NFL offensive lineman going for his PhD in mathematics at MIT.

If this doesn't remind you of those six seasons Albert Einstein played linebacker for the Philadelphia Eagles, nothing will.

Starting my PhD in math at MIT this offseason!!! pic.twitter.com/vjcSctVx9i

— John Urschel (@JohnCUrschel) January 26, 2016

In other news, Johnny Manziel is one Jägermeister-fueled bad night away from a career at Safeway. We all have paths in life.

The highest score possible on an IQ test was just achieved by an 11-year old.

This guy only had an IQ of 160.

For people under the age of 18, that's a score of 162. (Over 18? 161 is perfect. Don't ask why. ONLY GENIUSES KNOW WHY!!)

Kashmea Wahi is an 11-year old in the UK whose parents are both IT management consultants at Deutsche Bank in London. They apparently badger her to study constantly (love with a lash!), but an annoyed Kashmea knows what's up. And what's up is her IQ.

She stumbled upon the Mensa website, felt inspired, one thing led to another, and the next thing you know Wahi scored a 162, the youngest to ever score so high.

In case you were worried that Wahi might grow cocky, not all in her life is flawless. She was part of her junior school's team at the Oxford Maths challenge. They came in third place.

There's always a career as a writer, kid.

Twenty academic books that changed the world--at least according to the U.K.

In advance of Academic Book Week next month, a panel of librarians, booksellers, and publishers in the U.K. have whittled down a list of two hundred academic books to twenty, creating a list they claim are the tomes that changed the world. Now, they want the general public to vote which book is the singularly most influential book that stands heads and shoulders above the rest.

Two works of the twenty are fiction: George Orwell's 1984, and the complete works of Shakespeare. (I gather they couldn't pick just one.)

The remaining eighteen books are all nonfiction, with a heavy leaning toward writers from Europe, and especially the United Kingdom. Indeed, only two writers are Americans by birth (Rachel Carson and Germaine Greer), and two were born elsewhere and moved to the United States at a later point in life (Albert Einstein and Thomas Paine).

Poor France only has one writer on the list: Simone de Beauvoir

I know I'm shocked--stunned, really--that a bunch of British experts find no use for anything French.

The complete list:

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

Orientalism by Edward Said

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

The Complete Works by William Shakespeare

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson

The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein

The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris

The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

The Republic by Plato

The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Ways of Seeing by John Berger



Don't kid yourself. No one from Asia, Africa, or South America ever wrote anything that changed the world. Everyone in the U.K. knows this.

Einstein's brain is now an interactive iPad app.

As in the real thing. The real Einstein brain. Not some sort of cute wannabe Angry Birds game. As in slices of Albert Einstein's brain, photographed, and digitized for your perusal.

When Einstein died in 1955, an autopsy removed his brain for research's sake. Slices of his brain were later divided-up and placed on slides for scientists to focus under microscopes. It was an old-timey age when John Wayne swaggered, Marilyn Monroe charmed, and MRIs didn't exist, never mind advanced technology of people's brains plastered on an iPad. But now a medical museum in Chicago digitized those old-timey slides of Einstein's brain and created an app, naturally.

So for $9.99 you, too, can lose your appetite and feel mentally inferior at the same time.




photo: National Museum of Health and Medicine Chicago, via Yahoo.

Do penguins have knees?*

Pudgy birds with obese joints...or knee-less, waddling freaks? Honest question. Also the name of a book I once read, which aimed to answer the curiosities of life. 

Slate has their own version of this ("Explainer"), answering everyday questions most of us take for granted. One such question I'm guilty of asking on this site repeatedly over the years as well:

Why are smart people usually ugly?

Usually ugly, not always. Usually. (Lest someone who scored a flawless SAT start complaining they're also a smoke show.) Yet it turns out this way of thinking is all wrong. Wrong by me, by you (damn right I'm involving you in this), and by everyone we associate with.

According to Slate--and, by origination, vast amounts of research--ugly people actually tend to be dumber than good looking people. As if being ugly wasn't already a letdown in life, you're also supposed to be drooling on yourself, too. But Slate points to substantial research, especially one conducted by evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa--who looked to multiple databases covering a total of 38,000 people--and deduced (through examination that's too convoluted to explain briefly here) that good looking people tend to have an IQ 12 points higher than dumb people.

Obviously, this enters a murky gray area. What is beauty if not in the eye of the beholder? Yet, studies have shown that humans subconsciously acknowledge a biologically-based standard of beauty predicated on how symmetrical someone appears. The more symmetrical the more beautiful. (That crooked nose at a 90 degree angle you have from breaking it five times in your youth? It isn't wooing anyone.)

Intelligence is another matter. By and large, all research uses the IQ test as a basis for intelligence, which is mildly flawed. Boiled down, an IQ score is simply a matter of someone's likelihood of being intelligent--not their actual intelligence. One can have an IQ of 140, but never live up to the full potential of a 140 IQ. In theory, you could waste that entire potential and live out an existence no greater than someone with an IQ of 70. (Think: Forrest Gump squeezing every ounce out of his 70 IQ.)

Meanwhile, some researchers argue that IQs only gauge specific types of intelligence, and don't offer a comprehensive view of all the intellectual capabilities of a human being.

That said, there is a caveat to the whole analysis of beauty = intelligent argument, specifically that ugly people, while statistically less intelligent as a group, are also capable of having among the most intelligent individuals. Put another way, for every collection of Forrest Gumps there's an Einstein hidden within the ugly population, Kanazawa's research says.

The grand conclusion to take away from all of this is that intelligent people are probably--probably--better looking, too. Which is to say that Brad Pitt and George Clooney, Halle Berry and Brooklyn Decker are not only gorgeous human beings, they're probably also smarter than all of us, too. No question about it.



*Yes, they do.