A Wired feature -- brought to my attention via Grinding.be -- raises a number of questions about the extent to which we're able to integrate non-traditional language into our culture. Check out Grinding.be's coverage in particular for an interesting video from Amanda Baggs, an autistic woman mentioned also in Wired's article.

People who speak anything except English here in the US seem to face tremendous obstacles, while those whose first language is physical and non-verbal clearly face even more daunting ones. The article also looks at how people with Autism are generally perceived by the public as not being intelligent because they appear to lack any of the traditional characteristics of intelligence.

How people are perceived in public is something that I hope becomes progressively less of an issue. I keep hoping for the cyber-punk dystopias of novels like Neuromancer or the surreally cosmopolitan streets of Transmetropolitan's city where people are all so "different" that no generalizing descriptive terms can truly grasp the overwhelming complexities of culture and life. I want to live in a world where if people like Baggs can come to understand and appreciate her non-normative, non-threatening cognitive functioning, then everyone else can too. I hold out this hope not just for the overall tolerance required of people in such a place but for what I hope to be the onrushing rise of transhumans. I happened across this blog post at Accelerating Future which serves to sum up some of the broadest concerns of the Transhumanist movement and some of the underlying concerns and fascinations. Lots of my reading of late has focused on similar concerns, so it's always a great pleasure to find a vibrant discussion well under way. Discussions like the one Baggs has started and the one Transhumanists are carrying out is in large part the sort of big ideas that SF can tackle while simultaneously serving to entertain.

n.b. What is it like to have a lightsaber duel with a clone of yourself? Read this and find out!