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i’m behind a guy at ralphs. he has a weird shovel-corkscrew as one of the things he’s buying and catches me staring at it

guy: “it’s a tomato planter”
me: “oh”
guy: “yeah, i have to replant mine cause i watered them with microwaved water and they all died”
me: “excuse me?”
guy: “microwaved water gives you cancer”
me: “i never knew that”
guy: “yeah, it’s from the radiation”

this frankly would be a better plot for “attack of the mutant killer tomatoes” than the original one

stephen hawking, in a lecture is saying that the human race has ‘entered a new stage of evolution’, in that we are now taking control of our genetics directly. yes and no, his point is entirely accurate and valid, but his word choice is wrong. people abuse the word evolution because it’s the only one they know to describe change (perhaps ‘improvement’) of a population over time.

look, you wouldn’t say “bob has entered a new stage of walking, he has a bike now”, you would say “bob doesn’t walk places as much, he now bikes”. similarly we’re no longer evolving, we’re now doing something else. coin a word, or just say ‘custom designing ourselves’. evolution requires natural selection and that force nowadays has very little effect on humans, in a world with health care and birth control.

we can’t understand the future by simply blindly shoehorning our reality into outdated concepts and terms. so yes, partially this is me just being a stickler on word choice, but partly we also need to be aware that we shape our thinking in terms of things we know, and there’s no reason to give people wrong conceptions on what’s going on.

so in some games of mafia/werewolf people have cards that they look at, but more normally the mayor assigns the mafia/werewolves and the detectives/seers. if you’re as obsessive by mathematical pseudorandomness as i am, here’s a simple algorithm for doing so that will minimize your own selection bias.

think of a random word. “penguin” will do for this example. let’s say you have 13 players. you start by converting the first 5 letters into their corresponding numbers

oh. and be like me and have every letter of the alphabet’s corresponding number memorized. a=1, b=2, m=13, t=20, etc.

so now you have “penguin” -> “pengu” -> “16 5 14 7 21″. if your number is greater than your your number of players, subtract the number of players. in this case this yields “3 5 1 7 8″. now start at the person whose name comes first alphabetically (or whoever happens to already be in front of you, doesn’t matter), that’s how many people you will skip over as you go around assigning. so starting at your friend Aardvark, go 3 people, that’s your first werewolf. then go 5 more, that’s your second one, etc.

well, at least it’s a decent pseudorandom starting point for you to ignore while you assign them based on what you think will be funniest.

incidentally, would anyone be up for a game of werewolf if i set one up?

i hate the “the real danger of climate change is harm to humans, it’s impossible for us to destroy all life on the planet” argument. it has that feeling of calm rational compromise to it which makes us automatically trust it. it’s also wrong.

all life on this planet will end. that’s a fact. at one point temperatures will rise into the 400s as all the oceans boil away and our atmosphere becomes a vapor filled haze, like Venus. no extremophilic bacteria will be able to survive it, they max out around 100 degrees celsius. at the latest, this will happen when the sun expands and gets closer to us, hundreds of millions of years.

however, since heating is a positive feedback process past a certain point, this really can be kickstarted by humans early. once we enter the increased evaporation cycle with enough ‘climate acceleration’, the heat retaining properties of the water vapor will be enough to cause greater evaporation. ta-da, runaway feedback, 450 degrees, all life is done.

and to cover a last pedant point, yes it is theoretically possible that a life form will exist that can float 45 kilometers off the planet and using light and sulphur imbalances to survive. however, i’m confident in saying that that life would not be able to evolve quickly enough to account how fast (geological time-wise) the heating of earth would occur.