The Bog of Lost Scholars

I scored 29 on the Autism Quotient Quiz, just shy of the range where most autistics tend to score (32+).

I really need to track down Simon Baron-Cohen’s writings; while his work is way too easy for hardcore sociobiologists to twist out of shape, I do think he’s onto something with the systematizing vs. empathising intelligences.

(I find hardcore sociobiology adherents really annoying. “All men really ARE hardwired like X, and all women really ARE hardwired like Y…um, or is that the other way around?” Yeah, right. As is the case with most sociobiological ideas, I have no problem with the idea that men and women TEND to have different brainwiring, but I strenuously object to blanket “all men are this, all women that” formulations. By the way, when I take the SQ/EQ quiz, I test out pretty solidly on the systemizing side — in other words, I have a male brain. Take that, you hardcore sociobiology weenienappers….)

Heidi worked at the Press for eight years. I didn’t know her very well; she was very quiet, very reserved. Not talkative even with the other designers. But I know she was a fabulous book designer. And she tried so damn hard, sometimes, to join in the humor at our launch meetings, even though you could tell that she didn’t quite get it — or, perhaps, was so burdened even then that she couldn’t quite laugh.

In late January, she abruptly told her boss that she was quitting and would leave sometime in February. I ran into her in the hall after the announcement and told her that I was sorry she was leaving; she looked so distressed when she thanked me that I wondered if I’d sounded snarky or insincere. In retrospect….

And then she didn’t come in last Monday. And then they found her.

I’m still processing it. Half my brain seems to treat it as if she’d left for a better job rather than the Great Beyond. The other half…is not going to wig out, the first time I go into the Press on a Saturday and realize that Heidi won’t be at her desk working, but it’ll be damn empty here.

If any deity worth serving exists, They will say to her, “Depression is a life-threatening illness, and you battled it heroically for years before you fell. Here is a seat at Our high table, decorated with all the beauty you created in life. Hail, and welcome.”

Texas is moving its child support collection & distribution services from the county level to the state level, apparently due to new federal regulations. (Where have all the small-government federalist Republicans gone, long time passing….)

Now, I’d have figured that the logical way to do this would be for the counties to just dump the county records up to the Attorney General’s office, but no. I had to go to the county Domestic Relations office and get a certified list of my ex’s payments (fortunately that was free), have a form notarized saying that the amount of required payments my ex made that didn’t go through the county offices was $0 (why do they need an official, NOTARIZED form to say “look, it’s all going through the county, really!), and make a copy of the divorce decree.

They supplied a business reply envelope, but really, a 23-page copy of a divorce decree is not going to fit in a #9 envelope. So I just dropped the forms directly at the AG’s Child Support Division office.

Did the State of Texas intentionally put the Child Support Division in the same building as the Parole Division?

I swear, that has got to be the scariest government office visit I’ve ever made. The INS offices in San Antonio are cheerful havens by comparison.

But the lady at the desk was pleasant, and clearly knew what to check for on the paperwork to make sure I had everything correct. So that task’s done. Rather a pain in the neck, for $75/month….

Occasionally I run across the argument, “It’s better to have men as soldiers than women, because a man can sire a lot more babies than a woman can bear. If you have a war and kill off 90% of your young men, you can still get a full crop of babies for the next generation, but if you kill off 90% of your young women, you lose 90% of your next generation.”

I find this line of reasoning rather unsatisfying.

Ignoring the minor fact that if the war’s on your home turf, you could end up with lots of your young women dead whether they’re soldiers or civilians…. From a strictly biological viewpoint, the argument is true. One man + ten women = ten babies; ten men + one woman = one baby.

Now, in a society where the ideal is monogamy, tell me how we’re going to get that one man to sire babies on ten different women without a major breakdown in family and social networks.

Heck, we already know what that looks like. I’m reminded of a bit from Turner and Ehlers’s Sugar’s Life in the Hood where one of them points out that in the community where Turner lives, there is a high women:men ratio (5-10 women to one man; can’t remember the exact number), due to many men being in prison or otherwise unavailable as mates. The result, in that co-author’s opinion, is that a man in that community has no incentive to be a “good” man — really financially support his family beyond the occasional $50 supplement, be present for his kids, stay off booze and drugs, be faithful to his partner — because if his current woman doesn’t like his behavior, there’s someone else who’ll put up with it for the sake of having a man in her life and for the small financial benefit. And so you have the vicious cycle continuing: boys grow up thinking that’s the way to be a man; girls grow up thinking that they can’t expect men to act like adults.

So if you kill off 90% of your young men, either:

1. the ideal of the lifelong monogamous marriage goes kerflop, along with all the social structures based on that ideal; you may have a fully populated next generation, but you’ve lost important parts of your society and culture,
2. or you keep the ideal, you end up with a lot of unmarried women (cf. late 19th century U.S.)…and your next generation is still small, because 90% of the women aren’t reproducing. You might as well have let the women enlist alongside the men.

(Hmm. I really need to go track down some social histories of the UK and Europe after WWI. Certainly those countries lost large numbers of young men in the trenches, and I don’t have a clue what happened to the population in the following years.)