I'm not a genius, but I figured out how the ancients established the length of the royal cubit by precession measurements, it is as you say Roman, lots of hard work, like "filling in a coloring book."
Here's a test in association skills for you, IceAge. What does \(432\) have in common with Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ?
Furthering the analogy: What does \(432\), Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! , and "The sum of the numerals and the sum of the squares is nine" have in common?
I fondly remember the good old days (I guess you are officially a geezer when you start talking that way) when everyone actually liked smart people. It started in 1957 when Sputnik went up and America had to compete with the USSR in the science race. Math majors got dates, jocks were nice to us and even the cholos treated us with respect. I was so lucky that lasted almost thirty years, so I got to experience a fairly normal life when I was young. Nowadays people dislike anyone smarter than they are. Communication is not my only measure of intellect, but it's my first measure. How else am I to gauge a person's intelligence if they can't express themselves and I can't understand them? Obviously some people have good communication skills but not the other attributes of intelligence, but the communication facilitates figuring that out. If you've sold manure as gold then you're a swindler, but you're still pretty smart to have figured out how to do it and not get caught. Of course you become one of the reasons why ordinary people don't trust smart people, and Mensa should put out a fatwa on you. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Making enticing promises requires intelligence. Not in math but in creativity, the same kind of intelligence that drives novelists and poets. Creating campaign promises that entice people to give you their votes isn't much different than creating lyrics that makes people want to buy your CDs. Except for that fatwa thing again of course. Winning a promotion should require more than winning an election and unfortunately these days it doesn't. As a manager I look at what my people have done, not what they say. But many managers don't know how to measure and evaluate their subordinates' work, something I deal with in my consulting and training career. Too many people are promoted into management as a reward for being good technicians (in I.T. anyway) precisely because no one knows how to rate their management potential, and it becomes a death spiral as those new managers are even more poorly prepared to make promotion decisions than their predecessors. And why is that kind of talent not a component of intelligence? You use your communication skills to hear what people say and to read the rest of their bandwidth such as body language. You use your reasoning skills to form a profile of how they think and what appeals to them. Then you use your creativity to devise an approach that gains their confidence. Con men in general are very bright. Now where's that online fatwa template? I'll bet they still write well. Saul Bellow was a horrible speaker, I pity the poor kids who got stuck with him as their "celebrity professor for this semester." But his writing won awards. Of course that would have gotten him nowhere in an earlier era when few people could read. The measure of intelligence evolves with civilization's communication technologies. Soon writing will be more important than speaking as we all spend more time in virtual conversations than real ones. And those of us who can find the Shift key and the punctuation marks so people can understand what we write will be the leaders. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I don't see this. None of the Mensa members I've known have even admitted to being in the society until they were sure they were in the company of a person who could join if he wanted. They don't talk about it among the "commoners." Well okay, one lady with an MCSE flashed her Mensa card at a Radio Shack troll who treated her like a giddy housefrau who thinks a computer is a fancy toaster. And then she asked him in very stilted speech, "Do... You... Know... What... This... Card... Means?" I'll excuse that one. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Yes, I'm much happier to be here in this virtual society where I can choose my forums and talk about science and anthropology. Being in a Mensa meeting where members like Luke and Moz and Sammy D would dominate the conversation, well that's the reason I don't go to those meetings. I think it's interesting that Mensa rules have to allow spouses to join without taking the test. Clearly people with IQs 135 and above do not marry people with IQs 135 and above in great numbers. Most of us really don't enjoy hanging with other geniuses 24/7. I think he has to be stupid because so many of the things he does are stupid. I suppose one could forgive Truman for getting us mired in Korea because it was a situation for which history had no examples. I can't forgive JFK and LBJ for getting us mired in Vietnam despite having Truman's example to learn from. The Religious Redneck Retard got us mired in Iraq despite having two recent historical examples of the dreaded "land war in Asia" syndrome. This is simply not something a bright person would have done. He is certainly a puppet under the control of the petrocrats. They are neither smart nor stupid, merely selfish and imperious. They're taking a calculated gamble that Iraq won't turn into a nuclear World War Three on their watch, and like most contemporary Americans they have almost no concern for the world they're leaving their children. Than of course does mark them as stupid but it's a widespread type of cognitive dissonance. Advances in hands-on research are indeed often driven by mistakes. I don't think you'll find very many advances in mathematics that you can say that about. The brightest people like Hawking and Einstein do best at the theoretical level, where not making mistakes is an advantage, not a disadvantage.
IceAge, Let me add this in opposition to the previous connections: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Xerxes, The rolleyes icon rather than the winky face seems to indicate a lack of humourous content to your post. Not that I mind, but am a tad curious. Seriously? Fraggle, Will get back to you.
I didn't grow up in the States, what is a cholo? I noticed something. Once the topics get to religion/politics, even the most intelligent people tend to get irrational. (assuming not all Mensan are atheists) I can understand religion, because even an intelligent person can give a logical (although not necesserily rational) answer why he/she believes in a deity, but in politics, they REALLY get irrational. (see my thread about a logical Republican) Looks like these are the 2 topics that should be avoided even when super smart people meet, since it is most unlikely anybody is going to change their minds on the matter....
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! It was a joke. Don't read too much into the smilies
there are few members who are in positions that influence society, such as a medical researcher who discovered a significant breakthrough, for example. Such minds as Hawking, Gould, and etc are never seen in those societies. I often wonder why that is?[/QUOTE] I think you are right that the members of MENSA are full of themselves. I have known several MENSA members, but have never joined-- frankly because i don't believe that proving my wonderful intellectualistic intellectual intellectualism intellectualistically intellectualized intellect to a platoon of blatant narcissists is worth the effort. I have generally learned very little from this genre of misfit. True, i am a misfit also. But i do try to mitigate that fault rather than hide it. Besides, many of these penis heads are not even particularly educated. Please understand that this attitude is not caused by sour grapes on my part. It is causedby a disdain for the taste of rancid fruit. If you agree with this, then well and good. But if it offends you, then by all means, flame away and let me have it, but good! Haven't been on this board in a LONG time! It's good to be back! Megametrix
Cholo is Mexican-American slang for a gang member. In Latin America it's slang for "rebel." They also use the English slang word "homie" which is a contraction of the older slang word "homeboy" and is more prevalent in the African-American community. In my day--well really almost before my day, in the 1940s--Latino gang members were called pachucos but a pachuco wore an almost formal attire called a "zoot suit." Cholos dress casually.
I just took the test on the website, half of it consisted of factual knowledge so I just cheated and looked up anything I didn't know while taking the test. Ended up getting a 142 IQ... interesting how easy and stupid they must be I thought, I just cheated my way in. But then I realized... you gotta pay a minimum entrance fee of 80 dollars to join. Pretty stupid if you ask me!
Xerxes: Nope. Mine. My IQ measured in at a hefty 64. Or was it 86? At any rate, this means that from now on you reserve the right to print all my posts and wipe ass with it. Fraggle: Watch them. Ah, then. When I first read your post I thought of this co-worker once who tried telling me that North America had no native animals. I then thought of Regan claiming in some speech that Russia had no word for 'freedom' or that ballistic missiles could be recalled when launched. This is the man we refer to as "The Great Communicator". And that was my point- all it took was one conversation with said co-worker to figure she was, quite simply, a popular idiot. She has a loud voice, never stutters and if ever grows self conscious you'd never know it, looks you straight in the face without wavering, doesn't giggle needlessly and could literally keep a straight face pulling out the phrase "No, there are no animals native to America" straight from her asshole. But come to think of it, that a supervisor would consider her suggestions first before others is a testament to her social skills at hiding her stupidity. And that a draft-dodging cheerleader from Conneticut could pull off the Texan bravado that basically got him the presidency is a talent. Why shouldn't it be? Ditto on the con-men. Years from now, assuming my new life gets its shit together, you will read this post completely plagiarized in the form of a short story written by a pen name. I forget his name as he’s got those tortured Afrikaaner names, but I read of a South African author who would always hold an interview with a notepad where he would write his answer down before voicing it. He was a horrible speaker as well, but a prize winning author. Nexus: 3,9,and 13. All odd numbers. (If I'm wrong, eat me) I never said confidence was "key", more like a gimmick, and how is neither the intelligence to see the frame of a house in a pile of wood and the conviction to actually build it not required to 'get things done'? *bated breath* Phosphorous! One of the first known elements to be manually isolated form nature, the man responsible for it was a German named Hennig Brand who was obsessed with the turning of base metals into gold. So we watch him now in his 17th century laboratory with his robe parted,his dick in his hand. What we have done is caught him at the precise moment that after years of accidents and failure trying to make gold from lead, as dozens of contemporary alchemists had failed at by this time, he has reached the point of frustrated madness that has him now literally hunched over and pissing into a vat filled with rotting urine. He's been collecting it for weeks and now.......he's going to boil it. Long story short, now heated, the rotting piss rises from its tombstone, evaporating into a flask. What he did not know was that the condensed liquid, after heating, had concentrated phosphates in it, mixed with the carbons found in urine and the charcoal that he added. What he was basically doing was distilling the sodium phosphates naturally found in urine, thereby isolating phosphorus for the first time in history. After cooling, what he got was not gold but lo and behold and to his disappointment a white, waxy residue that glowed. This is that proverbial "WTF??" moment that we find in the history of science that goes on to sire technologies that we now take for granted; with phosphorous now isolated, other men could emulate it in their laboratories and 130 years would pass before the first naughty boy could ever burn a house down with the simple strike of a phosphorous-coated match on a surface dipped in sulfur. So every time we eat a hot meal out in the woods somewhere away from the microwave, made possible by this cute little stick you now call a match, think of Brand and his beautiful urine.
There's a surprisingly strong nerd movement in America. While they may be maligned by ther contemporaries, they stick together. They've even got their own musical genre– nerdcore. It's hip-hop about nerdy stuff. I suggest you check it out, pretty hilarious stuff, exceedingly witty. MC Frontalot, the guy who is credited with starting it all. Science is hands on research. Otherwise, it's just philosophy. The Hawkings and Einsteins rely on other people's discoveries (or mistakes that reveal curious anomolaies) to put everything together. As Newton said, they stand on the shoulders of giants (or the collective knowledge of generations of academics).
Sciforums seems like a tiny “high I.Q. society”. Of course when your average I.Q. is 60, then anything over 100 is high.
