Prometheus in Jeopardy!

Prometheus Society member Marc Spraragen appears television on Monday, February 26, 2007. He'll be fielding Alex's questions (or answers) on "Jeopardy" (check your local television listings for times). Tune in and cheer Marc on!
 

A new discussion list

One of our members just set up a new discussion list on Yahoo!Groups. It's called the Fire List Harmony Seekers. The group's description on its home page is: "Description
This group is an experimental group with the objective of achieving peace and harmony in the fire_list." So far, after several hours, the group has three members and two posts. Members of the Prometheus Society and the Fire List may join the group here:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Fire_list_harmony_seekers/

We'll have more news and info on this group as things develop.

It is not enough to have a good mind

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it well.

--Rene Descartes

Source:
The Immortal Word: It is not enough to have a good...

Boing-Boing goes the Prometheus Society

Seen on the Web: High-IQ societies in the Village Voice from Boing-Boing. The ever-watchful eye of one of our most active members caught this gem and posted a link to it on the Fire List. It talks about Rachel Aviv's recent article in the Village Voice in which she profiled my friend--and yours--Prometheus Society founder Dr. Ronald Hoeflin. Of course, the Prometheus Society is also mentioned. This, said I, deserves a linkback. And so it has come to pass.

Boing-Boing has an excerpt from the Village Voice article. Here is an excerpt from that excerpt:

Hoeflin is fascinated by the idea of a "maximum human potential." Every afternoon, he goes to Wendy's in Hell's Kitchen and reads for several hours with a magnifying glass—he's legally blind—as preparation for his three-volume treatise, The Encyclopedia of Categories: A Theory of Categories and Unifying Paradigm for Philosophy With Over 1,000 Examples. He is kind, awkward, and modest, and tends to explain things with charts. When talking about his childhood, he goes to his bookshelf unprompted and offers the results of a personality test. "I should probably just show this to you," he says. "As you can see, I have this extreme sensitivity factor. So some things are really hard."

To read more of the Boing-Boing excerpt (and to see Boing-Boing for Boing-Boing's sake), follow this link: Boing-Boing goes the Prometheus Society. To go directly to GO, forfeiting a possible $400 prize until the next time around, and take a peek at the Village Voice article, click here: Education Supplement Fall 2006: The Intelligencer - Inside the hypercompetitive world of high-IQ societies.

Happy hyercompetitive reading. And congratulations to Ron.

Fire List active as ever

We're not quite to the end of January yet, and 2007 is off to a roaring start on the Fire List! As of this afternoon, we have a total of 1,542 posts to the Fire List this month. That's excluding those posts that Yahoo!Groups is holding in cyber-jail and has not yet released (they had a bit of a glitch a few days ago, and most groups' posts ended up taking a detour through The Twilight Zone).

Here's the breakdown of posts on the Fire List since its inception:

It looks like we're in for another great season on the Fire List! I'd like to offer my personal thanks to all who have helped make it such an interesting and rewarding discussion list.

Gift of Fire Issue 165 Contents

Gift of Fire
Issue 165 Table of Contents

Society Business (including Membership committee proposal)
Ban-Ki Moon and the Future of the United Nations
Universe Had No Unique Beginning
How the Other Half Lives
Bird Flu: The Ultimate "Terrorist" Attack?
The Vampire Wore Dentures
Home-schooling exceptionally intellectually-gifted children
You Are Intellectuals
Song of Myself
About "Song of Myself"
Slow night (report from Crawpappy's Bar, Tulsa, Okla.)
Update on Aging
Neurophilosophy of Consciousness
Brian gets spanked
The Tao of the Cyber Amish
Let's salute the squirrels on this Fourth of July!
Crash! 9/11 Revisited in Manhattan on October 11, 2006
Three Bottles of Spirit
Bathroom Wars: The World Chess Championship 2006

To read these articles, you must be a Prometheus member or subscriber. Non-member subscriptions are available for as little as $10.00 per year and include full access to current and archived issues of the Gift of Fire journal. To subscribe, visit our website.

Two kinds of genius

There are two kinds of geniuses. The characteristic of the one is roaring, but the lightning is meagre and rarely strikes; the other kind is characterized by reflection by which it constrains itself or restrains the roaring. But the lightning is all the more intense; with the speed and sureness of lightning it hits the selected particular points - and is fatal.

--Kierkegaard