A symptom of our weird, statist, collectivist times is that many who excel at math, science, and business are now being increasingly characterized as "having Asperger's Syndrome." (Cf. www.google.com for hundreds of references.) In one line, Asperger's Syndrome is said to be a variant of autism, a kind of "able to function in society" variant on autism. Bill Gates is described as having Asperger's. In the past few weeks, we hear that Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were "probable Asperger's." Maybe a biochemical or DNA link to a real syndrome, besides brightness, will be found, but I suspect that a lot of people with the ability to concentrate are characterized as being some kind of second-rate Rainmans just because they don't watch "Oprah" and "Survivor" on t.v. I've never met Bill Gates, though I did meet some of his contemporaries (Gary Kildall, Steve Wozniak, and of course all the folks at Intel). He seems a little weird at times...but no more so than a lot of the folks I meet at Cypherpunks, Hackers, PenSFA, etc. My tentative conclusion is that calling someone successful a "case of Asperger's" is just another form of envy or trash-talking. (Or of the popular meme in the past 30 years where child actors are fed lines showing their putative precociousness as they psychoanalyze the adults around them.) --Tim May "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship." --Alexander Fraser Tyler