Month: September 2016

In a rare reversal, archaeologists have determined that a Maya book written almost 900 years ago is genuine--after decades of believing it was fake. The Grolier Codex was so named because it was first displayed in 1971 at the book lovers' Grolier Club in New York City. Archaeologist Michael Coe, who arranged the 1971 showing, later described its rather questionable history in a book.

It was acquired in a spectacularly scammy way in 1966 by a Mexican collector named Josué Sáenz. Coe says that Sáenz told him that a group of unknown men offered to sell the book to him, along with a few other items found "in a dry cave" near the foothills of the Sierra de Chiapas. They would only sell it if Sáenz agreed never to tell anyone or show the book. The collector, intrigued, took a plane to a remote airstrip with two experts, who declared the codex fake. But Sáenz went with his gut and bought the codex. After allowing Coe to display it in New York, he gave it to the Mexican government.

There were a number of good reasons to believe the Grolier Codex was fake--beyond the sketchy way Sáenz procured it. Unlike three other Maya Codex finds, it had writing on only one side of each of its 10 pages. Plus, some of the pages appear to have been cut relatively recently. There are odd discrepancies in the book's calendar system, hinting that a forger might have been trying to imitate a calendar he saw in another Maya artifact. The drawings are also unusual for a Maya document, combining styles of the Mesoamerican Mixtec people with Toltec attire. The Toltec were often hailed by the Aztecs as ancestors, and their art shares many similarities with late Maya art. Though carbon dating placed the Codex's bark pages during the late Maya period, it was not unknown for looters to find blank pages in ancient Maya caches and cover them in fake hieroglyphs to make them more valuable.

Enlarge / The basic game setup: ship in the center and enemies approaching from six sectors, ring by ring. One shield is already down; two others have taken damage. One hull section has been destroyed. (credit: Nate Anderson)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

Star Trek fans: did you like the original series best when Kirk was off on some distant planet wrestling the Gorn or threatening to spank the female leader of an alien civilization(!)? Or the space standoffs where the Enterprise came under assault by Tholian, Romulan, and Klingon ships, where shields were raised and phasers were fired and Scotty began shouting about how the ship couldn't take much more o' it, cap'n?

If the latter, then consider the new Star Trek Panic board game, where you will fight... a lot.

Enlarge / The two-book set, full of interviews with cast, writers, and crew, will give you a glimpse of the good, the bad, and the ugly behind the scenes on Star Trek.

The Star Trek franchise created such a fully-realized world that many of us feel like we've actually traveled to the 23rd and 24th centuries. But building that world was a messy, weird process. If you want to know what the creators were really thinking when they wrote your favorite TV show or movie, there’s a new two-volume set of books that’s full of inside secrets. Some are inspirational, some are just depressing.

The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, edited by Mark Altman and Edward Gross, is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the oral history of the franchise, from its earliest gleamings in 1964 to Star Trek Beyond in 2016. The two volumes, clocking in at over 1,700 pages, are overstuffed and prone to clutter and repetition, but they also have some fascinatingly honest assessments of Trek’s history from the people who were there.

You’ll find out about the various failed attempts to bring the original series back in the 1970s, including the notorious movie called The God Thing. But probably the most fascinating part of the first volume is the account of the chaos behind the scenes of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which went into production with no finished script, as Gene Roddenberry kept trying to wrest control away from the film’s actual writer. (And Spock wasn’t in the film until very late in the process, because it was originally written as the pilot for a new, Spock-less, TV show.)

Enlarge / In Colossal, Anne Hathaway plays Gloria, a party girl whose drunken binges seem to have awakened a giant monster in Seoul.

The premise of indie director Nacho Vigalondo's new film Colossal is so weird that it might just work. It's about loser millennial Gloria (Anne Hathaway), a party girl whose drunken binges cause a giant monster to awaken and rampage through Seoul. The debris of her personal life seems somehow psychically linked to the kaiju destruction.

Though its star Hathaway is an Academy Award winner and celebrity, Colossal snuck into the world without much fanfare. It just debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, and early reviews suggest it's uneven but definitely worth watching. The plot combines your typical "aimless thirtysomething" plot with giant monster action.

When Gloria's boyfriend dumps her, she returns to her hometown, broke and depressed. But during yet another drunken night at a bar, her childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) comes back into her life. That's when she starts to realize that there's a mysterious connection between her drinking binges and the kaiju destroying Seoul. In a clip from the movie, we're introduced to our main characters, as they talk about how Gloria spilled her guts to Oscar when she was plastered the night before.

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

In a press conference held with little advance notice, Tesla announced on Sunday that it will make more use of the radar sensors fitted to its electric vehicles when it releases firmware version 8 some time in the next two weeks. This is somewhat of a volte-face for the EV maker—just over a year ago Elon Musk told Ars that he considered optical cameras "sufficient for the task."

Radar and its discontents

All Teslas built since October 2014 include radar sensors, which the carmaker says were only meant to be supplementary to the primary camera system. However, in recent months Tesla has fallen out with optical sensor supplier Mobileye, and this move answers our question as to whether the company would develop its own sensors. "After a lot of analysis and getting some upgraded drivers from the supplier [of the radar sensors] we now believe we can combine that with fleet learning and almost entirely eliminate false positives," he said.

The problem of false positives—and therefore cars emergency braking for no reason—was previously high enough that a Model S or Model X owner would have seen several unwanted braking events a year, Musk explained. With the revised system he believed that "most people shouldn't experience one within their ownership of the car."

Enlarge / No, sorry Jean-Luc. This is not another Trek anniversary post singing the TNG praises.

In two of the nerdiest newsrooms I'll ever enter—Wired (2011-2012) and Ars Technica (2012-present)—I always identified as a bit of an outcast. I never felt unworthy because I stuck with standard issue OSes or relied on a Nokia 2320 through 2014. Rather, my anxiety existed because I started at Wired as a pop culture reporting intern yet lacked expertise in one crucial genre: sci-fi.

When editors debated the tentpoles of 80s film, I chimed in for Indiana Jones and sat out for discourse on Alien or Close Encounters. As my fellow interns spent downtime catching up on William Gibson, I chose instead to follow the Merge Records release cycle. Sure, I've seen the original Star Wars and Matrix trilogies, but moving beyond the genre's massive standard bearers left me lost in space.

That is, unless the niche discussions hovered around the Enterprise. Specifically, the 2364 model year piloted by one Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

Enlarge

The Pixel C tablet has had a tough life. Under its code name of "Ryu," the Pixel C started life in the Chrome OS open source repository, seemingly indicating that at one point it was meant to run Chrome OS. Google was experimenting with a touchscreen interface for Chrome OS to the point that an on-screen keyboard (which is mostly useless on a laptop) shipped in the stable version. A finished version of an "all-touch" Chrome OS never materialized, though, and we ended up with a Pixel C running regular Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

The result was a "productivity" device that couldn't multitask. You could type like a champ with the Pixel C's keyboard, but the one-app-at-a-time nature of Android made things like referencing information while typing pretty much impossible. The Pixel C was all the more disappointing because we knew a split screen mode was coming—a "highly experimental" version of the feature debuted in Marshmallow's developer preview.

Split screen wasn't ready for the Pixel C's launch, though, which just fueled the feeling that the C was a half-baked device with software that wasn't ready for the hardware it was running on. There were other bad signs, too—the tablet had a whopping four microphones on top, which seemed to indicate it was built for some kind of killer voice recognition system, but it didn't even support always-on Google voice commands at launch.

Enlarge / Andrew Cunningham isn't the only one who's been dabbling in OS 9 within the last five years. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Back when Ars Senior Products Editor Andrew Cunningham was forced to work in Mac OS 9 by his colleagues in September 2014, he quickly hit a productivity wall. He couldn't log in to his Ars e-mail or do much of anything online, which meant—as someone who writes about new technology for an online-only publication—he couldn't do his work. All Cunningham could do was play old games and marvel at the difference 15 years makes in operating system design.

But as hard as it may be to believe on the eve of yet another OS X macOS update, there are some who still use Apple's long-abandoned system. OS 9 diehards may hold on due to one important task they just can't replicate on a newer computer, or perhaps they simply prefer it as a daily driver. It only takes a quick trip to the world of subreddits and Facebook groups to verify these users exist.

Certain that they can't all be maniacs, I went searching for these people. I trawled forums and asked around, and I even spent more time with my own classic Macs. And to my surprise, I found that most of the people who cling staunchly to Mac OS 9 (or earlier) as a key component of their daily—or at least regular—workflow actually have good reason for doing so.