It is hard to drive safely in the hot afternoon, with the wrong music in my head. Light flashed off windshields, bumpers, trim; there are too many flashing lights. By the time I get home, my head hurts and I’m shaking. I take the pillows off my couch into the bedroom, closing all the shades tightly and then the door. I lie down, piling the pillow on top of me, then turn off the light. The denouement following the climax is particularly tidy, with all the subtlety of the end of an 80's college movie where we learn through super-imposed text that "Barry went on to win the Nobel prize" to the strains of Simple Minds. But the book is so much more. This isn’t an action or adventure novel, and the treatments and potential cure for autism is pretty much the only real SF element in the story. Rule 91 of The Highway Code recommends you take a break of at least 15 minutes after every two hours of driving. But it’s not just mid-journey breaks that matter but getting enough sleep before you set off, too. The stats show that you’re 20 times more likely to fall asleep at the wheel at 6am than at 10pm. Normality is a fictional notion, a social convention. Witness the extreme pressures exercised by some vocal minorities, both on the right and on the left of the political spectrum, to redefine normality in light of their own peculiar dogmas. Everybody who disagrees with them is their mortal enemy: Nazi sympathizers on the right lay claim to national identity – they are the only template for what it means to be a true [insert nationality here]; Every Christian splinter cult throughout history claims they hold the ultimate answer to God, and that everyone else is a heretic who should be burned at the stake; crusaders for a new sexual revolution on the left rush to cancel anyone who dares to question the validity of their claims and of their priorities.

Rereading Flowers for Algernon makes me realize just how frustrating this book is compared to that book. And it makes me take away a star.

Check your lights

If you wear glasses, you might want to speak to your optician about whether an anti-reflection coating on your lenses will help. I agree that both are excellent and that both deserve the genre awards received, and that we should avoid easy comparisons. If any of these lights aren’t working, you should repair them before hitting the road. If you’re not confident about doing this yourself, you can always ask for the help of a professional. Protect your eyes Registered office: Ageas House, Hampshire Corporate Park, Templars Way, Eastleigh, Hampshire, SO53 3YA Widen the interpretation of darkness a bit further, and consider the speed of dark matter. This mysterious energy makes up 80 percent of all matter in the universe. In a 2013 study, scientists determined that dark matter should have a speed of 54 meters per second, or 177 feet -- slow compared to the speed of light [source: Armendariz-Picon and Neelakanta]. Of course, dark matter velocity is theoretical at this point, as this matter has largely stopped moving, preferring to form haloes around galaxies throughout the universe. The 54 meters per second figure estimated its speed when the universe was first forming, extrapolated to how fast the dark matter could travel today if it were still in motion [source: Woo].

The writer is the mother of a son (adolescent at the time of this book’s publication) that has autism. The main character in this book has autism, but it takes place in the future where he has received better early intervention and treatment than exist today. The last factor is the most important for this book, Lou is autistic, what we would call today high functioning, though he is still autistic and struggles with 'normal' people, their behaviours and with general society. He has a job in a pharmaceuticals company in a special unit made up of autistic people who have good patterning skills. Lou sees patterns that other people do not, him and his co-workers have special conditions to allow them to use this skill for the company for whom they work. Lou and his cohort have another defining characteristic; they are probably the last people to become autistic adults, the treatments that were developed to treat autism were developed too late for them, but anyone younger has benefited from them.

Pack breakdown essentials

I have strong objections to the word "normal" anyway. Watching what Lou went through throughout this book was heartbreaking. First the forced pressure to be cured and, on the other side, does he want to be? It's very difficult to watch this struggle and to see how he's been made to feel less and other all of his life. Darkness does not possess a speed of its own. We cannot create darkness, as darkness has no source. In fact, the only reason why humans can identify darkness is that light exists. Scientifically, darkness is not an independent physical entity. Darkness is defined as merely the absence of light. It is mere emptiness. Dirt, frost and snow can impair your view of the road during daylight hours. If you allow them to stay on your windows and mirrors when driving in the dark, you might notice that your view of the road is even more affected.

Darkness is just the absence of light, and this means that darkness is an expression to state that no photons are present. I guess in some ways, it is similar to how a dry surface is just a surface that does not contain water (or any other form of liquid). Dry is not a specific material, but all liquids are. We can measure how much a liter of fluid a weighs, but we can’t ask how much ‘dry’ weighs.JadePhoenix13 on Reading The Wheel of Time: Taim Tells Lies and Rand Shares His Plan in Winter’s Heart (Part 3) 7 hours ago Most matter in the Milky Way and other galaxies is invisible matter. For nearly a century, astronomers have deduced the existence of such dark matter by measuring its gravitational influence on the visible stars and gas within galaxies [ 1]. And high-powered telescopes now routinely make detailed maps of where this dark matter is located [ 2]. But how fast dark matter moves—a quantity that affects the interpretation of dark matter detection experiments—is less well understood. To this point, astrophysicists have estimated the characteristic speed of dark matter using simple theoretical ideas [ 3]. A new study by Jonah Herzog-Arbeitman from Princeton University, New Jersey, and colleagues [ 4] now comes at this question from a different perspective. Using numerical simulations, the researchers identify “old” stars in the Galaxy that share the same characteristic speed as the dark matter, thereby providing a new window into the dark side of our Galaxy. It may sound obvious, but it’s important to stay alert when driving in the dark. Tired drivers are a serious risk on the road and fatigue contributes to 4% of fatal road crashes in Britain. Because it’s so difficult to spot, the true figure could be much higher. Autistic is different, not bad. It is not wrong to be different. Sometimes it is hard, but it is not wrong."

I found this story very moving and I really loved the main character and all the characters are well drawn. The author tells a very engrossing story. But most of the characters are wonderfully complex too. The head of Lou's department has some internalised guilt for abandoning his own low-functioning autistic brother to a full-time adult care facility which he assuages partly by his work with Lou and other high-functioning autistic employees.from the interview: When a title works, it begins to resonate with more and more elements ... in the writing, the other metaphysical connections formed. It's interesting to me that we spend the early part of our lives rebelling against normality (Why be normal, right?) only to want so desperately to be normal when our normality is not in our hands. Lou is born autistic, and even with the advantages of a future where more is known about the illness, there is still an enormous amount of prejudice towards people with autism. But some people don’t think too well, and it’s easy for them to blame someone else for anything that’s wrong in their own lives." I want to know what we know now, not what my parents might have heard when they were children. What difference does it make if someone in the distant past thought there were canals on Mars?" How can Elizabeth Moon be so insightful and expressive, close to poetry, on the subject of autism, a condition so easy to misinterpret? From the same interview I quoted earlier, the author has a long, difficult yet rewarding experience in dealing with Otherness in her own family.