lickystickypickyme:

1. Einstein Was a Fat Baby with a large Head:
   

   When Albert’s mother, Pauline Einstein gave birth to him, she thought that Einstein’s head was so big and misshapen that he was deformed!

   As the back of the head seemed much too big, the family initially considered a monstrosity. The physician, however, was able to calm them down and some weeks later the shape of the head was normal. When Albert’s grandmother saw him for the first time she is reported to have muttered continuously “Much too fat, much too fat!” Contrasting all apprehensions Albert grew and developed normally except that he seemed a bit slow. (Source)

2. Einstein Had Speech Difficulty as a Child: As a child, Einstein seldom spoke. When he did, he spoke very slowly – indeed, he tried out entire sentences in his head (or muttered them under his breath) until he got them right before he spoke aloud. According to accounts, Einstein did this until he was nine years old. Einstein’s parents were fearful that he was retarded.

   One interesting anecdote, told by Otto Neugebauer, a historian of science, goes like this:

   As he was a late talker, his parents were worried. At last, at the supper table one night, he broke his silence to say, “The soup is too hot.”Greatly relieved, his parents asked why he had never said a word before.Albert replied, “Because up to now everything was in order.” (Source)

   In his book, Thomas Sowell [wiki] noted that besides Einstein, many brilliant people developed speech relatively late in childhood. He called this condition The Einstein Syndrome.

3. Einstein was Inspired by a Compass:
   

   When Einstein was five years old and sick in bed, his father showed him something that sparked his interest in science: a compass.

   When Einstein was five years old and ill in bed one day, his father showed him a simple pocket compass. What interested young Einstein was whichever the case was turned, the needle always pointed in the same direction. He thought there must be some force in what was presumed empty space that acted on the compass. This incident, common in many “famous childhoods,” was reported persistently in many of the accounts of his life once he gained fame. (Source)

4. Einstein Failed his University Entrance Exam: In 1895, at the age of 17, Albert Einstein applied for early admission into the Swiss Federal Polytechnical School (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule or ETH). He passed the math and science sections of the entrance exam, but failed the rest (history, languages, geography, etc.)! Einstein had to go to a trade school before he retook the exam and was finally admitted to ETH a year later. (Source)
   
5. The Saga of Einstein’s Brain: Pickled in a Jar for 43 Years and Driven Cross Country in a Trunk of a Buick!: After his death in 1955, Einstein’s brain [wiki] was removed – without permission from his family – by Thomas Stoltz Harvey [wiki], the Princeton Hospital pathologist who conducted the autopsy. Harvey took the brain home and kept it in a jar. He was later fired from his job for refusing to relinquish the organ.

   Many years later, Harvey, who by then had gotten permission from Hans Albert to study Einstein’s brain, sent slices of Einstein’s brain to various scientists throughout the world. One of these scientists was Marian Diamond of UC Berkeley, who discovered that compared to a normal person, Einstein had significantly more glial cells in the region of the brain that is responsible for synthesizing information.

6. Einstein Became Estranged From His First Wife, then Proposed a Strange “Contract”: After Einstein and Mileva married, they had two sons: Hans Albert and Eduard. Einstein’s academic successes and world travel, however, came at a price – he became estranged from his wife. For a while, the couple tried to work out their problems – Einstein even proposed a strange “contract” for living together with Mileva:

   The relationship progressed. Einstein became estranged from his wife. The biography reprints a chilling letter from Einstein to his wife, a proposed “contract” in which they could continue to live together under certain conditions. Indeed that was the heading: “Conditions.”

   A. You will make sure
   1. that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;
   2. that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;
   3. that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.
   B. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons…

   There’s more, including “you will stop talking to me if I request it.” She accepted the conditions. He later wrote to her again to make sure she grasped that this was going to be all-business in the future, and that the “personal aspects must be reduced to a tiny remnant.” And he vowed, “In return, I assure you of proper comportment on my part, such as I would exercise to any woman as a stranger.” (Source)

   
   
   source: Neatorama

“You think that it’s not magic that keeps you alive? Just ‘cause you understand the mechanics of how something works, doesn’t make it any less of a miracle… which is just another word for magic. We’re all kept alive by magic, Sookie. My magic’s just a little different from yours, that’s all.”

~Bill (True Blood)

I am a geek.  I have been a geek for as long as I have been alive.  It is all just a part of who I am.

I love science, I love understanding, I love logic.  I have crushes on Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman.  And had they been my college professors, I would have been a theorhetical physicist.

I love being a geek.

Love,

me.

Oh wait, I know the answer to that, and it won’t help.

I watched a show called “If we Had No moon.”  Two things I noticed about this show:

1.  Very little science was actually involved in the making of this show.  What I mean is that I am all for possiting theories about Earth and life and all that, but that doesn’t mean the science channel should put up on TV something that sounds more like the ramblings of a lunatic than something that has a basis in science.

2.  While ever speaker had his name and job title posted, not once did it mention the school or research facility that these people worked for.  Why?  Every other show I have watched has the schools/facilities identified.  Did the science channel know that this was going to look insane?

It was like watching a fundamentalist Christian documentary on Intelligent Design.