Robert Hickman

Blog

Why mainstream educational courses do not work for me

Rigidly structured educational courses do not work for me. I am able to learn things perfectly effectively, but how I learn is different.

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How I learn things

For me, learning always begins when something catches my attention: ' this thing looks interesting and I want to do that'

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Behavior mirroring, developing social skills in real situations without logical analysis

Social mirroring may be a good way of developing social skills directly within the contexts that they will be applied.

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A timeline and history of men wearing skirts at contra dances

Should you have watched a video of an American contra dance you may have noticed that it is not uncommon to see male dancers wearing skirts, but how did this originate?

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Skirt silhouettes and styling for men

I share some ideas on skirt silhouettes and approaches to styling that look good on masculine body types.

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A gender neutral guide to twirly skirts for contra dance

Twirly skirts are a great aspect of contra dancing, flowing naturally with one's movements and generally looking awesome. Every contra dancer should be able to wear one if they want, why not?

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Living with a persistent drive for autonomy (PDA autism)

Due to a having a high baseline anxiety, I'm always thinking about what may happen or go wrong in the future, and because of this I only feel safe when I'm fully doing things voluntarily, of my own volition.

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Mental specialization: A positive reframing of autism and neurodiversity

I believe that autism is a biologically evolved neurological specialization, a trait that makes individuals predisposed to being good at some kinds of task, and worse at others. Using this idea, we can start making changes to work with differences in a positive way.

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Some practical reasons men should start wearing skirts (again)

Any cursory research will reveal that male skirts were by no means unusual historically, so if we discard the notion that skirts are objectively feminine, what kinds of practical use could men gain from this kind of garment today?

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A study regarding the skirt preferences of contra dancers

Myself and Louise Siddions, a widely known contra caller, conducted a survey into the skirts people enjoy for contra dancing.

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Write faster without pages (why page-oriented writing software is bad)

I find it odd that the common software for writing documents are still based around a model of pages of paper. Writing in this way forces a conflation of writing and layout, causing a ton of valueless work.

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Recommended programming lectures

A number of programming lectures that I found especially valuable.

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Implementing a drag and drop sortable list in vanilla JavaScript using pointer events

I describe an implementation of a drag and drop list using pointer events from first principles.

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