Blatantly tangenting off of a thread from peterme I wanted to share an article that theorizes nerdism may be a mild form of autism.

It seems that M.I.T. has a course to help nerds get along in a social world, but for those of you interested in pushing the other way, I'm working on two microsites to help bring forth your inner savant. Each microsite is devoted to teaching mere mild geeks two of the tricks often demonstrated by the true autistic savants.

First is the "human calendar" exercise. This site will teach you how to convert any date in the past two-thousand years or the next two thousand (or however far you want) into a day of the week (what's more, you'll get the right day of the week).

Second is the 'one-function calculator' exercise where somebody gives you a 9 digit number and you tell them its cube root instantly.

Both of these tricks are often performed by autistic savants as demonstrations of their remarkable gifts, but remarkable as they may be, they can both be mastered within an afternoon by anyone with a reasonable memory and the ability to do two-digit math in their head.

So the microsites aren't done yet, but if you'd like an email reminder when they're available, enter your email address below and I'll drop you an email when it's done. I promise not to use it for anything else.

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