High-IQ Chats
For several years, there has been a lively IRC chat for members of the “higher-IQ societies” (99.9th-percentile-plus) and others interested in the community of the highly gifted every Tuesday evening, starting at 7 PM Pacific time, 10 Eastern, and continuing for several hours. The main unstructured chat channel is currently #prometheus, on DALnet. Discussion is free-form. There are no set topics. Sometimes a subject comes up and is discussed for an hour. Other times, we skip from one thing to another. Sometimes the atmosphere is serious; sometimes it’s playful.
On some Tuesdays, at 7 PM U.S. Pacific time, 10 Eastern, there is a chat on channel #foursigma, intended to remain focused on a topic and last for about an hour and a half to two hours. For detailed descriptions of our programs, see this page. We will be talking about many subjects in the weeks to come. (See list of past programs.)
If you don’t have chat client software, you can download mIRC at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Park/6000/get.html. Connect to the Internet, then start up mIRC. From the File menu, choose Options, which will open a dialog box. Select a DALnet server. It takes a while to connect. When you’re connected, the mIRC Channels Folder dialog box will pop up. Type a channel name, hit Enter, and you’ll be in the chat room. You can open more than one chat window to participate in two or more channels at once. I’ve installed mIRC several times and it’s never taken longer than half an hour.
For the Mac, you can download ShadowIRC at http://sourceforge.net/projects/shadowirc/.