Free Republic

When Michelle Obama moved into the White House, she instantly became one of the most famous first ladies in history, a symbol of racial pride, a victor in the battle of the sexes and the picture of a modern woman, mother and wife. But from her days on the campaign trail to her residency in the White House, Obama’s favorability rating has been in flux, from a low of 48 percent in June 2008 to a peak of 72 percent last March to a slide to 61 percent in a recent Gallup Poll. That 11-point stumble – some might call...

I'll start the ball rolling. 16 Tons

“Oh, That We Had Meat to Eat!” (Numbers 11:4-6, 10-15)“Oh, That We Had Meat to Eat!” Well, we certainly did have meat to eat yesterday, didn’t we? We had pork steak and bratwurst and hot dogs--all kinds of delicious meat to eat at our Men’s Club barbecue. But as you might guess, that is not what I am referring to when I say, “Oh that we had meat to eat!” No, rather, this line comes from our Old Testament text for today, from Numbers 11. And instead of being a positive recollection of a nice thing like our barbecue, this...

By carefully analyzing brain activity, scientists can tell what number a person has just seen, research now reveals. They can similarly tell how many dots a person was presented with. Past investigations had uncovered brain cells in monkeys that were linked with numbers. Although scientists had found brain regions linked with numerical tasks in humans - the frontal and parietal lobes, to be exact - until now patterns of brain activity linked with specific numbers had proven elusive. Scientists had 10 volunteers watch either numerals or dots on a screen while a part of their brain known as the intraparietal...

How big is it?” is certainly one of the world’s most dreaded questions. In fact, after the Million Man March in 1995, Congress restricted the National Park Service from even making estimates — a restriction that was maintained for 14 years and then quietly rescinded this January for the Obama inauguration. I’m talking about crowds, of course. I can’t take you people anywhere. There have been a lot of estimates, from the “official” one of 60 to 70 thousand, up to the rumored 2 million. Let’s see if we can make a plausible estimate with some rigor and some idea...

A North Carolina man who allegedly cracked the code to mentally calculate any multiplication problem is now offering to reveal his secret - for the bargain price of $33. Albert Clay said he came up with his system as a high school junior, but never showed anyone aside from a high school math teacher who shrugged off the achievement, the News & Observer reported. Now 75 years old, the retired pharmacist has copyrighted the formula, "How to Multiply Any Number by Any Number in Your Head," and hopes to demonstrate it in schools, books or even personal mailings to anyone...

When historians track the beginnings of the second American Revolution, their search will take them to Morristown, N.J., just like the first time. And like the first, it will have started with a tax revolt, and anger at an unresponsive government Something is happening in this country. And it would be not only arrogant, but unwise, for our elected officials to ignore it. In the past, movements like the July 4 national Tea Parties were usually sparsely populated by libertarians, radicals and reactionaries. This movement has them too, but with a whole lot more regular folks. The crowd Saturday at...

A most strange storyline has emerged with regard to the provincial vote totals for the Iranian election. Around 1600 GMT Sunday, the ministry of Interior released the official vote totals by province. As others have mentioned, by law candidates have three days following voting to contest the result, before the final totals are approved by the Supreme Leader. As such, it is notable that both the aggregate totals and provincial totals were certified, approved and released before the three day deadline. Another curious turn of events was that somewhere between 1600 and 2000 GMT, the provincial vote totals mysteriously disappeared...

In a recent study, Bartolo Luque and Lucas Lacasa of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain have discovered a new pattern in primes that has surprisingly gone unnoticed until now. They found that the distribution of the leading digit in the prime number sequence can be described by a generalization of Benford’s law. In addition, this same pattern also appears in another number sequence, that of the leading digits of nontrivial Riemann zeta zeros, which is known to be related to the distribution of primes. Besides providing insight into the nature of primes, the finding could also have applications...

AN incomplete survey of newspaper accounts and organizer estimates pegged this week's Tea Party protest population at a minimum of 250,000. If we use the crowd-counting math of left-wing activists, we can call it the Million Taxpayer March. To George Soros-funded grievance professionals, 250,000 is an insignificant number. But unlike recent anti-war and pro-illegal-immigration rallies padded with union workers, college students and homeless people, the Tax Day Tea Party demonstrations featured small-business owners, working taxpayers and families. A quarter-million people took time off in the middle of the workweek to raise their voices against reckless taxing and bipartisan spending. Multimillionaire...

Obama Approval Index History Date Presidential Approval Index Strongly Approve Strongly Disapprove Total Approve Total Disapprove 03/07/2009 +8 39% 31% 56% 43% 03/06/2009 +15 42% 27% 58% 40% 03/05/2009 +14 41% 27% 59% 40% 03/04/2009 +16 42% 26% 60% 38%

President Obama this week continued his effort to spend the country out of recession with his first speech to Congress outlining where he wants to go and his first budget showing how he plans to pay for it. Three major policy goals are at the top of the president’s list – health care reform, development of new sources of energy and ensuring that every child has “a complete and competitive education.” Despite the spending on this and the various bailout and stimulus packages he has announced to date, Obama also promises to cut the federal deficit in half in four...

The American economy is in the midst of a crisis unlike any we have seen in our lifetime. (snip) Etc, etc, blah blah blah, ad infinitum or ad nauseum (whichever comes first)...

By Mary Beth Sheridan Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, December 22, 2008 Officials are casting doubt on an early projection that 4 million to 5 million people could jam downtown Washington on Inauguration Day, saying it is more likely that the crowd will be about half that size. D.C. authorities said the earlier estimates, provided by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D), were based on speculation surrounding the historic nature of the swearing-in of Barack Obama as the nation's first African American president. After weeks of checking with charter bus companies, airlines and other sources, they're reassessing. "It's more of an...

AUSTIN — Early voting is big in Texas this year. Ten days into this year's 12-day early voting period, 2.7 million people in the state's 15 largest counties had cast their ballots, compared with 1.7 million who had voted at the same point four years ago. ....Democrats are turning out in bigger numbers than Republicans in Harris County, according to one analysis. Early voting historically has been dominated by Republicans. Leland Beatty, a Democratic consultant, said 42 percent of early voters had voted in Democratic primaries and 20.6 percent in Republican primaries. Republican pollster Mike Baselice said he thinks Democratic...

You know the economy is in trouble when economists start bandying around numeric terms previously associated with astronomy and particle physics. You can't open a newspaper these days without seeing the phrase "trillion dollars" placed in disturbing proximity to the word losses. According to the Nexis database, these terms appeared together in 1,774 English-language news reports between July and October 2008. During the same three-month period in 2007, they appeared in only 541, and during the same period in 2006, they appeared in only 316. Those were the good old days! You may not even remember from grade-school arithmetic what...

This is one of the most resourceful groups of people that I have ever seen. I tried doing this last night and found it difficult. If I was a propeller-head I could do it myself. How do we compile a list of what elected officials received part of the $200,000,000 that Fannie and Freddie doled out over the years. I saw the "Fannie-Boy Frank" got $40,000. I believe that every politician should be forced to give back every dime that they have ever received. I am sure that there will be some republicans on the list, and they too should...

Babies reveal natural gift for numbers 09 February 2008 From New Scientist Print Edition. They may seem to just eat, cry, sleep and poo, but 3-month-old babies may already be aware of how many animals are dangling from their mobiles. Véronique Izard at the University of Paris-South in France and her colleagues have discovered that babies have brain circuits dedicated to noticing quantity, adding weight to the argument that humans possess an innate sense of numbers. Izard had already shown in adults and 4-year-olds that numbers seem to be processed in a particular part of the brain, and separately from...

You may not realize it, but when you tell the grocer you'd like a half-dozen eggs for your family of six, you're using a primitive numbering system. Anthropologists believe that such object-specific counting, in which words like "half-dozen" and "six" denote the same quantity but refer to different objects, preceded abstract counting systems, in which any number can describe any object. Now, a study of Pacific Island languages suggests that counting systems can also evolve in reverse, becoming more object-specific. People on the Polynesian island of Mangareva take object-specific counting to the extreme. They tally some things, such as unripe...

Hillary Clinton won last night by putting together the voting coalition that has held Democratic frontrunners in good stead for 75 years. Take a look at these numbers - all of which come from CNN's cross-tabulated exit polls. What you'll see is that Hillary Clinton won many elements of the traditional FDR coalition. -Self-identified Democrats made up 54% of the electorate. She won them, 45% to 34%. -She won voters without a college degree, 43% to 35%. -She won voters with incomes less than $50,000, 47% to 32%. -She won voters over the age of 65, 48% to 32%. She...