Was McCarthy on the spectrum? He certainly displayed many of the classic features of Asperger’s syndrome: his brusqueness, his single-minded focus to the point of seeming rude, his physical clumsiness, and his habit of coaching himself aloud when under stress. He also had many clearly positive traits that Asperger associated with autism: a fascination with logic and complex machines, a gift for puns and aphorisms, an uncompromising personal ethic, and the ability to solve problems from angles that his more socially oriented colleagues missed. But McCarthy would have had no need to seek out a
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