creationists among engineers than there is among any other STEM discipline.

And because they only learn the results, not the history and argumentation that led up to the result, they're not as well prepared to deal with the barrage of idiocy that is spewed by people like anti-vaxxers. When you have a lesser idea of why what you know is the truth, you have a lesser resistance against people who argue that what you think is the truth is not the truth.

This may be a controversial opinion here on slashdot, and I fully expect to be downvoted, but it is the truth nevertheless, borne out again and again in every study on the subject.

Re: stimming, yeah, I can confirm that anecdotally. I stopped things like rocking back and forth and repeating catchphrases and instead developed a massive anxiety disorder. Let your kid rock back and forth or shake his foot up and down when he's busy with something, it doesn't hurt anyone and really helps him, even if you don't understand why or how.

I was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome (now high functioning autism) at the age of 19. I went through 2 or 3 years of therapy (though not the therapy you described, mine was just one on one with a therapist), but what helped me the most (in my experience) is that I read an ungodly amount of fiction between then and now (I'm 30 years old now). Books really describe how people think, and I've found that if I interpret what people do based on what authors say people think in books I'm usually not far off. That is, I'm close enough that interpreting people based on what I've read in books is close enough to the truth that it doesn't lead to major social fuck ups. When I was in high-school (ie., before I was diagnosed), teachers would sometimes get mad at me for what I thought then was 'no reason', but I now understand that it was caused by my behavior.

  For example, I remember one time when my 9th grade German teacher asked the class about our 8th grade German teacher, and I said that he was a huge asshole. This caused the teacher to flip his shit, but I had no idea why, because he and the 8th grade German teacher were clearly different people, so why would my opinion of the one affect the other? I now understand that my use of language was inappropriate, as well as that they were probably friends, or that it is inappropriate to shit on one teacher in front of another one in a classroom setting.

I'm basing my interpretation of my memory of what happened then on what I've read in the (among others) Harry Potter series. Interactions with teachers and classmates are explained very well there. I may not be able to intuitively feel what is the right way to behave, but because I have a good memory and because I read so much I'm usually able to determine what's going on now. So, in my experience, reading has been more fruitful than therapy.

The error is that comprise does not take of, unlike compose and consist.