A long-lost Minecraft is found, “literary seismographs”, and killbots
Today’s Linkfest: The best stuff I found while procrastinating online
Every Monday I serve up a list of the best stuff I found while procrastinating for hours online. Welcome to this week’s edition for July 5, 2021!
First up …
1. 🔍A rare, long-lost version of Minecraft is finally recovered
Minecraft gets updated nearly every week, so after 12 years, there are hundreds of versions out there. Fans of the game often keep old ones around, playing them for fun, nostalgia, or to enjoy the smoky flavor of deprecated game mechanics.
But one has long been missing — the lost Atlantis of Minecraft!
Version 1.1.1.
Mojang released it on September 18, 2010 — then quickly realized it had a nasty bug and yanked it offline, after only 3 hours and 25 minutes. Very few people downloaded it, and for years it seemed nobody had saved it either. Minecraft devotees spent the last decade wand’ring the desolate caverns of Mediafire and MEGA.nz, desperately hunting for a copy, with no luck.
Until last weekend! On Twitter, @lunasorcery wrote a thread describing how she realized she’d actually tweeted about 1.1.1 way back in 2010 when she first downloaded it. She found her old hard drive from back then, plugged it in, and le voila.
She put 1.1.1 online, and Minecraft obsessives went out of their gourds with joy. Her thread is a wondrous tale of digital packrattery, ending in the archival dictum of Internet pop culture:
“Never Delete Anything”.
2. 📖 “Literary seismographs”: Predicting national crises by studying a country’s novels
There’s a fascinating piece in The Guardian about a group of literary scholars in Germany who tried to predict emerging national crises by looking at a country’s literary scene. What type of novels were striking a chord with the public? With reviewers? Which were causing arguments, or seemed to reflect simmering civic strife?
It sounds a bit nutty, but the group claimed to have some success: In 2017 they predicted Algeria was ripe for civil unrest, which indeed happened two years later. But the group’s funding was yanked in 2020, so the project was mothballed.
Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating way of thinking about what novels mean, as it were. They’re stories, they’re art, they’re fiction — but they’re also data.
Back in 2006 I did some reporting on the CIA, and spoke to several CIA analysts who studied “open source intelligence” — which is their term of art for any type of non-secret information that’s published openly, like a country’s newspapers or blogs or tweets … or novels. Turned out CIA analysts sometimes read those too, and, like the scholars, found them useful in figuring out where a country was headed.
3. 🤖Dumping the ROM on a Speak & Spell to prove it didn’t have a “swear words” mode
Remember “swear words” mode on the Speak & Spell?
Back in the 80s, kids claimed that if you typed the correct eldritch command into the keypad, you’d unlock a mode where the robot voice would cuss like a drunken sailor.
Alas, it turns out it’s a conspiracy theory of the early Silicon Age. Phillip Burgess of Adafruit dumped the ROM from a vintage Speak & Spell and crawled through the code to prove, once and for all, that there are no swear words in there. Check out his video to see his excavation. (And, trivia! Did you, like me, assume that the Speak & Spell pronounced words by assembling phonemes together? Also not true: Every word it speaks was recorded in its totality.)
Burgess did discover one word that was recorded onto the ROM but never used in the spelling game: “Mosquito”.
Filthy stuff.
4. 💣Autonomous lethal killbots are here
You may also recall that freaky “slaughterbots” sci-fi video from 2017?
It gave me nightmares, man. “Slaughterbots” was released by a group of scientist and thinkers who worried that autonomous killer-drones were going to be deployed any day now; after all, as they pointed out, the main things you needed — face-recognition AI, cheap redundant waves of drones, political actors with deeply compromised morals, etc. — were already here.
Well, that group is still active and just wrote a piece noting that a UN report identified what appears to be a real-life case of autonomous killer drones — used in Libya in the spring of 2020.
“In so many words, the red line of autonomous targeting of humans has now been crossed.” This is not going to help my sleep much either.
5. 🥏The physics of why beer coasters make lousy frisbees
If you’ve ever tried to toss a beer coaster like a frisbee — and who among us has not—you’ve probably noticed they fly terribly. A few feet after you toss it, the dang thing flips over and plummets.
A new paper at Arxiv analyzed these aerodynamics and figured out why: Gravity quickly pulls at the beer coaster, and the lift becomes focused on the leading edge, which flips the thing vertically and unto certain death. (There’s an excellent plaintext writeup by Jennifer Ouellette over at Ars Technica.)
Two things leap out of this paper, though! One is that the lead author — Johann Ostmeyer — has actually done previous work on the physics of beer: Last spring he put a paper on Arxiv explaining the physics of “beer tapping”. This guys is clearly angling for a well-deserved Ignobel.
The second thing is: To test his hypothetical model of beer-coaster physics, Ostmeyer and his team built a machine to shoots beer coasters with robotic consistency. They included a picture of this magnificent device …
They should install these in bars everywhere. My hat is off.
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Wired and Smithsonian magazines, and a regular contributor to Mother Jones. He’s the author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, and Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing our Minds for the Better. He’s @pomeranian99 on Twitter and Instagram.