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...

Prometheus Society Founder Ronald Hoeflin, PhD Featured in Boing-Boing

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

Firegivers

What, exactly, is Firegivers? Firegivers is a list on Yahoo!Groups. Membership on Firegivers is available to all members and subscribers of The Prometheus Society. It is not a discussion group; rather, it is a place where copies of the articles in our journal, Gift of Fire, are posted in text format for all who have access to the group to read.

Here's the group's description, found on the Firegivers site:

Do you want to read the latest issue of Gift of Fire? Look no farther. I've used the Hebrew letter Aleph because it is a homonym of "alluph", a title given in Hebrew to scholars who have attained great knowlege and understanding. I hope these articles will take you a few steps farther in that direction. All articles contained herein have appeared in the printed edition of Gift of Fire, the magazine of the Prometheus Society, and are subject to the same copyright protection. This group is open only to members and subscribers of the Prometheus Society. For information on how to join, go to the society's website:

http://prometheussociety.org

Firegivers was founded on January 27, 2004 by the Prometheus Society Treasurer, Brian Schwartz. Brian had a great idea, here! Yes, issues of Gift of Fire do get posted to our website, where members and subscribers can access them. However, each issue is accessed individually, and the issues of the journal are in PDF format. This format has its advantages, certainly. For one, the online journal looks identical to the print version of Gift of Fire. These days, that's certainly the trend, as we can see in Science and other online journals, where PDF "copies" of the original journal (or, in the case of larger journals, individual articles) can be accessed and downloaded. However, the Firegivers list has some interesting advantages.

When accessing Firegivers, members can use the search capability of Yahoo!Groups to find articles based on keywords. These keywords can be related to an article's subject, or a member can use the keyword search capability to find all articles by a particular author. If an individual wishes to quote or respond to a given article, they have only to cut-and-paste the text from the article in Firegivers. Though this can be done with PDF files, it's much simpler a process with a plain text file.

If you are a member or subscriber of Prometheus, I urge you to visit the Firegivers site if you haven't already. Brian does an excellent job of keeping it up-to-date and posting new articles as they are available.

If you are not a current member or subscriber and are interested in reading Gift of Fire, please visit the Prometheus Society website for more information. Online journal subscriptions are only $10.00 per year and include access to the protected areas of the website as well as the Firegivers site.

A genius is one who can...

A genius is one who can do anything except make a living.

--Joey Adams

Prometheus Unplugged Guestbook

Please sign the Prometheus Society Blog guestbook!

Your entry will appear as soon as it is reviewed and approved (entries are reviewed to weed out spam and inappropriate content).

Sign the Guestbook

View the Guestbook

Prometheus Unplugged discovered!

Blogger's now being owned by Google is not without its benefits for those seeking search engine optimization. With no effort whatsoever, someone who starts a blog here has it, within days, indexed by today's most popular search engine and available to anyone who searches on the key term or terms.

Such was the case with this blog, this new blog, this grand concept still not yet out of the egg with which I've been working. One of our astute Prometheus Society members (aren't all our members astute?), an Officer in fact, found this blog and posted a link to it on the Fire List, our discussion group. Already! All who have followed the link have come, therefore, to find my post entitled "Test" and likely wonder just what is going on and what might be in the offing.

For more details, they'll have to wait, I'm afraid. But the news will be good, and there will be much to interest not only our members and subscribers, but the general public as well. This, of course, doesn't preclude my working on the official Prometheus Society website. And I do have some grand changes in the works for it as well. This is something extra, something with benefits that can't be found on the official website, something that will allow our members and subscribers a latitude and means of expression they won't find elsewhere, something that...well, the rest will have to wait.

This is, after all, only a teaser of a post. A little more interesting than the previous post (which will, after this, be deleted) and a little less cryptic.

And yes, comments will be enabled here. If you like, you can comment on what you find here. However, comments will be moderated. Your comments won't show up until they've been reviewed and, if I don't find them appropriate, they won't make their way to Prometheus Unplugged. There will be more on the comment moderation process later.

Geniuses are like thunderstorms

Geniuses are like thunderstorms. They go against the wind, terrify people, cleanse the air.

--Kierkegaard