DrKrettin

I don't think that Aspies carry some kind of burden which is harder than a neurotypical burden, and we now have the fantastic advantage of being able to identify a consistent set of behavioral patterns and come to terms with them. Society is constructed for the benefit of neurotypical people, which is a problem for Aspies, but it is a problem one can deal with once the problem is recognised. Living with an Aspie involves being aware of the triggers for emotional meltdown and avoiding them, and arranging social contact in a manner which is bearable, all perfectly manageable tasks with a little effort.

5 minutes ago, koti said:

I just took this test and I scored 13 out of 50. Anything below 25 they say qualifies as non autistic but it's probably not a comprehensive way of finding out.
As for your "bad life decision" one could argue...if you haven't had married that person maybe you would have not spend a decade on studying physics and you'd be a dense, science ignorant now

I just did you test and scored 36. The bad decision I referred to was not studying physics (I had already done that) but marrying the person I did marry when a little more insight into my own brain would have been far more useful to me than a decade of physics. 

37 minutes ago, CaptainT said:

Obviously, everyone says I should walk away (people say this even without knowing of the AS), yet I do want to try again.

Would you have any opinion on how to communicate with my partner?

 

I don't know why everyone says you should walk away - having an insight into the partner's mental makeup can only improve the possibility of a meaningful relationship, and so if the urge is there, I see every reason to try to reconnect. 

I don't really understand why people generally have an aversion to a psychological inspection, and are usually very reluctant to discuss it. This is a potential problem when you want to discuss Aspergers with somebody who is unaware that they are somewhere on the spectrum. The prejudice is that it is some kind of disability, so people get defensive about it, without realising that a mild form of it can have huge positive attributes, such as the ability to focus on one topic far longer than a neurotypical person. (I am convinced that the academic environment of a university has the highest density of Aspies anywhere.) You don't mention whether the partner is aware of being an Aspie, and if not, then extreme tact is required when wanting to discuss it. On the other hand, my second wife had a life-changing revelation when we began to understand why we both had such difficulties in social situations and why we felt so isolated sometimes, just not understanding how other people functioned. 

Aspies hate being put on the spot, and always feel comfortable when they can take time and consider a social response. So I would not recommend a telephone call, but rather a carefully composed letter or email as a first step. Then see what kind of response before the next step.

1 minute ago, koti said:

DrKrettin Sir, if you take out Asperger out of your story it sounds like a regular mariage story. People don't need Asperger to realize that their relationship has no meaningful basis and get on their way after 25 years of living together. Are you sure you have it?

I am absolutely certain I qualify.  I agree that the situation is by no means confined to Aspergers, but the point I was making is that if I had been aware of my mental make-up and the implications of it at the time, I would never have married the person I did. There was nobody around at the time to give me the advice I needed. It is a sad reflection on how we live that I had spent a decade dedicating myself to studying physics, yet I had no idea of  the basics of how my own mind operated, which resulted in a really bad life decision.

I could write a whole essay on this.  Briefly, five years ago at the age of 65, after a considerable amount of research and some tests, I diagnosed myself as being on the Asperger's spectrum. If I had had this diagnosis 60 years earlier, my life would have been much easier and different in many respects.

By far the best approach is I think to read Tony Attwood's book on Asperger's syndrome which can be downloaded as an e-book. His description of aspects of Asperger's  coincided so much with various social difficulties I have had in the past, that it was a complete revelation.

By far the biggest effect it has had on my life is mentioned in the book. As a generalisation, young Asperger's men tend to be aware of an emotional immaturity and choose partners who are older and more emotionally mature because there is something comforting about it. He says this is unfortunate because in the long term, this is not the kind of partner he needs.

This is exactly what I did. It took me 25 years to realise that the relationship actually had no meaningful basis (for me) and I knew we should never have married. I'll skip over the details here. Suffice to say that an Asperger's male should seek and Asperger's female, but given an estimated 1 in 1000 males and 1 in 4000 females are in this category, the chances of meeting are small. (The figures for women are debatable, more about that later). But I did meet one, 25 years later than I should have done.

15 minutes ago, Ten oz said:

The number of partners doesn't matter.

True in most cases, but the OP was asking whether  a previous relationship can harm a newer long-term one, and I was trying to say that it certainly does not have to, and in some cases can be beneficial.

9 hours ago, Raider5678 said:

If it seems to be going great and working out, why would you throw it away in the hopes of something better?

I didn't mean it quite like that. Sometimes relationships end for practical reasons, such as having to live too far away to continue. Sometimes a relationship is fantastic in a specific situation and the situation changes. Sometimes a relationship is valuable but you recognise that something important is missing so you know it can't last. Sometimes you just get dumped. Despite the pain, I would far rather have loved and lost than never loved at all.

I think it is important to have several meaningful relationships before settling down to a long-term one, because only then can you be confident in knowing exactly what your criteria are. I know a couple who played together at the age of 4, never had other relationships, and have been married for 40-odd years. That's great if it makes for genuine happiness, but how do they know whether they might be happier with other partners? A long-term relationship can quickly become a habit rather than something meaningful, and (I think) you some kind of comparison mechanism. 

There are about 3,200,000,000 women in the world. It would seem a shame to me if I all I had to experience in life was the pleasure (or not) of living with just one of them.

Noted, thanks. My alternative is to construct the thing in metal using an actual I beam (which they actually have in stock, at least today), but the whole thing would look awful, and cladding it in wood would be time-consuming. I find it hard to believe that I need to do that. 

All the above is really useful information, thanks everyone. Now I've got the name of the beam, I can do a little research.  Where I live (Tenerife) the biggest problem is supply of materials. Wood is not only expensive, there is very little choice of shapes and sizes, and so I have to make do with what is available.

Today, I had worked out exactly what I needed to make most of the construction from metal, using 100x100 box metal, 3mm thick. Off to the only company selling metal on the island, hanging around to be served, only to be told that they were out of stock, can't order it, no idea when it might arrive, bugger off.  They also denied that 6m lengths of steel for a flitch beam actually existed. I failed to explain in Spanish what I wanted to do, but here there is no customer support or any help whatsoever.

So off to the biggest wood supplier, where I found I could get 100x200 or 70x200 laminated beams, and very little else. But oddly what they did have was a piece of metal ideal to use for a filch beam, exactly what the "experts" denied existed.

So my idea is to use two 70x200 laminated beams and the filch beam to span the 6 metres. This would have to take the weight of about 1000 kg (tiles) evenly spread. I just can't imagine that this is not strong enough, but if anyone disagrees, please let me know.

I want to make a kind of pergola with a tiled roof on one side of the house, 6 m along the side of the house and 3 m wide. Usually, these pergolas have supporting posts every 3 metres, but I particularly want a span of 6m between the corner posts, which means I need a strong supporting beam to hold up the roof. A builder friend suggested that I get two 6m laminated wooden beams of cross section 100x200 mm and sandwich a metal sheet (thickness 3 - 6 mm) between them, bolting the three together along the length of the beam. This metal sheet would be vertical, thus effectively working as an I-shaped RSJ, but the whole thing would be much more attractive than just an RSJ. 

I have no idea whether I am over-engineering this. The roof weight will be 30 sqm of tiles at 50 kg per sqm = 1500 kg including roof beams, about two thirds of which weight will rest on this 6m beam. Any comments on these quantities would be appreciated.

What I do wonder about is something the builder claims is simply not a problem - what happens to this wood-steel-wood sandwich when the steel expands and contracts under temperature changes? Does the wood expand with the steel, or what happens?

1 hour ago, DanRaleigh said:

Let us forget what the text books are saying for a moment and use our common sense to make some judgements. 

 

The alternative is to accept that history texts books are usually written by scholars who know how to evaluate data. Why should we forget this?

Common Sense also tells me that if any of this were true, then there would be clear tangible evidence, not just some conspiracy theory.

22 minutes ago, swansont said:

"Go to first unread post" is also a setting you can enable in the customized streams

That would be really useful information to somebody who knows how to customise a stream. Any clues?

On 7/23/2017 at 2:34 PM, Ten oz said:

Children born with disabilities like the various ranges of Asperger's syndrome may never how to manipulate others. Are they born without this instinct your describing? 

Asperger's is generally not a disability. I seem to remember arguing about this before. 

Thanks for that!

All I get is what looks like a "stream of consciousness" list of posts listed according to time of posting. If I notice a thread of interest, I can either go to the beginning of the thread (which might be 30 pages)  or the last post. Obviously I need to go to the first unread post in that thread, but I can't. The result is confusing, although I admit to being easily confused. 

I haven't the faintest idea how to navigate around this new version. I thought the old one was perfectly acceptable.

I could argue that Jazz is far superior due to the use of many complex scales, time sigs and improvisory variations on themes... but again, that is just my opinion and it has been shown in studies (will have to look it up if you need citation - I read it somewhere a while back) that most people hate jazz and that it is an acquired taste.

Strange how subjective this all is. I cannot imagine living without music - to me it is provides a meaning to life. But I find jazz to be the most revolting and disturbing experience, physically painful. If there is jazz playing, I have to get out of the room. Seeing that most people I know choose to have it as background music at social functions, it can make life difficult for me.

Yes, that does seem to be the obvious method, which for various reasons I don't understand, he finds unacceptable. I think it is a matter of principle that he thinks it is a general requirement but which does not seem to be supported, and he cannot understand why.

Well, actually it's my son who needs this for work, and he wants to use tablets, not a computer using W10. So I'm not sure that a W10 solution is something he would find useful.

If you have multiple tablets (do you?) then surely all you need todo is start with the PDF open on each of them, then open different links on each... or am I missing something?

That would have to be the method if no easier one is available, but with an original very long document with hundreds of hyperlinks (of which half a dozen might be needed), it would be difficult to manage. The mystery is that this facility we are looking for must be generally useful but seems impossible to implement.

Is there a method of doing this on tablets run on android with a pdf reader? (I assume Linux is not available on a tablet)

I need to read a long technical document with many hyperlinks in it. If I click on a hyperlink, that text becomes visible in a different window. But what I need to do is to have these hyperlinks open on a different networked computer screen. The aim is to have several screens where the original document and several hyperlinked documents are all visible simultaneously.

This seems like an obvious requirement, but we can't find any method of doing it. Any ideas anybody?

Here am I, wondering whether I should bother to google EDM because the OP can't even be bothered to say what it is. Nah, I won't bother either.

What if we consider the devil to be a metaphor for those individuals, behaviours and beliefs that are "evil", or at least "up to no good"?

Why not include things like bone cancer in children?