When I was a child, I was leafing through <i>Parade</i> when I came across "Ask Marilyn" and read about her having the "world's highest IQ."<p>Several Sundays later when I'd gotten the gist of the whole thing, I asked my mother: "but what does she <i>do</i>?" I was totally and utterly perplexed. Here was a woman smarter than Einstein and Hawking squandering away her intelligence on such downright silly matters. You don't need an IQ of 230 to write a newspaper column... you just don't.<p>It pissed me off then, but I never gave it much attention... Since then I've left the States and totally cast her out of mind. But when the topic comes up, I just shrug and guess that this is God's way of showing us that you don't need to be the world's most intelligent in order to accomplish something, because sometimes the biggest "geniuses" amongst us are the biggest idiots in reality.<p>An IQ like that applied to literally <i>anything</i> under the sun other than a newspaper column could yield huge benefits to humanity. It doesn't matter what - anything she likes. History, psychology, chemistry, physics, math, computers, English, philosophy, <i>anything</i>.<p>But she didn't. And that pisses me off like crazy. Because I don't have her IQ but I work day and night hoping to make this world a better place.... and there she is, showing off her IQ as if at the World Fair to make petty gains as a household celebrity, a freak of nature rather than one of the luckiest people on the planet.