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This is so freaking awesome! He even has my first name lol



"For 12-year old astrophysics prodigy, the sky’s the limit



By Zachary Roth



In some ways, Jacob Barnett is just like any other 12-year-old kid. He plays Guitar Hero, shoots hoops with his friends, and has a platonic girlfriend.



But in other ways, he's a little different. Jake, who has an IQ of 170, began solving 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzles at the age of 3, not long after he'd been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a mild form of autism. A few years later, he taught himself calculus, algebra, and geometry in two weeks. By 8, he had left high school, and is currently taking college-level advanced astrophysics classes—while tutoring his older classmates. And he's being recruited for a paid researcher job by Indiana University.



Now, he's at work on a theory that challenges the Big Bang—the prevailing explanation among scientists for how the universe came about. It's not clear how developed it is, but experts say he's asking the right questions.



"The theory that he's working on involves several of the toughest problems in astrophysics and theoretical physics," Scott Tremaine of Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Studies—where Einstein (pictured) himself worked—wrote in an email to Jake's family. "Anyone who solves these will be in line for a Nobel Prize."



(VIDEO)



It's not clear where Jake got his gifts from. "Whenever I try talking about math with anyone in my family," he told the Indianapolis Star, "they just stare blankly."



But his parents encouraged his interests from the start. Once, they took him to the planetarium at Butler University. "We were in the crowd, just sitting, listening to this guy ask the crowd if anyone knew why the moons going around Mars were potato-shaped and not round," Jake's mother, Kristine Barnett, told the Star. "Jacob raised his hand and said, 'Excuse me, but what are the sizes of the moons around Mars?' "



After the lecturer answered, said Kristine, "Jacob looked at him and said the gravity of the planet ... is so large that (the moon's) gravity would not be able to pull it into a round shape."



"That entire building ... everyone was just looking at him, like, 'Who is this 3-year-old?'"





http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110329/ts_yblog_thelookout/for-12-year-old-astrophysics-prodigy-the-skys-the-limit

COMMENTS

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PAGAN
22:24 Mar 30 2011

I love reading stuff like this. So often folk believe that having a disorder limits intelligence - not so, in fact, in some (although not all) cases having Asberger's Syndrome, or Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), means that an individual may exhibit well above average intelligence in some areas.



Generally though, the flip-side is that having such disorders can limit social skills to varying degrees.



Rain Man the movie was based on a true story and explains really well some of the abilities and disabilities commonly associated with ASDs - Kim Peek who sadly has since passed was the 'Rain Man'



http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant_syndrome/savant_profiles/kim_peek



Great story :)))

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Oil, Gas, Libya and Obama



In 2009 the avg price of oil was $61.65, 2010 $70.40 and today $105 over 40% increase.



Gas 3/7/09-$1.90, today $3.49 an increase of $1.59/gal.



If you use an avg of 1.3 gallons a day over the course of a year you've used 474.5gal. Using conservative figuring (12/10 prices) you've spent $498 more over the last 365 days compared to the previous 365.



To put it in more recent terms. In Jan 2011 you spent $118.56 on gas, in March you'll be spending closer to $134.55, right at an extra $16, just in 1 month. On a national scale Americans paid $160 million (low est.) more for March than for Feb. And yearly we're pushing close to 1/2 a BILLION more than the previous year.



Now between Feb and March gas went up ~$0.40, between 2/21-3/7 it went up $0.30.



The cause people say is Libya. Well the US only gets around 0.5% of its oil from Libya and globally Libya only provides 1% of world oil supplies. So why has the price spiked so much?



In the US we are NOT having a supply crisis, we're having a price crisis. And since oil is traded in the future tense, speculators can falsely spike the price even when locally there's no real disruption in supply. Because most oil produced is bought and shipped and bought again all over the world we here in the US have very little control over pricing.



Now there are 2 ways we can deal with this, by releasing oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) or by drilling and producing more of our own oil, oil which we can directly control price.



Firstly, the SPR is for real emergencies, when our supply is in danger, and it's not. We have less than 2 months worth of oil in our SPR, if anything we should be adding to it, not taking from. The only 2 times oil was drawn from the SPR for pricing/supply issues the price of gas went through the roof, it didn't help at all. So why people are trying to get us to do that is beyond insane.



The second option, drilling, will give us more oil, more control over prices because we rely less on foreign (thus globally traded) oil and we won't have the issues we're facing today.



In countries that produce all their own oil gas prices are less than $1.50/gal and in some cases far less.



But of course Obama, utterly ignorant of how the market works, whose energy policy is busted and largely non-existent, doesn't see the problem. He's hurt our ability to produce oil at current levels and greatly harmed our ability to produce more.



One thing liberals say is "even if we drilled today it could take 5-10 years before the oil gets into the supply". And really that's fairly true. Drilling today will not increase our supply immediately. Of course they said this in 2006 when gas was less than $2.50/gal.



But, since oil is traded on the predicted rise or fall of prices the bulk of it's cost is just speculation and emotion. In 2008 there was a short time when gas was over $4/gal national avg. at that time Pres. Bush simply took the ban off production away and within 6 months gas was down to $1.60/gal.



All Obama has to do is get the hell out of the way and let drilling resume and give the ok for increased production and oil/gas prices will plummet. Then in another 6 years instead of having $7/gal we'll have $2/gal and we can end this addiction to foreign oil and the problems we've been having since the 70s.



This is a 40 year old problem and the only thing keeping us from fixing it are impotent leaders like Obama and radical green liberals. Unless you want to break America, deeply, you must understand that the minimal environmental impact is worth it when you look at the cost and hardship to humans.



By increasing our production we will lower costs, putting more money into the hands of citizens and buying us the time we need to safely, properly and effectively change our energy source from fossil fuels to other renewables. A broken economy, lies about Libya being the cause (when it's speculators), refusal to use our resources and increased government intervention does NOT produce innovation.



This administration has become impotent, less leading and more playing the role of catch-up, has shown it doesn't understand the free market, has no clue about energy or economics and doesn't care what the American people want (like with health care). Not to mention going in the total opposite direction on some of their strongest promises, such as Gitmo.



It's time we teach them a lesson and have them get out of the way, limit the damage they can do over the next 2 years, take steps to fix the problem now (like with drilling) and clear house via elections.