Mensa, the society for people who are good at IQ tests, have announced that they have been shining the beam of their collective intellect on some of the world’s most intractable problems, starting with African Poverty.
Entry to Mensa is strictly limited to those who can score in the top 2 percentiles on Cattell-type tests, and many like to imply that this correlates to useful human intelligence.
Until now, Mensa’s most visible contribution to society has been providing puzzles for the newspapers, but after today’s announcement, that might change.
Over the past few weeks, members of Mensa’s Global Problems Special Interest Group (GlobProb SIG) have been working together on African Poverty, and believe they have some interesting new insights.
GlobProb SIG leader, Andrew 'Andy' Sharp, an IT consultant, summarised the issue as the process of turning “want” into “have”. He explained, “we think we are able to do this in as few as 3 steps, changing only one letter at a time, and each time forming a new word. The answer is on page 45 of our findings.”
Another SIG member, IT consultant Justin Higgins, commented, “one of the first things we noticed when we sat down together was that I was sitting to the left of Andy, but two spaces to the right of Gavin, so you see Tony could only sit between me and Gavin. Pretty soon after that, we saw that you could find 30 four-sided shapes in the four-by-two lattice of the windows in the meeting room."
Other findings were that “African Poverty” was an anagram of “Crave Profanity” and “Frantic Overpay”, and that out of Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan, the odd one out was Chad, for having only one syllable.
Meetings have so far been held on the 1st, 3rd, 6th, 10th and 15th of this month, meaning that the next two meetings will of course be held on the 21st and 28th.
The group intends to release the full text of the findings just as soon as they figure out how to use the fax machine.
Are you a member of Mensa? What's the missing number in this series? 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, _, 8, 13? What other issues should Mensa tackle? Send us your comments using the form below.
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