If You Like To Read

Esquire.com has an interesting article about people with unusually high IQ's. It's about 5 pages long and is a click-through article. If those two things don't bother you, then I suggest you get on this. Life is difficult at both ends of any spectrum. The story covers a few unique individuals. I'll share part of one of them. I hope it won't dissaude you from reading the rest.

Here's an excerpt:

Christopher Michael Langan (...) is certainly the smartest nightclub bouncer in America, endowed with an IQ that has been measured at 195, give or take a few points, a score that puts him on a par with the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rene Descartes, three of the brightest minds in human history. A great minotaur of a man with a basso profundo voice, Chris is six feet tall and weighs 275 pounds. A former cowboy,Construction worker, and Park Service firefighter, he has a fifty-two-inch chest, twenty-two-inch biceps, a cranial circumference of twenty-five and a half inches--a colossal head, more than three standard deviations above the norm.

When Chris isn't busy doing temp work as a bartender, or training such summer luminaries as writer Tom Wolfe at the local health club, or wrestling with spoiled, flush-pocket drunks, or chatting up the young ladies--the very young ladies, his self-avowed major weakness--he is often found hunched over his homebuilt computer, drinking tepid tea from a spaghetti-sauce jar, working on something he calls the CTMU, his Cognition-Theoretic Model of the Universe. The result of ten years of solitary labor, the CTMU--pronounced cat-mew--is, says Chris, a true "Theory of Everything," a cross between John Archibald Wheeler's "Participatory Universe" and Stephen Hawking's "Imaginary Time" theory of cosmology.

It gets better. Click here to read the rest...