News You Can Bruise

On December 27th I started the third capture for the Minecraft Archive Project. Previous captures ran in February 2015 and March 2014. This time I collected about 420 gigabytes of material.

Here's the breakdown by what I believe the new files to be:

Type	Number of files	Collective size
Maps	33112	320 GB
Maps (MCPE)	1552	2 GB
Resource packs	2137	30 GB
Resource packs (MCPE)	176	172 MB
Mods	6082	10 GB
Mods (MCPE)	1839	1 GB
Screenshots	335651	57 GB
Skins	31064	132 MB
Server records	25923	361 MB
Blog posts	6562	129 MB

This time I think I was able to archive about 60-65% of the maps I saw, compared to 73% in the last capture. Even so, we ended up with 33k new maps in this capture versus 22k in the last one--and I didn't even get the adf.ly maps this time! (Nor will I--it's a huge pain and I'm sick of it.) 2012 was the single biggest year for custom Minecraft maps, and there was a downward trend visible in 2013 and 2014, but it looks like 2015 was really huge.

Couple new features in this capture: I started keeping track of blog posts and server records from Planet Minecraft. Server records are especially important because they usually feature screenshots, and in twenty years those screenshots will be the only record of what those servers looked like.

I've completely given up on the idea of archiving public servers--it's still theoretically possible but it's a full-time job for two developers, so I'd need to get a grant or some volunteer interest from the modding comunity. In fact, a few months ago the multiuser server I played Minecraft on went down, and I don't know whether my stuff is still around. That's life! Gonna archive the screenshots.

The full dataset is now about 2.4 terabytes. I bought a new drive to store the archive and set it up with XFS, and it does seem to improve the performance when iterating over the file set.

As always I'm putting a copy of the data on a server at NYPL Labs, and I recently gave Jason Scott a drive that contained the first two captures, so he can do whatever Jason thing he wants with the data. I don't have any plans to make this archive public, or even to re-run the Minecraft Geologic Survey on the new data. My maximum supportable commitment is spending some time once a year to shepherd these scripts through saving a representative sample of this artform.

I'm going to leave everything else to the future when the archive becomes valuable to other people. I am doing exploratory work for adding a third site to the archive, but that's all I'll say about that for now.

One problem with maps throughout history is the way they depict subway stations. The oldest known maps don't show subway stations at all. In the 20th century things got a little better, and now subway stations show up even on fancy zoomable online maps. But the zoomable maps still have a map/territory problem that doesn't need to exist anymore.

Here's Union Square, one of my favorite places in New York, home to the subway station I like so much I have a mug of it. (That's on Google Maps. I tried to show on other popular map services, but Yahoo's map system seems to not be addressable, and Everyblock's and Microsoft's maps of NYC don't show subway stations at all. Anyway.) Most maps (including the NYC subway map) show one subway station there on 14th street. Google Maps shows two subway stations there on 14th street (which there kind of are, but it doesn't mention that they're connected). All maps show the subway stop(s) as a point on the map.

But in the real world we don't go to a point and that point's the subway station. This works for bus stops (which are legion on Google Maps), but subway stations typically have multiple entrance stairways, and sometimes also elevators. There are six different entrances to the Union Square station in a three-block radius, for a total of (I think) eight stairways and an elevator. Each of those comes out at a different place on the street. It takes experience to know where all the entrances to a subway station are, and a better map would save people time. In today's world of zoomable maps and infinite detail there's no reason not to signal where all the entrances are and even have a cutaway that shows in outline how the station looks under the ground, a la Dwarf Fortress.

Adam Parrish drew a cool map.

It looks like the Libre Map Project is paying off! I'm always happy at reductions in the gap between "public domain" and "available online".

In 1996 I cut up a road atlas and pasted it into an AAA map of southern California. Because the scales were different, a major highway in one part of the country would feed into a street on the LA detail of the road map. This was my Dada Road Map.

I got this map laminated, but I always thought my craftsmanship on it was rather shoddy, so I never hung it up. Recently I foisted it on Jake Berendes, who pretended to appreciate it.

But once I got it out of my head, a similar idea took its place. Google Maps has pregenerated static image tiles for maps at different scales, and it wouldn't be hard to write a program that tiled them together like Google Maps does, except not helpfully.

So I present Dada Maps, which uses tiles from all over the world to create a new evocative map every 5 minutes. It's what I wanted my earlier project to look like, and it's not subject to scarcity. Enjoy!

Speaking of Google Maps add-ons, here's one that shows the sea level rising. Still looking for what I'd really like: something that can also show what happens when the sea level falls due to ice age.

robotfindskitten now exists as a Google Maps add-on.

ASCII : Unicode :: General MIDI :: ?

Apparently nothing, but I did learn about the game MIDI Maze while trying to answer that question. Man, that's awesome: using MIDI as a networking technology. The equivalent today would be USB Maze or something.

Really great APOD today, and of course moon maps. Turns out the moon is not nearly as interesting as the Earth. Should be fun fodder for Paolo's Games on Google Maps list. You know, Google Maps has totally rehabilitated Javascript. People (inc. me if I weren't busy) are falling all over themselves to write stuff in this primitive and previously shunned programming language.

The LazyWeb strikes back: I was planning to post links to satellite maps of all the UNESCO World Heritage Sites, but someone else beat me to it. Way to go, person who's not me!

I was Google sightseeing (they just put up the first decent-resolution satellite photos of the whole world that I've ever seen) and I noticed something weird in Libya. It looks like the Black Pit of Doom. Now that I've seen it I can find the same feature on other, much larger-scale satellite maps. I'm almost positive it's a real geographical feature and not a picture of a solar eclipse or something, but I can't find any information about it on the web. I tried the geographical name search engine for that latitude and longitude, and nothing it found seemed to match. What is that thing? It's creeping me out.

All sorts of ecology maps over at Mapping the Biosphere. Where else can you find the global map of soil pH? Actually, if you can find that somewhere else let me know, as that somewhere else probably has other interesting maps.