You might just be old. It happens to the best of us 
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Engineer here
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On the autism topic I strongly suspect construction/industrial maintenance/etc is full of people with undiagnosed autism. There are a lot of common behaviors and interactions that make much more sense read that way imo.
I work construction and used to think that; but after 20+ years maybe some of them are just plain stupid?
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Por que no los dos?
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I worked for an engineering and construction company for 35 yrs and spent many hours on the construction sites. My observance was that some are just plain dumb, but surprisingly there are some very intelligent people out there also.
I think just an environment and communication style that works for autistic brains. Probably a high concentration than in the general populace, but probably not full.
My wife is a computer programmer. Most of the other programmers she works with aren’t autistic. Definitely some, but still a minority.
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Ah, yeah. Full was not a great adjective there. I meant has a much higher percentage than the population. In theory everything is unambiguously communicated by drawings and documents, and there’s more working with things than people in many roles.
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Ah. That’s why you knew about engrams.
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The term “engram” is new to me, so I checked Wikipedia.
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The term “engram” was coined by memory researcher Richard Semon in reference to the physical substrate of memory in the organism. Semon warned, however: “In animals, during the evolutionary process, one organic system—the nervous system—has become specialised for the reception and transmission of stimuli. No monopoly of this function by the nervous system, however, can be deduced from this specialisation, not even in its highest state of evolution, as in Man.”
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This instantly reminded me of one of my favorite Robert Heinlein quotes.
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A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
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Did most of those, more or less. Still on my bucket list:
- change a diaper
- die gallantly
Not planning to change a diaper in the foreseeable future, so I’ll be an insect for the time being 
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To be fair Heinlein didn’t exactly tick all the boxes there either.
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I studied History and Philosophy and did the natural progression to being a systems administrator and then working in tech support which has now been redubbed Customer Experience. Probably to make people that somehow got a CS degree feel better about not being able to Google their own answers 
Jokes aside, I like problem solving and am not afraid of repeated failure, which is probably why someone with no sense of rhythm to speak of decided to learn to play bass.
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QRZ?