Interesting Articles

One of the many pleasures of English is the imaginative, poetic use of its collective nouns. A crowd of people. A charm of hummingbirds. A herd of elephants. A flange of baboons. A nitpicking of Southern Baptists.

The loss of gifted and talented students to programs elsewhere has prompted districts to shore up and expand curriculums and courses to keep the kids — and state funding.

Strapped for money, school districts are adding or expanding programs for gifted and talented students, who have begun deserting traditional public schools and taking their state funding with them.

In the last 150 years, life expectancy has doubled from 40 to 80, and according to Aubrey de Grey the Cambridge gerontologist, the first person who will live to be 1000 is already alive and 150 is eminently achievable.

Orla is struggling in maths again. �I�m just not clever enough to do this, Miss�. For some reason the fact that she has been hailed a �literary genius� since the age of seven on the basis of her creative word play and devouring Philip Pullman novels since the age of eight doesn�t seem to factor in this negative self-perception. And Sally. Well, what can we say about Sally?

His name was William James Sidis, and his IQ was estimated at between 250 and 300 [8, p. 283]. At eighteen months he could read The New York Times, at two he taught himself Latin, at three he learned Greek. By the time he was an adult he could speak more than forty languages and dialects. He gained entrance to Harvard at eleven, and gave a lecture on four-dimensional bodies to the Harvard Mathematical Club his first year.

BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA: These New Year’s business resolutions can help catapult your company to new heights in 2009, according to new thinking from Australia Mensa leader Ainslie Waldron.

Eliminate your biggest barrier during January

How long until you be crashing it against the wall?
The Mensa Puzzle Alarm Clock, one of the weirdest of its kind

There are quite a lot of wacky alarm clocks available, but the Mensa Puzzle is definitely one of the most innovative and annoying similar gadgets.

My Buddhist Chinese friend, Bubba, tells me the most annoying thing about ancestor worship is that long after your Uncle Ping has died, he’s still following you around the house criticizing your every action. Bubba would rather avoid the spirits that trail around after him. The Seacoast Paranormal Research Group (SPRG) is hunting them down.

�Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. That you must believe if anything good is to come of this story.� Charles Dickens-A Christmas Carol. What we don�t know is how he died. What we do know is that he died Christmas Eve. What else do we know? We know he lived in London. Europe. We also know that the tradition here is to put up Christmas trees on Christmas Eve. We also know that it is not uncommon to have 13 foot ceilings in European homes.

I think Marley died of a heart attack.

I can relate.

Skaar makes three-day ‘Jeopardy’ champion

Last month, Bob and Marcia Skaar’s phone at their home in Alamogordo was ringing off the hook.

“We heard from people we hadn’t heard from in 30 years,” she said.

That’s because their son David was a three-day champion on “Jeopardy.” He won $104,000 in three days, and then was defeated on the fourth day and won $2,000 as runner-up.