Out of sorts

I just wanted to thank everyone for their kind words and love. Sarah and I have appreciated you all.

I have been hard at work learning Bayesian networks and inference, in pursuit of the Netflix Prize. Tonight, I'm getting all the rating data in that database. I think I am writing my stuff in Perl. I am also considering getting it onto the PC so I can use Matlab, but that would take a new hard drive.

But other than that, I've been Daylight Savings Out Of Sorts. I slept pretty crappily last night.

I hope to get a little deeper into the saga of Alex as time goes on. Sarah and I have found a lot of misconceptions about autism out there. The most obvious is that Alex doesn't seem to be neurotic like Rainman or other celebrated cases. Instead, his diagnosis of autism comes down to a checklist in the DSM, and a few boxes like "not enough language for communication", "not enough pretend play", "does not attend to unfamiliar adult". There is a broad spectrum of disorder, from truly incommunicable sensibilities back up to where Alex is. I figure that telling Alex's story and our story can break a few stereotypes.