Glenn Reynolds, autism expert

I was reading the October issue of Popular Mechanics (theme: disaster preparedness! survival! which really turns my geek crank!) and I ran across this, by Glenn Reynolds – page 48.

Here’s a simple truth: It’s better to bend than to break, and it’s best to be prepared for the worst. This age-old wisdom is going by a new name in slide-rule circles: “Resilience engineering” starts with the insight that it’s smart to design and maintain systems so that they have some give. That means building technologies that offer extra capacity to handle sudden loads, plenty of warning when normal operations are beginning to break down, backup systems in case things do go wrong, diverse digital architectures so that a single bug doesn’t produce widespread failure, and decentralization so that when (not “if”) communication breaks down things don’t grind to a halt.

And that seems to me to be a perfect, perfect description of parenting an autistic child.

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