This week's newsletter is going to be a little different from normal - more of a stream of consciousness than a deep dive into particular topics. I hope you don't mind. This past couple of weeks have been pretty busy for me, mostly on personal stuff, but I'll attempt to relate the highlights, particularly where they intersect with skepticism.
As a programmer, I love a good story about buggy software. Maybe it makes me feel better about my own mistakes! So when I recently heard about a fun bug in the strategy game Civilisation, from way back in 1991, I was intrigued. Apparently the fallout from this particular code error (no pun intended) was that the peaceful world leader Mahatma Gandhi would suddenly become very fond of amassing and using nuclear weapons - a quirk that has been named Nuclear Gandhi.
There was a nice story about the 30th anniversary of the Lotto this week from Stuff. The article talked about how the fact some numbers come up more often than others is likely chance (Lotto take this seriously, and apparently regularly wash and weigh the balls to ensure there's no bias). The difference in frequency between the most drawn ball, number 1 (16.91%) and the least drawn ball number 34 (13.97%) is not huge, and I suspect the number frequency draws a bell curve.
The NZ Herald published a list of the top 5 luckiest stores, and went so far as to claim that your chances of winning the lottery would increase if you visit one of these stores!