Free Republic

What’s happening to the boy genius? Outside of fantasy fiction, he seems to be a shrinking breed. New York’s gifted-and-talented schools are overstocked with girls, a recent Times study found. In some gifted classrooms, three-fifths of the students are female. Yes, we know girls are smart and dutiful and hardworking, but this phenomenon confounds what’s long been considered the natural order. Could it really be that boys are now the struggling class, in need of help or affirmative action? Experts have been warning about the boy crisis for years, but the idea has never really taken hold—partly because it originated...

BP's engineers can't stop the gushing oil spill, but a young genius from Long Island says she found the solution in less time than it takes most people to finish a crossword puzzle. Since the "top kill," "junk shot" and "top hat" techniques failed to end the environmental nightmare, Alia Sabur -- who started her engineering Ph.D. at age 14 -- is pushing for a more radical idea. The Northport native, who started reading before she could walk and who at 18 broke a 300-year-old record to become the youngest-ever college professor, proposes surrounding a pipe with deflated automobile tires,...

No, you cannot. That title is a lie, and, judging by a recent spate of books on the subject, a popular one. Ann Hulbert of Slate has compiled a list of books which preach the Gospel of Success (HT A&LD). Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success was not, appropriately enough, a bolt of original genius when it appeared in November 2008. Geoffrey Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else had come out a month earlier. The following spring brought Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How. …This spring David Shenk’s...

The original manuscript of Albert Einstein's groundbreaking theory of relativity has gone on display in its entirety for the first time. Einstein's 46-page handwritten explanation of his general theory of relativity is being shown at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem as part of its 50th anniversary celebration. In the manuscript, which helps explain everything from black holes to the Big Bang and contains the famous equation of E=MC², Einstein demonstrates an expanding universe and shows how gravity can bend space and time.

Most three-year-olds are fascinated by cars and trucks. But few can read and remember their number plates like William Potter does. He can also name most towns and cities in the British Isles - and has just become one of the youngest people ever accepted as a member of Mensa. With an IQ of 140, his intelligence is said to be on a par with that of Bill Clinton and, apparently, Napoleon Bonaparte.

America, the Constitutional limitations on governmental power established by the people of this great country has worked to prevent Obama's socialist take over of this country. Our forefathers were genuis when it came to writing a document establishing a government with very limited powers, separation of powers, and keeping the majority of power in the hands of the American people!

The founder of the website "Free Republic", Jim Robinson, has joined a growing boycott of the CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) due to a homosexual activist group sponsoring the event. GOProud, a group that advocates same-sex "marriage," a repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, and "expanding access to domestic partner benefits" for homosexuals, is listed as a sponsor of the event at CPAC's website. Mr. Robinson has joined a number of conservative activists including Liberty University Chancellor Jerry Falwell, Jr., Liberty Counsel founder and chairman Mat Staver, and Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of...

Leftists who decried the War on Terror now use the same terminology to describe center-Left members of their own party. On last night’s episode of MSNBC’s The Ed Show, Ed Schultz interviewed Katrina vanden Heuvel about President Obama’s “sellout” on the health care bill. Katrina complained Obama’s is “a White House which has emboldened the conservadems, people like Joe Lieberman” who “is now holding hostage” socialized medicine. She repeated the elocution moments later while appealing to “citizens who don’t want to be held hostage by the insurance companies.” Schultz thanked her for appearing, adding, “Always the truth coming from you...

In an interview for Nation magazine, former President Jimmy Carter says that current President Barack Obama is “the best in my lifetime, maybe the best this country has ever had.” Key to the high praise was Carter’s assessment that “President Obama is the most brilliant man to ever have held the office. He is wise beyond the boundaries we normally observe for human beings. That is probably why his Administration is our nation’s most unprecedented in history.” “Of course, being the first black man to be elected president has to rank as the most unprecedented accomplishment ever achieved by anyone...

Here is a short horror comedy film by Richard Gale. Saw it at the Nevermore Film Festival earlier in the year. I know many a FReeper will find this as funny and enjoyable as I did. The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon

A recent road trip convinced this traveler that the radio airwaves are saturated these days with self-proclaimed experts who are espousing more solutions to our economic woes than there are problems. A recent visit to the Will Rogers Center in Claremore, Okla., convinced this observer that what this country needs is not another talk show host, but instead, someone with the character, integrity and sense of humor of Rogers. Some say that Rogers invented talk radio and at the peak of his career could lay claim to several million daily listeners. His commentaries were never cruel and were based on...

Like all of this year's graduates, Moshe Kai Cavalin is excited that he completed college, with a degree in astrophysics. But unlike the majority of college grads, Cavalin is only 11 years old and stands 4 feet, 7 inches tall. At the age of an average sixth-grader, Cavalin has gradated from East Los Angeles Community College. But, graduating college at 11 may not be his highest goal in life. "I want to be a movie actor and compete in the 2016 Olympics in martial arts," Cavalin told NBC affliate Wood TV.

Moshe Kai Cavalin, 11, graduates with honors from East Los Angeles Community College this week, but just don't call him a genius. 11-Year-Old Graduates From LA College Watch Video Moshe Kai Cavalin, 11, is graduating with honors from East Los Angeles Community College this week. "I consider myself a regular kid who works hard and does his best," says this only child of a Taiwanese mother and an Israeli father. When Cavalin started college at the age of 8, he may have been the youngest person in class, but he ended up tutoring some of his 19- and 20-year-old classmates...

Seeking signs of genius, a researcher recently reconstructed the shape of Albert Einstein's brain with techniques normally used to analyze fossils. This mold of thought, she believes, reveals the imprint of a rare intelligence that transformed our understanding of space, time and energy. By studying photographs of Einstein's brain taken at his death in 1955, paleoanthropologist Dean Falk at Florida State University identified a dozen subtle variations in its surface that may have heightened his ability to see physics in a new way. Her research suggests how the brain shaped the inner life of the 20th century's most famous mind....

More Roosevelt… Less Jimmy Carter… that’s what this brand needs! Folks, there’s been a lot of scrutiny of President Obama in these first 100 days. It goes with the territory. The attention is brutal no matter who’s in the Oval Office and it always will be. Exposure is something most marketers covet . . .but over-exposure especially of the wrong features can be deadly for a personal brand. That is why, Barack Obama –whom I’ve called a first-rate poli-marketer (see the past few weeks FOX Forum posts here)– had better stop behaving like Jimmy Carter and start emulating Roosevelt. In...

<p>As was asked when this issue was debated -- and resolved, we thought -- "If you don't trust a pilot to carry a gun, what the fuck are you doing allowing him at the controls of a plane carrying 300 people?"</p>

As a new book speculates that 'Britain's Einstein' was autistic, an autism expert warns that a prenatal test for the condition would prevent brilliant scientists like Paul Dirac from ever being born A new book on the greatest British physicist since Newton speculates that both his profound mathematical abilites and his extreme social awkwardness stemmed from undiagnosed autism. The claims – from a biography of Paul Dirac by Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man – tie in with an article on the BBC website from leading autism researcher Prof Simon Baron-Cohen. Baron-Cohen says we need a public debate about the prenatal...

The number of children entering New York City public school gifted programs dropped by half this year from last under a new policy intended to equalize access, with 28 schools lacking enough students to open planned gifted classes, and 13 others proceeding with fewer than a dozen children. The policy, which based admission on a citywide cutoff score on two standardized tests, also failed to diversify the historically coveted classes. In a school system in which 17 percent of kindergartners and first graders are white, 48 percent of this year’s new gifted students are white, compared with 33 percent of...

An oldie, but a goodie. And it really captures the attitude that Mr. Obama and his supporters have regarding themselves, Liberalism and their candidate.Operation: Rabbit

Bo (woof) In Commentary: Some think this dog is amazing. Me, I’m not surprised. (In case you missed this one, a Mission Viejo woman’s dog — a 9-year-old cockapoo known as Cookie Einstein — has become a celebrity of sorts for her apparent mathematical abilities, the O.C. Register’s Niyaz Pirani reported over the weekend. She [Cookie] adds, subtracts, multiplies, divides and calculates square roots and simple algebra through barking. And Cookie can answer if the question’s asked in either English or Spanish.) Bi-lingual and good in math…she must have scored well on her SATs. Cookie won’t respond to anybody but...