So Bear Stearns has essentially collapsed. Megan and Felix Salmon have commentary.

This is going to be a verrrrry interesting week in the markets. If you don't typically tune into the business news, this might be a good time to start. Will Lehman make it to Wednesday? Tune in tomorrow, on CNBC!

If things go badly, we could be in a financial version of "Ten Little Indians."

Via a commenter at Tom Maguire's, here is an interesting article on autism from a physician's perspective over several decades of practice. Here is an excerpt:

In some children the clinical signs and symptoms of autism had been present from birth. In others, the child was quite normal (neurotypical) at birth and reached developmental milestones, including language acquisition at the usual times and in the usual manner. But then at age two, three or four, a conspicuous regressive process began robbing the child of all of that natural progress. Interestingly, in these late onset cases the parents all had some sentinel event that, in their mind, accounted for the cause of this dreadful regressive pattern: "ever since he fell off the pier and nearly drowned"; "the time he got trapped in the silo"; or "ever since he went into the hospital to have his tonsils removed".

The point is that there is a natural tendency on the part of parents to seek out and blame some event or procedure for the onset of such startling regression in a child who has otherwise been developing normally. ... Obviously, in seeking causes, one has to separate out temporal relationship to causal relationship.

(Emphasis added.)

Interestingly, he believes that there has indeed been an increase in incidence of autism over the decades, but not at "epidemic" levels.