Lessons from Supervillains on Office Design
If you’ve spent the past year and change working from home, you’ve probably let yourself go in many ways. Truthfully, your coworkers might not notice if you put on a few pounds. And they might even like how you’ve grown your hair out.
But one thing you wouldn’t want them to notice: all the ways you’ve started to slack off on your computer during office hours. So what if you’re just as productive as you used to be, even though you’ve always got YouTube open in another browser tab? They’ll judge you all the same!
So what can you do? Are you going to straighten up and fly right? Or are you going to life a paranoid’s life, always ready to hide your screen at a moment’s notice?
I for one believe in the adage: work smarter, not harder. So here’s an idea: implement a laser tripwire at the entrance to your office or cubicle. As soon as a coworker sets it off, it can minimize all your windows, lock your computer, or do anything else you want using custom scripts.
It’s just the thing for when you need to quickly look like you aren’t nearly as lazy and time-wasting as you truly are. You can buy one or build your own.
Atomic Gardening
For as long as humans have cultivated crops, we have been genetically modifying organisms. First we did this over the millennia with countless generations of selective breeding, creating plants very unlike their wild counterparts. More recently, we’ve turned to directly manipulating the genomes of crops to give them precise traits.1
But between the old and the new, we’ve tried one other bizarre technique to enhance our crops: irradiate them and see what happens.
The idea is pretty simple. Evolution occurs as a result of random beneficial mutations accumulating in the gene pool. Radiation causes random mutations. So why not put a radiation source at the center of a field of crops to induce lots of random mutations and see if any of them turn out useful?
It sounds totally insane, but it works.2 Odds are you’ve eaten plenty of crops descended from one of these experiments. Over 2000 varieties of plants created by atomic gardening are available worldwide, including varieties of Japanese pears, grapefruits, rice, and barely.
Obligatory Oreo
I would’ve hoped those traits would’ve been “big” or “tasty” or “nutritious”, but we seem to have settled on “resistant to being doused in gallons of poison”.
Sadly, attempts to create superpowered humans with radiation have not been as successful.