The Rambling Musings of Self Aware Stardust

           I like to consider myself a kind, patient, caring father; after all, I have won Daphne Stevens’s “Father of the Year” award three times now. However, there are times when I am exasperated and yell, times when I am uninvolved and just want to play on my phone, times when I am tired and just want to feed my kids cereal and send them to bed. Like it or not, those moments are part of my legacy with my kids, and while I have had many successes, I’ve also had failures and it is important to be honest about it. The history of our country and citizens is the same way, so when people look at the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6 th and say, “That is not who we are!” I believe they are wrong in their picture of America, at least partially.           The history of America is full of contradictions from the very beginning.   We have Puritans fleeing religious persecution and settling in Massachuset...

              I’m a numbers guy, my master’s degree is in math, and even though it didn’t specifically have a concentration in statistics, about half my courses were related to it. I also don’t enjoy flying (ok, that’s underselling it. I’m afraid of flying) so whenever I sit down in that cramped seat that has somehow gotten even smaller, I remind myself that the number of fatalities per mile driven is twice as many per mile flown.   If you look at injuries, it’s even worse for the drivers. Nevertheless, my hands are sweaty, gripping the armrest as the plane comes in for landing, something I rarely feel while driving. Why is this? It basically comes down to the fact that we (humans) suck at evaluating relative risks, figuring out if one action is riskier than another.   This has come up many times in considering vaccinations and other medical treatments and there are a number of psychological reasons this is the case. Knowing this does not al...

  I am an autistic individual who wasn’t diagnosed until their later 30s (even though I began to suspect I was autistic when I learned about autism in college) and I have a son who is autistic and was diagnosed in kindergarten.   As such, I’m part of two communities that should work together but are often at odds: autistic people and parents of children with autism. Having a mom for a doctor and a dad who taught science, my son Isaac is aware of the controversy between vaccines and autism. One night, he asked, “But why would your kid having autism be a bad thing?” You see, when we have talked to him about having autism we’ve stressed that it’s a different way of thinking, a different way of understanding the world, a different way of looking at reality and to him that sounds pretty cool. He knows that sometimes his friends do stuff he thinks is weird and he does stuff that his friends think is weird, but his integration into “normal” life has been fairly easy. Isaac didn’t kno...