Mensa report
May. 24th, 2003 12:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walbournAt this point I've made it to this month's 'new members' meeting, the monthly meeting with a seminar on historical study of tsunami, and this month's science SIG meeting with a presentation on commercial airplane air circulation and recycling and its implications for disease transmission. It seems to me that the whole point of Mensa is to get people together to discuss their opinions and perspective on things they are only barely qualified to discuss. Mensa people have an opinion about everything and can carry on deep conversations on a weirdly large swath of topics and have no trouble expounding their perspective on every subject under the sun. The truth is though that I'm totally one of those people.
It is mentally stimulating to take my general interest and educational background in science and my knowledge and experience of the world and think about some topic I would never otherwise have the opportunity to learn about. It really reminds me how much I loved attending university seminars--I need to see what kind of speaker program UW might have going. I read Scientific American every month to keep abreast of developments, but there is just something more rewarding about having an interactive discussion.
Obviously, there is more to Mensa than geek conversation and intellectual banter, but so far it's pretty cool. I just missed a rather large Regional Gathering ("RG" in Mensa-speak) in Oregon, but hopefully one will be happening again before too long. The locals who attend and host the monthly functions seems to be mostly in their late 30s to mid-40s, which puts them a bit older than most of my friends and peer group. Probably most of my peers that would otherwise attend these things actually have lives or something...
It is mentally stimulating to take my general interest and educational background in science and my knowledge and experience of the world and think about some topic I would never otherwise have the opportunity to learn about. It really reminds me how much I loved attending university seminars--I need to see what kind of speaker program UW might have going. I read Scientific American every month to keep abreast of developments, but there is just something more rewarding about having an interactive discussion.
Obviously, there is more to Mensa than geek conversation and intellectual banter, but so far it's pretty cool. I just missed a rather large Regional Gathering ("RG" in Mensa-speak) in Oregon, but hopefully one will be happening again before too long. The locals who attend and host the monthly functions seems to be mostly in their late 30s to mid-40s, which puts them a bit older than most of my friends and peer group. Probably most of my peers that would otherwise attend these things actually have lives or something...
