"The same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?" - Kelvin Throop III

With the likelihood of no NBA this year the Sun City Ballers are getting ready to fill the gap.

Our local NPR station is holding this year's fourth semi-annual pledge drive and rolling out every motivation in their bag with heavy emphasis on guilt. If I listen I should support; "Call now."
I want to call and tell them I do listen and I do support - through my tax dollars.
Oh, and that bit about public radio being commercial free? If calling it an underwriting credit changes what would otherwise clearly be a commercial, I've got a '62 Corvette out in the garage.

We set another record today, hitting 114 in Sun City. The good news: nobody has to evacuate because of heat and it doesn't destroy anything. I'm thankful I don't live along the eastern seaboard.

Have you read about the latest theories re. autism? I've come across it twice in recent months. The first was an hour-long interview on NPR with two parents, both engineering professionals, who have written a book about their severely autistic son. The second was an article in last week's TIME about Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, he's related), a researcher who has written scholarly articles on autism.

It seems an unusually high percentage of kids on the autism spectrum show special abilities in certain kinds of thinking - the kind used in engineering and process analysis. They're often very good at anything related to math. (I am not autistic!) They're also finding geographic clusters of autism, especially on the two coasts.

So Baron-Cohen has hypothesized that the entry into the job market of women that began 20+ years ago, including in the fields of science and engineering, means that more couples with similar brains were marrying. Many of us find our mates either at college, at work or through work-related networking. Thus, a man and woman who are both in the engineering (or similar) fields meet (maybe at MIT), marry and have kids. Mom and dad may not be anywhere on the autistic spectrum, but their brains are wired in a way that includes a likelihood of autism which then shows up in their offspring.

Now concentrate these adults in geographical areas like Silicon Valley or the Research Triangle where math and engineering jobs are prevalent and you get a geographic cluster of autism.

This is probably one of those developing areas of understanding (or misunderstanding if the hypotheses turn out to be wrong) that doesn't make any practical difference. The Student Life Department at USC's School of Engineering can't mandate that students in their program marry only from the pool of music majors. But if this theory does turn out to have merit, at least as one significant contributing factor, it illustrates the law of unintended consequences. The push  two decades ago to get more 5th grade girls to enter exhibits in the science fair...

Weird, huh?