What is a geek? For many people the term is perjorative, but for those who embrace geekdom, being a geek simply means having a thorough knowledge of and passion for a specific topic or activity. These aren't limited to calculus and Star Wars references, as 80s movies may have kead you to believe, but those topics certainly aren't excluded here, either. And as with any personality trait, geekiness is attractive to other geeks. But what the hey does this all have to do with autism? That's what researchers Simon Baron-Cohen and Sally Wheelwright set out to solve.

In a series of studies, the pair revealed that geeky personality types were more likely to have children diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. Most revealing were statistics related to the parents' occupations:

12.5 percent of fathers of children with autism were engineers, compared with only 5 percent of fathers of children without autism.

Likewise, 21.2 percent of grandfathers of children with autism had been engineers, compared with only 2.5 percent of grandfathers of children without autism. The pattern appeared on both sides of the family. Women who had a child with autism were more likely to have a father who had been an engineer—and they were more likely to have married someone whose father had been an engineer.

But Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright's research wasn't limited to the industry-specific employment of parents with autistic children; the pair also researched tendencies to data systemizing, college majors, tech-industry locations (which revealed that Silicon Valley reports a higher incidence of childhood autism) and why autism seems to be more prevalent in malesthan in females. The article by Baron-Cohen is along read, but worth it if autism and geekiness are relevant to your interests. Check out the rest on Scientific American. Link | Photo

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This little girl has a happy family that comes with some strange obstacles she shares with other European children. From the website:

I live in a loving family with two dads. Sadly only a few countries in the European Union currently recognise my family. This means that I am unable to move around as I want with my parents and I also risk living with one of my dads being invisible from the State. Both situations are putting me and thousands of other children in same-sex families in unnecessary vulnerable situations as we are treated differently than children in families with a mum and a dad. For example, when I started in school, only one of my dads could sign my papers for my teachers. They did not accept that from my other dad. Also, when we were on holiday and I broke my arm, in the hospital the doctors would only talk to one of my dads and he was the only one who could visit me. My other dad had to wait outside as the hospital did not accept that I have two daddies.

Learn more at Invisible Parents. Link -via the Presurfer

I can see it now: I say to my four-year old, "If you're going to act like Lindsay Lohan, then you're going to her time-out stool. Off you go!" Cira James's Celebrity Naughty Stool is a simple stool covered with photos of celebrities who have misbehaved in public. If my kids want to avoid their company, they'd better stay on the straight and narrow.

Link -via Nerdcore

Tumblr user mrstater recaptioned the illustrations of Eric Carle from the children's book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? to align with the icons of the TV series Game of Thrones. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy

Robin Gatti wanted to make sure her family photoshoot wasn't boring, so she themed it after Doctor Who. While the whole series is pretty adorable, I can't help but love this one, with a baby Matt Smith who looks like he's going to drown in Tom Baker's scarf.

Link Via Laughing Squid

On Thursday, Joffrey Baratheon beheaded four noblemen, but he was still bored. Westeros and the world of children's book writer and illustrator Eric Carle clash in a set of book covers. You can read the rest at the link.

Link -via Popped Culture

The One Laptop Per Child project started several years ago with the idea that inexpensive, solar-powered computers could help bring children in Third World countries into the information age. So far it's worked really well. To push the limits of the project, volunteers tried an experiment: they gave laptops to two Ethiopian villages where the literacy rate is near zero, and there are no schools, no printed signs, and no books. They didn't show the kids how to use the tablets. They just delivered a box with enough for every child in each village.  

"We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."

What's more, the children were using the computers to teach their parents! The One Laptop Per Child program may eventually do an end run around the prohibitive expense of building schools and hiring teachers for some places. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science

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Hey Bronco Bama and Mitt Romney- Abby Evans has had it with you both, and if 4-year-olds could vote you would both lose!

Think political ads don't harm children? Think again...

--via Cheezburger

Everybody was Kung-Fu fighting, that baby was fast as lightning. In fact it was a little bit frightning, but he fought all while crying.

See! I knew I should have gone into music.

-Via Clip Nation

Buzzfeed rounded up some cute and clever "expectancy" announcements that tell more in pictures than in words. There's 23 of them, and it was hard to pick an example, but I was drawn to this math-based photograph. Go see the rest! Link

Ah, the first baby. They always bring their parents so much anxiety:

'Our baby's the devil', say Colombian parents whose child can 'walk at four weeks and breathes fire'

This is news? Someone skipped the new parent classes offered by the hospital.

Black magic and evil spirits have captured the soul of a new-born baby in Colombia who can apparently already walk by himself and produce fire, his own mother has claimed.

Ana Feria Santos gave birth to her son last month but says her joy quickly turned to fear when she noticed that he had 'several abnormalities' - leading to fears in her community that he is the 'devil in disguise'. [...]

Her neighbours in the town of Lorica, near the Caribbean coast, also say he is possessed by a 'malign spirit' and that he is capable of producing fire.

This, they say, is because burn marks have been found on his clothes and a sofa where he regularly sits.

My daughters had that problem, too. Miralax cleared it up and it never happened again after about eight months. It's just a normal developmental stage. Nothing to be alarmed about.

You can read the rest at the link. Note that it's a Daily Mail article, so it's entirely possible that the article may not be fully accurate.

Link -via Dave Barry | Photo: USCPSC

Brilliant! It took me a long time to learn how to tie shoes. This might have helped. I may make one for my own kids when they're ready. When they are, I'll follow the instructions at the link written by Caroline Urdaneta.

Link -via Make

The blog Pregnant Chicken rounded up a whole slew of pumpkins and Jack O'Lanterns that were arranged and carved in such a way as to illustrate a pumpkin giving birth. Many of them appear to be from obstetrician's offices and maternity wards, because they need Halloween decorations, too! Be warned that as funny as they are, some images may be a little too graphic for the very young or very sensitive. Link

I'm a firm believer that no babies are ugly, but a man named Jian Feng from China apparently believed that there are such a thing, and that his own baby is one.

Because his wife is beautiful and he considered himself to be hunky, Feng immediately thought that his wife cheated. But the truth was much, much darker:

As it turns out, his wife didn’t cheat, but did gloss over the fact that she had spent $100,000 on intense plastic surgery to severely change how she looked before she met him. It’s the kind of thing that can slip your mind on the first date. After his wife revealed this to him, Feng took the only right-minded course of action and divorced and sued her, claiming that she got him to marry her under false pretences. The false pretence presumably being that she was good looking.

Feng sued and, incredibly, he won $120,000 in judgment against his ugly-turned-beautiful ex-wife: Link - via MSN Now

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When she was twelve, Kathryn DiMaria decided that she wanted a Pontiac Fiero. She bought the remains of one with babysitting money and has spent the past two years rebuilding it. By the time she turns 16, it should be fully restored:

Lately she's been focused on rebuilding a 3.4-liter Camaro engine to replace the 2.8-liter the Fiero came with. She's done with the sanding and is starting to piece together the body. She is cautiously optimistic of meeting her sweet 16 deadline.

She's busy, too, sharing what she's learned. Last month, Kathryn was short on time for posting, but her dad shared photos of the car maintenance class Kathryn taught for girls at her church.

Link -via The Mary Sue