M-Ongst Ourselves |
How long have you been in Mensa? Chances are it’s not as long as Richard Busch, who has spent 35 years in the group since he took the entrance exam the summer after his fifth grade year. (One of his three children, a 14-year-old, will be taking the test soon, too, so maybe he can pass on the tradition!) Richard works for a major manufacturer as a software engineer, and he is also an avid computer enthusiast at home. The story of just how he came to work in this field is intriguing--and perhaps will sound familiar to many of us who started off on one path only to find ourselves on a different (and wholly unexpected!) one. As a college student, his first love was filmmaking; he won the silver medal at the Cannes Film Festival one year with a short film. (The film was animated, a study in rhythm and design called Onomatopoeia.) Learning that the film industry is controlled by the people with the money, Richard took accounting classes as a means of entering the industry permanently. However, the time he spent with computers while taking those classes changed his mind, and he made the switch to software engineering. Since I had a computer expert on the phone with me and a newspaper article about the Y2K situation at my fingertips, I asked Richard his thoughts on the subject. He predicted no huge disasters but possibly a few amusing stories on the subject by this time next year. In the spirit of onomatopoeia, I responded, "Whew."
Our second Glance this month, Carol Mulder, recently moved back to Phoenix from Seattle and resides here with her "five cats, no kids." Seattle, Carol tells me, is rainy, mossy, gray...and gorgeous. If you’re planning a visit, she recommends dressing in layers, wearing a raincoat, and stomping around in waterproof shoes. Places you should put on your must-see list include the University of Washington campus, especially its dock (from which you can venture out via canoe), and the San Juan Islands. (She once saw a small pod of killer whales on that ferry ride.) Carol works in a law office and hopes to have her own business sometime in the future. She has worked in a variety of fields, one of which included the task of designing leather clothing. Another was the electronics field, and it was in this capacity that she became the first female electron beam weld operator on the West coast. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with the machine, it is the size of a small bedroom.) Carol enjoys reading nonfiction, especially natural history, early modern history, and Egyptology. Currently she is reading The History of the American People, a book by Paul Johnson that provides an English perspective on the issue. Concerning music, Mozart is a favorite, as well as jazz music, and if you attend Mensa’s Dance Night you just may be seeing her there soon. Cha cha cha!
Did I write cha-cha? I meant China, since that is exactly where June M. Unger, M.D (a radiologist) visited for a month this fall. She reports that it is not a "third-world country," rather a "developing country," and the population is huge. There are 30 million people in Beijing alone. And here’s a factoid for you: there are more people living along the Yangtze River right now than in the entire U.S. of A. The smallest city she visited was Wuhan--itself with a population of 7 million. The food was marvelous, especially the vegetables, and it was served in enormous quantities. (As opposed to the "Chinese food" we consume here, a typical restaurant dinner in China has 20 to 30 dishes, most of which consist of fresh vegetables.) If you are planning a trip to this country, you might be interested to know that June recommends traveling with a group, as lone American-looking travelers (or even couples) may raise suspicion, especially in areas near Tibet. She also reported that the hotel accommodations were great, and that Fall is often considered the best time of year to visit.
And, finally, Jim Thompson graciously accepted my invitation to be a Glance this month, and many of you may be interested in the information he gave me about other high-IQ societies. He happens to be a member of others, and is most active in the Prometheus Society (the journal is called "Gift of Fire"--nice, huh?), which accepts members with an IQ of 164 or higher. He is also a member of the Triple Nine Society (TNS), which requires an IQ in the 99.9 percentile. Due to smaller membership numbers (the Prometheus Society only has about 60 members worldwide, Jim estimated), these groups communicate mostly via their journals, e-mail, and special on-line lists for members. These groups may use different IQ tests than Mensa does, so if you are interested in joining, here’s what you need to do. You could visit this website, which has links to various high-IQ societies: http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/hoeflin.html. You can also visit the Prometheus Society at: http://prometheus.wwwh.com. Or contact TNS at: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/7447. Jim, by the way, is one of the few members I’ve interviewed who says he does not read much in his spare time--and he has a great reason: he reads for a living as a freelance editor. Nevertheless, he does have a book recommendation for us: Nothingness: The Science of Empty Space, by Henning Genz, which is about empty space and how it’s not really empty at all.
Kind of like how this column isn’t really over at all. Except that it is...until March.