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National Geographic reports on a new(ish) theory on the Dyatlov Pass incident [edit: moved from archived original]: a small avalanche with a large chunk of snow could have caused the blunt-force injuries, leading to them evacuating the tent, without leaving the expected (but missing) signs of a full avalanche.

The bizarre deaths of hikers at Russia’s Dyatlov Pass have inspired countless conspiracy theories, but the answer may lie in an elegant computer model based on surprising sources.

An avalanche could explain why they cut their way out of their tent and were found scattered around the campsite, but there was no snowfall and no signs of an avalanche when the bodies were found, and it doesn’t explain the various injuries.

Car crash test data combined with snow simulations developed for Frozen — and the fact that some of the hikers put their bedrolls on top of their skis makes the injuries fit if a slab of snow landed on the tent.

And the team diary recorded strong winds, which most likely would have been blowing downslope, which could have moved enough snow around to trigger a small avalanche.

Not conclusive, of course, but within the realm of possibility.

Of course, a mini avalanche isn’t as exciting as, say, an attack by Yeti or running into an experimental Soviet weapons test!

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I like Minecraft Earth, but it didn’t quite hit its stride before the pandemic, and didn’t adapt as well as Pokémon Go has to the pandemic. I’ve mostly stopped playing since hitting the level cap because gameplay is still too awkward, and while it is fun, it’s not enough fun to overcome that when I don’t have a goal to work toward.

So while I’m sad that it’s shutting down in June, it’s more “what could have been” than wishing I could keep playing it.

Live the Adventure!

Adventuring in augmented reality is the clear highlight of the game. You use your phone as a window into a life-size 3D fragment of a Minecraft world where you can fight zombies, mine resources, activate redstone contraptions, and so on. Initially these would spawn out in public spaces, and you could spot them from a distance like Pokémon Go gyms. During the pandemic, they changed to a system with “Adventure Crystals” that you can find or earn through challenges and activate to spawn an adventure at home. Different levels of crystals will spawn different sizes of adventures from simple up through “Epic.” Friends can scan a QR code on your phone to join you and you can play together in the same AR environment.

The main problems are:

  • You need enough space, especially for the bigger adventures.
  • You can’t choose the type of adventure, only the complexity. So you’re never sure if you’re going to get a puzzle, a battle, or just a lot of blocks to mine.
  • You can’t invite anyone to join you until the adventure starts, so if you have an epic adventure with 15 skeletons shooting at you and a half-dozen creepers ready to explode, you can’t take the time to get help.

Building

Build plates let you take a fragment (8×8, 16×16 or 32×32) of a Minecraft world, view it at tabletop scale in AR, and build what you want with it. You can use resources you’ve collected or crafted in other parts of the game. You can populate it with animals or monsters, or a “Mob of Me” that represents you. And you can play a life-size instance of it like an adventure, though again you need enough space for that.

Space is a problem here, too, and the process of actually building something complex in AR is awkward. Sometimes I think it would’ve been nice to be able to build in standard Minecraft UI, then play them in AR. And the real promise of this was being able to share your build plates with other players, which again was ruined by the pandemic.

I ended up mainly using build plates to farm. It’s cool that you can, though! Crops and trees grow, you can milk cows, shear sheep, etc. All on your dining table!

Collecting

That leaves the location part of the game: going out and collecting resources. That part is only really fun if you can get out and walk somewhere, which may or may not be possible depending on how locked-down your area is at any given time. But it’s less like catching Pokémon and more like spinning mobile Pokéstops. You’re just tapping on them as you get close to them, not jumping into a mini-game with actual strategy and skill to it. Once I’d collected enough resources to do all the building and crafting I wanted to, I stopped firing this mode up on walks because catching Pokémon was more interesting.

Challenges

They have at least tried to keep giving players new things to do by running biweekly challenge seasons. You collect or craft items, or solve adventure puzzles, or kill five zombies with a golden shovel (yeah, they get oddly specific after a while) in order to get a reward and unlock the next challenge. Even those get frustrating after a while, though. I keep getting stuck on defeating five skeletons (or whatever specific monster), and then for ten adventures in a row I’ll only find zombies, or spiders, or no mobs at all. Or chickens.

Sunset

At least Microsoft is handling it well. They announced it today, along with an update that includes all the remaining finished-but-unreleased content, discounts to in-game purchases, and nearly six months for us to play through the new features before shutting it down. (I’ve already found one of the new cow variants.) And aside from character items, which are already shared with Minecraft Bedrock Edition, they’re transferring currency over to Minecraft proper. So they’re giving the game a decent send-off and making an effort to keep players happy.

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November 23: Helicopter pilot finds “strange” monolith in remote part of Utah.

November 25: Using Google Earth to look for the Utah monolith site. One candidate that matches the landscape seems to have something vertical that appeared between the 2015 and 2016 images.

No coordinates in the article. Attempt no landings there.

December 7: After the Utah Monolith was found, everyone was making comments about 2001: A Space Odyssey. But as more have popped up, I’m starting to think about The Chronoliths. It’s a novel by Robert Charles Wilson in which obelisks appear out of nowhere, commemorating future military victories by someone no one has heard of – yet.

The monolith in Atascadero, California, was installed by a group of local artists who, on hearing about the one in Romania, figured, someone’s going to make a third one, so why not us?

It was meant to be something fun, a change of pace from the kind of conversations 2020 has been plagued with

After a group traveled five hours to tear it down on video, the town rallied around rebuilding the obelisk and putting it back up on the mountain.

December 27: I…what????? Gingerbread monolith appears — then collapses — on San Francisco hilltop

In true pop-up-art fashion, a nearly 7-foot-tall monolith made of gingerbread mysteriously appeared on a San Francisco hilltop on Christmas Day and collapsed the next day.

A tower made of gingerbread squares on a patch of dirt on a hill. Boulders and hikers visible in the background.

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Whatever you think of the electoral system, the fact that we have to wait for people to copy down those electoral votes is no longer helpful, and the fact that they can choose (or be pressured) to vote for someone else is a vulnerability in our democracy that should be patched.

You want to keep using electoral votes instead of the national popular vote? We can argue about that later. But we don’t need electors any more. Once each state certifies its election’s results, assigning its electoral votes should be automatic. It’s just math.