There’s another article in today’s Globe magazine that I’d like to draw your attention to, as well: the Boston Uncommon feature, an essay by Christopher Wood-Robbins about how being diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at age 40 changed his life. It’s a beautiful piece.

I’ve written before about Asperger’s, and my own fascination with the condition, and occasional frustration with people on the spectrum. The article I linked to in the previous sentence did more to help me “get it” than anything else, but something really leaped out at me from Mr. Wood-Robbins’s article:

Other kids taunted me at recess and threw dodge balls at my head (and it wasn’t during a game). I would skip down hallways to my next class and not understand why everyone else thought it was strange.

I’m about as neurotypical as they come, and those two lines could be taken directly from my unwritten memoirs. See, my folks moved around a bit when I was a kid, and while skipping down hallways might have been considered whimsical and cool in School 1, and I would be some kind of trendsetter, at School 2, it would be the dorkiest thing you could possibly do and the dodge balls would start flying. As a child, I could pick up on social cues, but I honestly couldn’t figure out why the same behavior, clothes, or lunchbox that would made me cool in one setting made me an outcast in another. The bullying pained me — but the unearned popularity mystified me just as much. And the fact that I knew I hadn’t changed led me to believe that social interaction is fundamentally unknowable … and probably not worth it.

So … yeah. Maybe I do know, a little more than I’ve let on, even to myself, what Aspie folks must feel like sometimes. And maybe some of my mixed emotions about them might be a desire to shut out those painful feelings of confusion and loneliness from my own childhood. I’ve always assumed that my difficulty getting along with people on the spectrum is that I’m very different from them. This is true, but maybe that’s not the whole story.

Because I know what it’s like to do the thing that seems right and normal and have people laugh in your face. I know what it’s like not to realize that the rules have changed until it’s too late. I know what it’s like not to get the joke. I know what it’s like not to even realize there was a joke until you find out, again too late, that you were the butt of it.

And I know what it’s like to say, “Screw it, I’m just going to hang out with my dog and read Sherlock Holmes. Y’all ain’t worth it.” Boy oh boy, do I know what that’s like.

The author ends his essay with this:

If you can try to understand why I function the way I do, then I will do my best to learn the proper way to do things on the neurotypical side of the fence. In other words, I’ll meet you halfway.

Change “halfway” to “for a cup of coffee,” Mr. Wood-Robbins, and you’ve got yourself a deal.

… is online here.

Not enough we awarded 10 Ig Nobel Prizes last night … this morning Google Alerts informed me that “Miss Conduct” was dubbed one of the “9 Hottest Roller Girls of All Time” by Complex.com. I don’t quite recognize myself in their photo, I must admit:

I don’t think they carry that skirt at Eileen Fisher.

Here they are, folks:

VETERINARY MEDICINE PRIZE: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, UK, for showing that cows who have names give more milk than cows that are nameless.

PEACE PRIZE: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining — by experiment — whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.

ECONOMICS PRIZE: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks — Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland — for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa — and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Javier Morales, Miguel Apátiga, and Victor M. Castaño of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, for creating diamonds from liquid — specifically from tequila.

MEDICINE PRIZE: Donald L. Unger, of Thousand Oaks, California, USA, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand — but never cracking the knuckles of his right hand — every day for more than sixty (60) years.

PHYSICS PRIZE: Katherine K. Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, USA, Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard University, USA, and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, USA, for analytically determining why pregnant women don’t tip over.

LITERATURE PRIZE: Ireland’s police service (An Garda Siochana), for writing and presenting more than fifty traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country — Prawo Jazdy — whose name in Polish means “Driving License”.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE: Elena N. Bodnar, Raphael C. Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, Illinois, USA, for inventing a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.

MATHEMATICS PRIZE: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers — from very small to very big — by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).

BIOLOGY PRIZE: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu, and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas.

For more information, including full citations on the winners–because all of these achievements are real–go to improbable.com.

ALSO, if you are in the Boston area — the Ig Informal Lectures will be held tomorrow, Saturday, October 3 at 1:00 p.m. at MIT in room 10-250. In a certain way, the Informal Lectures are even more fun than the ceremony, as the winners have more time to explain what — and, more to the point, why — they did what they did. I hope to see you there!

If you can’t come to the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony tonight, you can watch the webcast, starting at 7:15 pm EDT, on improbable.com.

Phew! Hectic day. Details, details!

From Sociological Images comes this gem, an early 1900s chart describing the two paths a woman’s life can take, one leading to shame and ostracism, one to love and honor:

Now, you’ll notice that the ages line up here at first — 13, 20, 26 — but then the “good” woman winds up at age 60, while the “bad” one winds up at age 40. Perhaps they mean to suggest that she dies young, but I prefer to imagine, instead, that after all that study, obedience, virtue, devotion, and caretaking, the woman on the right treated herself to one HELL of an offstage midlife crisis before settling down to grandmotherhood! I hope she had a good time, and is whispering some scandalous stories in her granddaughter’s ear.

For anyone who is interested in the path of Miss Conduct’s life:

At 13: Bad literature (I much preferred Stephen King and those Hitchcock anthologies to the Newberry Award winners the librarians were always pushing on me)

At 20: Flirting and coquetry (well behind my peers on that one, actually, as a result of always having my nose stuck in a mystery novel in my teens)

At 26: Fast life & dissipation

At 32: Fast life & dissertation

At 40: Advice columnist.

Today is the biggest day of the year in the Improbable-Conduct household: Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony Day!

Surely, by now, you’ve all heard me talk about this enough. Let me just point your attention to a lovely article that came out a few days ago, that I think really gets at what the Igs are all about:

Not everyone has seen the funny side of the Ig Nobels, however. In 1995 a team of British researchers won the physics Ig for research into why breakfast cereal goes soggy – prompting some newspapers to ask why taxpayers’ money was being wasted on such trivial research. In fact, the project had been funded by a leading cereal maker rather than the UK taxpayer and had an entirely serious purpose: consumers prefer cereal that keeps crunchy as long as possible.

Even so the controversy led Britain’s chief scientist, professor Sir Robert May, to ask the organisers not to award any more Igs to UK researchers, who were emerging as embarrassingly frequent winners of the prizes.

With maintenance of reputation being so important among scientists these days, Sir Robert’s request was understandable. But it also ignores the fact that many major scientific advances have come from research into “trivial” questions.

Have a nice read, and I’ll be back with the list of winners for you tomorrow morning!