Hugo Chavez is dead. I am not going to write my blog about that, because I’m sure that what I have to say will be said elsewhere, but I am saddened. He was only 58, the same age as me, and that is far too young to die. But, he lived a big life.
Some people loved him, some people hated him. Those who have been paying attention to this blog will certainly be able to guess that I am in the first group. I will remember him as the leader who responded to Hurricane Katrina quicker than George Bush. I will always remember his “whiff of sulphur” speech. I will also remember his attempt to rename Angel Falls, which I thought was a little bit weird and petty. He was certainly an interesting character.
RIP Señor Chavez. I will remember you fondly.
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Instead, I’d rather talk about this. A 12 year old Indian girl in England has a higher IQ, they say, than Albert Einstein. Of course, you have to have some kind of disclaimer in the middle of that sentence: they say, allegedly, supposedly, maybe. That’s because there is no way to prove it.
Einstein, like Newton, Shakespeare, Da Vinci and Aristotle, never took an IQ test. They hadn’t been invented yet.
I’d like to introduce a theory I have at this point. Not actually a theory, just speculation, and I’m not denying that crazy old Al was a brainy guy. But I think maybe not so much as everybody thinks. Almost everything he thought up, the stuff he’s famous for, the theory of relativity and so on, he thought up in 1905, when he was still in his 20s. He spent the rest of his life justifying it and trying to explain it to people, few of whom could understand it. I know I can’t.
So, I suspect (and this is just random, meaningless speculation, with no facts behind it whatsoever) that maybe his 1st wife was more of an influence on him as a scientist than anybody ever knew. She was a scientist, too -just an overshadowed one, and a woman.
But, back to the story of Neha Ramu, who scored 162 on an IQ test. I congratulate her, and wish her well.
But, history will not remember her as greater than Einstein (or Dali, or Spielberg, or brilliant people in any field) unless she does something that people can point to and say “Wow, that’s a work of genius.” To paraphrase Forrest Gump, genius is as genius does.
www.gurukalehuru.com 