Now listening to Show Me by The Cover Girls and The Dead Pool by Lalo Schifrin...

On Seymour Street in Downtown Vancouver. Summer of 2018.

Seymour Street stretches from Pacific Boulevard in the south (near the False Creek area) to the edge of Stanley Park in the north, where it transitions into a residential and commercial corridor. It crosses key east-west streets like West Georgia Street and Dunsmuir Street, making it a central artery in the downtown grid. It passes through vibrant districts such as Yaletown (south of False Creek), the central business district, and the West End, offering a mix of commercial, residential, and cultural spaces.

The Vancouver Heritage Site Finder highlights 1295 Seymour Street, a former Federal Motor Company showroom and Chapman’s Garage built in 1920. This structure is noted as a rare surviving example of early 20th-century industrial-commercial architecture in Vancouver, reflecting a minimalist, functional design typical of automotive workshops from that era. The 1200-block of Seymour Street once housed a cluster of similar workshops, though most have been replaced by modern developments, making 1295 Seymour a valuable historical relic.

The WeWork location at 333 Seymour Street is a well-regarded coworking hub, spanning seven floors with amenities like a fitness center, showers, and pet-friendly policies. Reviews praise its central location, modern design, and community-driven atmosphere, with staff like Sade, Yammy, and Vera enhancing its appeal. It’s easily accessible via public transit (e.g., buses at Cordova Street) and bike stations, reflecting Vancouver’s emphasis on sustainable transport. The Mark at 1372 Seymour Street is a notable condominium development in the Downtown Vancouver West area, near Pacific Street. Recent sales data (e.g., #1503 sold for $30K under asking on July 19, 2025) indicate a competitive market, with the building offering luxury units in a prime location. This reflects ongoing urban densification and investment in the area.

Seymour Street’s proximity to the SeaBus terminal and major transit routes makes it a hub for commuters. The street map data confirms its role as a navigable, pedestrian-friendly corridor with Google Street View available for exploration. The street blends historic charm with contemporary urban life, hosting a mix of offices, shops, and residential towers. Its central location near Gastown and the waterfront adds to its appeal for professionals and residents alike.

 

Tene Williams interview on Video Soul with Sherry Carter

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884)

The Austrian botanist Gregor Johann Mendel was a genius of the plodding, hardworking, single-minded sort - a genius for whom discovery was, as Thomas Edison put it, one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. He was not a playful, intuitive genius like Picasso. (The great painter once said, “I do not seek — I find,” an attitude that describes many of the men and women we now think of as geniuses.)

Mendel “toiled, almost obsessively, at what he did. But still he had that extra 1 percent, that inspiration that helped him see his results from a slightly different angle. It was this flash of insight that allowed Mendel to perform a feat of genius: to propose laws of inheritance that ultimately became the underpinning of the science of genetics” (Henig, 2001, p. 6).

According to Henig (2001) it was Mendel’s non-heroism that allowed him to do the patient, thorough work through which his genius emerged (p. 168). A science was named in his honor: Mendelian genetics. High-functioning autism/Asperger Syndrome would be highly useful in this kind of plodding work, and this chapter presents the evidence that Mendel displayed this condition.

Mendel made the first tentative step towards a concept that would not be fully elucidated for another 50 years: the difference between phenotype (the way something looks) and genotype (the particular combination of genes that explains those looks) (Henig, 2001).

Life History

Mendel was born on July 22, 1822, near Udrau, in Austrian Silesia. His father, a farmer, did some experimental work with grafts to create better fruits. Mendel entered the Augustinian cloister at Briinn, and was ordained a priest. Having studied science at Vienna, he returned to Briinn and later became abbot. He studied plant variation, heredity, and evolution in the monastery’s garden, particularly in pea plants. (It is interesting that many adults with autism work well in gardens; e.g., at Dunfirth in Ireland, people with autism live and work at activities such as organic vegetable growing that are intended to foster their growth and development.)

Mendel died at Briinn in January 1884, from Bright’s disease (inflammation of the kidneys). Later, he was heralded as the father of genetics. During his years of anonymity, the priest was fond of telling his friends, “My time will come.”

Work

According to Henig (2001), Mendel “observed that traits are inherited separately and that characteristics that seem to be lost in one generation may crop up again a generation or two later, never having been lost at all. He gave us a theoretical underpinning for this observation, too: he believed the traits passed from parent to offspring as discrete, individual units in a consistent, predictable, and mathematically precise manner” (p. 7). Sixty years after his death, a friend stated, “Not a soul believed his experiments were anything more than a pastime, and his theories anything more than the maunderings of a harmless putterer” (Henig, 2001, p. 164). During the winter, Mendel spent as much time as he could in the monastery library, doing meticulous work. His relationship to peas was probably similar to that of other persons with autism to numbers.

Social Behavior

Mendel was essentially homebound for his first forty years. In one photograph he is “standing in the precise middle of the group and looking off somewhere past the photographer's left shoulder” — he stands “erect and alone” (Henig, 2001, p. 121).

Mendel was a very shy person, with major peer and relationship problems. He had a naturally reticent personality: a friendly reserve with an underlying privacy. He was unable to do the most basic work that priests were required to do and was not in good health. He took to bed with a mysterious illness. Abbot Napp, the head of the monastery, stated that he was “seized by an unconquerable timidity when he has to visit a sick-bed or to see anyone ill or in pain. Indeed, this infirmity of his has made him dangerously ill” (Henig, 2001, p. 37).

When trying to do some teaching, he panicked and performed poorly at a teaching assessment that involved both an oral and a written examination. Professor Kanner, who examined his geological essay, described it as arid, obscure, and hazy, his thinking as erroneous, and his writing style as hyperbolic and inappropriate. Clearly Mendel had been an autodidact. Six years later he again tried to pass the certificate examination but panicked again and failed. According to Henig (2001), he was relegated for the rest of his career to the rank of uncertified substitute teacher.

Narrow Interests/Obsessiveness

As a boy Mendel was a disappointment to his father because of his reluctance to get out of bed. Mendel was attracted to book learning and joined the local monks.

Henig (2001) referred to a “one-track, simmering genius that had a chance to explode only years later, when the twin stars of intuition and accident were momentarily aligned in Mendel’s favor, providing him an insight into the mystery of inheritance that few but he were prepared to understand” (p. 22). Henig thought that as a young man Mendel was probably eager, driven, and scientifically voracious. Nevertheless, he had interests other than experimental science: He became the official “weather watcher” for the city of Briinn and recorded meteorological readings every day. The fame that he longed for would come to him in his lifetime primarily as a local meteorologist. He was a skilled chess player (persons with autism are often interested in chess); he kept bees and gathered honey. He regarded his bees as his “dear little animals.”

According to Henig:
Mendel was also forever amusing himself with scientific and mathematical ideas that had nothing to do with plants. On the back of a draft of one of his dozens of church-tax missives, he scribbled lists that showed that, even in the midst of administrative tasks, he set himself new intellectual challenges. One of the most intriguing was a list of common surnames. Using several directories — the Military Year Book of 1877, the register of transporters, the register of bankers, a barristers’ year book — Mendel collected more than seven hundred names, which he arranged in different ways in an apparent attempt to spot some sort of pattern. First he placed them in alphabetical order, then he grouped them according to meaning. (2001, p. 165)

Mendel’s experimentation with peas was tedious work: In the autumn of 1857 alone, he had to shell, count, and sort by shape more than 7,000 peas, and that was just for one experiment, involving crosses between round and angular peas (Henig, 2001, p. 81). By the time he finished his work, seven years after he began, Mendel had conducted seven versions of this experiment, seven different monohybrid crosses, designed to look at plants that varied in only a single trait (shape first, then color, then height). By the time he had completed this succession of crosses, re-crosses, and backcrosses, he must have counted a total of more than 10,000 plants, 40,000 blossoms, and a staggering 300,000 peas. Virtually no one except a person with autism could do this.

Henig (2001) noted that Mendel applied his passion for counting almost indiscriminately to everything in his own little world. He counted not only peas but weather readings, students in his classes, and bottles of wine purchased for the monastery cellar. People with high-functioning autism are fascinated by numbers.

After Mendel became abbot of his monastery, he engaged in an obsessive letter-writing campaign against the new “monastery tax,” which he continued until his death.

Routines/Control

“Monastery life was a balm to Mendel. Its regularity provided ease and comfort to a man who had spent his first twenty-one years in a thicket of uncertainty” (Henig, 2001, p. 25).

The orangery became his favorite place in the monastery. This is reminiscent of Ludwig Wittgenstein writing his philosophy in the warm botanic gardens in Dublin. He furnished the orangery with “a game table for playing chess; an oak writing table; six rush-bottomed nut wood chairs; and a few paintings. In his last years, when as abbot he could use the monastery’s grandest rooms, he still spent his time in the orangery ... working through the mathematical, biological, and meteorological problems that vexed and intrigued him all the days of his life” (Henig, 2001, p. 65).

Language/Humor

Mendel, even to the end of his life, had a waggish and somewhat mischievous sense of humor, and “collected good jokes the way Darwin collected barnacles” (Henig, 2001, p. 163). He once upset the local bishop by saying, in what he thought was a whisper, that the bishop possessed “more fat than understanding.” He would “walk slowly among the plants, which he liked to call his ‘children’ to get a reaction from visitors who did not know about his gardening experiments. “Would you like to see my children?’ the priest would ask. Their startled and embarrassed faces were always good for a chuckle” (Henig, 2001, p. 116).

Anxiety/Depression

Mendel became paranoid later in his life, just like Isaac Newton, and was suspicious of everyone, even his fellow monks, whom he thought to be “nothing but enemies, traitors and intriguers” (Henig, 2001, p. 162).

Mode of Thought

Mendel became interested in combination theory, which describes the relationship among the objects in a group arranged in any predetermined way. Henig (2001) saw this belief in combination theory as a mark of Mendel’s genius: “Throughout history, some of the most creative minds have been those capable of maintaining two different mental constructs of the world simultaneously and applying the principles of one model to problems in the domain of the second” (p. 54).

The day he died, the local Natural Science Society heard a eulogy that referred to his “independent and special manner of reasoning” (Henig, 2001, p. 166).

Appearance

Henig (2001) quoted an acquaintance who described Mendel as “a man of medium height, broad-shouldered ... with a big head and a high forehead, his blue eyes twinkling in the friendliest fashion through his gold-rimmed glasses. Almost always he was dressed, not in priest robes, but in the plain clothes proper for a member of the Augustinian order acting as schoolmaster — tall hat; frock coat, usually rather too big for him; short trousers tucked into topboots.” His dress “bespoke his decorum and modesty; he was out in the world, but always a cleric” (p. 90). It is interesting that he is supposed to have had a big head: 50% of people with autism have big heads. This may be due to less pruning of cells early in life but may lead to a greater capacity to carry out mathematical calculations. When he walked, according to an acquaintance, he looked straight in front of him.

Conclusion

Mendel showed many of the criteria for Asperger Syndrome, particularly obsessiveness, social impairment, and love of routine. He also had the interest in counting, classifying, and mathematical calculation that is quite typical of the syndrome.

- Michael Fitzgerald, Former Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry

Just finished watching The Flame (1947) and Cloud Waltzing (1987)...

Just finished watching Avatar: The Way Of Water (2022) and Weapons (2025)...

England as the Workshop of the World

The Crystal Palace Seen From The Serpentine by William Wyld, 1852

I will continue to quote from 'Paths of Fire: An Anthropologist's Inquiry into Western Technology' (1996) by Robert McCormick Adams. The following quote is from the fourth chapter, which is titled England as the Workshop of the World. "The onset of the Industrial Revolution, while an epochal transformation in any longer view, involved no sudden or visible overturning of the established order. Many contributory streams of change had converged and unobtrusively gathered force during the first two-thirds or so of the eighteenth century. Leading elements of technological change presently began to stand out - in engines and applications of rotary power, in the production of iron and steel, and most importantly in new textile machinery. But their sources and significance lay primarily in interactions with a wider matrix of other, earlier or contemporaneous changes. As we have seen, these other changes were largely of a non-technological character. While highly diverse, the most important can be briefly summarized. Among them were the consolidation of large landholdings and the commercialization of agriculture; the widening web of international trade; unprecedented urban growth; rising, increasingly differentiated internal demand and the development of markets to supply it; intensified applications of oversight and discipline in prototypes of a factory system; growing concentration of wealth and the socially sanctioned readiness to invest it in manufacturing; and, not least, the discovery of common interests and meeting grounds by inventors, engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs. Not as anyone’s conscious intention, it was out of such diverse elements - and the even broader and more diffuse shifts in cultural predispositions that underlay many of them - that an era of profound irreversible change was fashioned. This chapter will sketch the main outlines of how it happened and the role that technology occupied along the leading edges of change. But no less important than England’s taking of commanding leadership was how it slipped away in the later nineteenth century. We will discover that this was no internally determinate, quasi-biological cycle of youthful vigor, maturity, and decline. It mostly had to do instead with the diffusion and further development of core features of the Industrial Revolution itself. External competitors could quickly assimilate the English example while escaping some of its natural shortcomings as a pioneer. Uncapitalized, the term industrial revolution denotes a significant rise in manufacturing productivity and an ultimately decisive turn in the direction of industrial growth, anywhere and at any time. So used, it applies to all of the sequential phases of modernization on a technological base that, at a still-accelerating pace, have cumulatively transformed the world since the late eighteenth century. On the other hand, when stated as the Industrial Revolution, it is widely used, and is used here, to refer specifically to the founding epoch of machine-based industrialization in England that began around 1760 and lasted there for something less than a century. There is no dispute that this was a time of sustained, cumulatively substantial change. Within a human lifetime of seventy years or so England moved forward without serious rival into the status of “workshop of the world.” As such, it came not only to dominate world trade but to transport much of that trade in its ships. Industrialization directly and profoundly altered the fabric of life for many, drawing a rural mass not only into urban settings but into factories and other new, urban-centered modes of employment. Population, having risen only slowly until late in the eighteenth century, turned sharply upward by the early nineteenth and rose by 73 percent (from 10.5 to 18.1 million) between 1801 and 1841. Markets proliferated, and popular dependence on them both deepened and widened. Travel beyond one’s local community or district came within an ordinary wage earner’s reach. National income rose precipitately, although the significance of this for any notion of “average” income or well-being is undermined by growing inequities of distribution. Important as these largely material changes were in their own right, we must not overlook their intersections - but also their differences - with others in the realm of ideas. Introduced in the wake of the American and French Revolutions were new aspirations for individual rights, equality before the law, and widened political participation. Echoing great themes of popular unrest that had risen to the surface in the seventeenth century and never been completely submerged, they gave ideological form and content to the protests of working-class movements as they emerged to meet the new challenges of the factory system. Similarly energizing were the great nonconformist religious movements that from the mid-eighteenth century onward began to challenge the established Church of England. And differentially directed against each of these streams was a backlash, chronicled at length by Edward Thompson who saw it as a ‘political counter-revolution,’ that continued for four decades after 1792. The growing commercial role of coal as a vital resource is one of the central economic trends of the seventeenth century. Without assured, relatively cheap access to this new fuel, London, growing by almost 45 percent in the last half of the seventeenth century, almost certainly could not have become the largest city of Europe. During that period, a growing demand for coal for industrial use was simultaneously added to its already well established reliance on coal for domestic consumption. As a result, by 1700 British production had climbed to the level of 2.5-3 million tons annually, estimated to have been “five times as large as the output of the whole of the rest of the world.” Half of the entire tonnage of the British merchant fleet was by then engaged in the coal trade. Huge forces were at work here, even though the linear succession of their effects is far more anonymous and difficult to document in any way than the line of scientific advances that laid some of the groundwork for - but stopped short of - the Newcomen engine. It is certainly in this economic context, I submit, that we must look for the stimulus to the steam engine as an epoch-making invention. With almost equal certainty, we must assume the existence of a wide, diffuse, relatively unknown circle of entrepreneurs, experimenters, skilled mechanics, and would-be inventors. This, and not the more elevated circle of gentlemen in the Royal Society, was Newcomen’s proper setting and source of creative sustenance. “In round numbers,” E. A. Wrigley estimates that London “appears to have grown from about 200,000 in 1600 to perhaps 400,000 in 1650, 575,000 by the end of the century, 675,000 in 1750 and 900,000 in 1800.” Across the span between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, in other words, London had risen from housing about 7 percent to an unprecedented 11 percent of England’s total population. Lacking effective provisions for sanitation or for the prevention and treatment of many endemic and epidemic diseases, London of course had a significantly higher mortality rate than the country at large. By all reckonings, Watt’s multiple improvements in the Newcomen engine ultimately came to occupy a place at the very core of the Industrial Revolution. His first (1769) patent added a separate condenser and made related changes greatly to increase its pumping efficiency, immediately making possible the deeper and cheaper mining of coal. Later patents in the early 1780s provided vital adaptations of it for driving machinery of all kinds, stimulating more continuous operations and an expansion of scale in virtually every industry. The city of Manchester, widely regarded as the first citadel of the Industrial Revolution, powered its largest spinning and weaving factories with Boulton & Watt engines. Fundamental as Watt’s contributions proved to be, it is important to recognize that, even with Boulton’s joint efforts, their commercial success was neither immediate nor assured. The economy and reliability of his steam engine as a power source took time to establish, and waterwheels continued for many years to provide a highly competitive alternative. As has often been the case, cumulative smaller improvements in older and competitive technologies substantially delayed the adoption of the new and seemingly superior one. In particular, advances in waterwheel design for which Smeaton had been responsible greatly extended the aggregate reserves of water power available to accommodate new industrial growth. Dominating popular understanding of the Industrial Revolution is an impression of sustained, transformative growth. In the preceding account also, attention has been focused on technological and economic advances. But what has been said may leave the sense of a rising tide that, if at somewhat different rates, surely was managing to raise all boats. Is this impression accurate? The gross disproportion in the levying of the tax burden might suggest otherwise. It had almost doubled by 1815 (to more than 18 percent) as a share of national income, as a result of war expenditures that had spiraled upward from the time of the American Revolution. Excise duties on domestically produced goods and services were principally called upon to sustain the increase. Although they also impacted on the cost of decencies and luxuries for those with discretionary incomes, these duties fell more heavily on price-inelastic necessities for factory workers. By contrast, with relatively minor and temporary exceptions, “There was no effective tax on wealth holders throughout the period.” How disproportionate, in fact, were the respective allocations of the benefits of growth to different groups within British society? What are we to make of the great waves of popular protest, including especially the Luddite movement that aimed at the destruction of textile machinery in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and the working-class movement for parliamentary reform in the late 1830s and 1840s that was known as chartism? Were they only transitory episodes of conspiratorially incited unrest, as was repeatedly proclaimed by the courts and aristocracy in suppressing them with considerable severity? Or were they instead manifestations of deep-seated, broadly felt grievances over declining living standards and a loss of security that was in increasingly sharp contrast with growing national wealth? In impressive detail, Edward P. Thompson’s massive work on The Making of the English Working Class (1963) argues the “pessimistic” case for what he regards as the preponderantly negative impact of the Industrial Revolution on England’s working people. Beyond this, Thompson also records the repressive legal climate with which virtually any form of individual or organized speech or action to obtain redress of political or economic grievances was received. Drawing upon “political and cultural, as much as economic, history” across the half-century or so after 1790, he argues that this forged a working class able self-consciously to identify and struggle for its own strategies and interests. That outgrowth of resistance and self-discovery was, for him, “the outstanding fact of the period.” But Thompson’s emphasis on the centrality of class formation is sharply disputed by some other authorities and is, in any case, not one on which it can be said that any consensus has emerged. More immediately relevant to our concerns is a further judgment reached by Thompson. The working class did not come into existence, he insists, as a spontaneously generated response to an external force - the factory system, or the technological advances of which factories were an outcome. That would imply that the class itself was composed of “some nondescript undifferentiated raw material of humanity,” lacking common, historically derived aspirations and identifying symbols of its own solidarity. “The working class made itself as much as it was made.” It is strongly implied in most contemporary accounts that there was widespread aversion to factory employment. Those whose skills made them members of the “aristocracy of labor” no doubt constituted an at least partial exception. For the mass of less skilled and unskilled workers, however, factory jobs may have been seen as the only alternative following loss of rural livelihoods as a result of enclosures and the consolidation of smaller workshops. No doubt people often entered the mills in the (usually illusionary) conviction that such work was only a temporary expedient and hence could be briefly tolerated. Symptomatic of this is a textile factory owner’s complaint in the 1830s about the “restless and migratory spirit” of his mill workers. Long, closely supervised shifts were, after all, a starkly unpleasant departure from periodically demanding but on the whole far more intermittent agricultural labor schedules. Moreover, the factories themselves often bore a disturbing resemblance to parish workhouses for pauper women and children - from which, in fact, not a little of the early factory labor force had been involuntarily recruited. The pauper apprenticeship system, barbarous as it was in terms of “children working long hours for abysmal wages,” was in any case short-lived. The need for it was greatest prior to the general shift of spinning factories to the more advanced Crompton’s mules driven by steam power. For as long as the availability of waterpower was a requirement, the necessary location of some mills in remote settings had isolated them from the rapidly growing potential work force that was congregating in the new industrial cities. Some, but not all, of the deterioration that had occurred in the material conditions of life can reasonably be laid at the door of the conscious discretion of industrial owners and managers. That applies, for example, to the sometimes almost unbelievably harsh conditions of exploitation of child labor that Thompson cites, and perhaps to some deliberate manipulation of skilled and unskilled, male and female groups of factory operatives in order to depress wages by maintaining an unemployed but dependent reserve. We must not forget that the science of public health was in its infancy. The effects of urban congestion on endemic and epidemic diseases were only beginning to be understood. No body of experience made it possible to gauge the combined effect of malnutrition, pollution, and extended hours of daily employment on expectant mothers and especially on the health and growth of children. It has remained for late twentieth-century analysts to discern such indirect consequences as declining human stature, and persistent high rates of infant mortality, rising illiteracy, precisely in the latter part of the Industrial Revolution when the incomes of male factory operatives are supposed to have risen. The general impression thus is left that there was little or no improvement in living standards before mid-century, “despite the optimists’ evidence of rising real wages.” To whatever degree a product of innocent or willful ignorance, the cumulative effect was that “wherever comparison can be made… staggering differences in life expectancy appear, amounting in the worst decades to an average of twenty years of life expectancy lost by the average male urban wage-earner; and whatever horrors the English statistics showed, the Scottish were invariably even worse.”"