When your attention is drawn to a thing once, the thing will appear at least 2 or 3 more times in the next few days or so. Part of this coincidence is that your radar is now tuned and looking for it, so you find it more easily, but..

Anyway, in my writing group there is one member with Asperger's. He wrote a short piece about living with it and we read it. Then a day or two later in the NYTimes there were a couple of articles about it that surprised me. (Of course I knew that vaccines have nothing to do with autism, a link which has been disproved many times.)

Cambridge University studied the incidence of autism-spectrum disorders in the Netherlands, and found that an area known for high-tech jobs had 3 times the rate of autism (Asperger's is an autism-spectrum disorder) that other areas with few high tech jobs did.
They studied the families of the autistic kids too, and found the parents very often had personality traits that resembled autism but weren't extreme enough to make them actually in the category.

Their personalities were typical of people working in mathematical fields, computers and engineering, and other analytical fields. Nerds, in short. People who focus on very detailed and sometimes repetitive tasks, who have often poor social skills -- as if you had to trade one ability for the other. If you read about Rain Man-type savants, it happened sometimes that when the person broadened his social skills, he was less able to calculate complex math in his head.

People with Asperger's are very often highly intelligent. Theirs is a kind of high-functioning form of autism.

What the articles said that I was unaware of was that autism is extremely inheritable -- it runs in families.
When a couple has one child with autism, there's a 20% chance that another child of theirs will also have it. That's enormous.

I keep thinking about the roles depicting nerds in movies and TV now. Big Bang Theory in particular has a major character, Sheldon Cooper, who probably would be classified as having Asperger's, and he's the reason I watch the show. He's adorable, usually, and at times his roommate speaks and acts as if Sheldon were a child. He is also hard for his friends (he has friends, on the show. this is significant) to tolerate, with his many, many rituals and rules he follows in order to survive. This doesn't exactly make him a poster child for the case of Asperger's, that's for sure. But it's a comedy, and I don't have a problem with poetic license. They're allowed to exaggerate.

They do occasionally show how hard a time someone like Sheldon has in life. Just like my friend in the writing workshop, he can't read people's emotional states well at all, and in fact displaying strong emotion he considers unnecessary and messy, and wonders why people do it. Figuring out what people are feeling and thinking and expecting of him is something he has to really work at. It's a lifelong struggle.

I think people are interested in struggle. It's such a startling thing, and something people would sympathize with.