The Weekender: on starfish, mind games, and 'The Shining'

The Secret Life of Passwords

The New York Times
Ian Urbina examines the connections and emotional importance we invest in our passwords.

Yes, I understand why passwords are universally despised: the strains they put on our memory, the endless demand to update them, their sheer number. I hate them, too. But there is more to passwords than their annoyance. In our authorship of them, in the fact that we construct them so that we (and only we) will remember them, they take on secret lives. Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. They derive from anything: Scripture, horoscopes, nicknames, lyrics, book passages. Like a tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.

The Man Who Made Tetris

Motherboard
Jagger Gravning profiles Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of one of the most enduring games of all time.

Tetris was formally released in June 1984 by the Academy of Sciences, after initially spreading among academics and the computer literate by way of copied floppy disks. As a tile-fitting puzzler, Tetris captivated these members of intelligentsia. After all, here was a game constructed of pristine shapes taken straight from Platonic idealism.

The game was later discovered at the 1988 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by Bullet-Proof Software founder H​enk Rogers, who, to make a complicated story brief, ​spread the gospel of the ​tetrominos to a world ripe for fresh addiction. Bullet-Proof released the game in America in 1989. It's estimated the franchise has gone on to sell over 70 million physical copies, plus an estimated 100 million mobile downloads of the game worldwide.

Death Wears Bunny Slippers

Mother Jones
Josh Harkinson hangs out with the workers who, beyond any good sense, guard our missile arsenal.

Indeed, on my first night in town, over beer and bison burgers, Aaron had introduced me to "Brent," another recently former missileer who looks more like a surfer now that his military crew cut is all grown out. Brent lost faith in his leaders early on, he told me, when he saw the way they tolerated, if not encouraged, a culture of cheating. He'd resisted the impulse, he said, and his imperfect test scores disqualified him for promotions. But the worst part of the gig, the guys agreed, might be the stultifying tedium of being stuck in a tiny room all day and night waiting for an order you knew would never come. "Any TV marathon you can stumble upon is good," Brent said. "Even if it's something you hate. It's just that ability to zone out and lose time."

Mind Game

Wired
Chris Suellentrop delves into a new game by designer Marc ten Bosch, Miegakure, which tries to depict a fourth dimension in space.

If Miegakure can live up to ten Bosch's ambitions, it will be more than just another brainy diversion—it will be the realization of a century-long intellectual quest. Miegakure does not visualize 4-D space or analogize it to something more familiar. Rather, the game attempts to evoke the experience of an actual, explorable world that includes one additional spatial dimension.

“There certainly isn't a fourth dimension in the way there is in the game,” ten Bosch says. We can't rotate objects so that they appear out of nowhere in the real world or disappear in front of our eyes. But he wants the game to give people the intuition that a fourth spatial dimension might exist. The easiest way to wrap our minds around such a slippery concept, he thinks, is to reach out and touch it.