Bounced out of office
A month after Wimbledon, Feedback’s summer of sport travels to Central America and a claim that one ancient Mayan ball game required some extremely specialist equipment. As if the capital “I”-shaped court used to play this form of pelota weren’t fiendish enough, the ashes of dead rulers were used to make the game’s rubber balls.
At least, that is the suggestion made by Juan Yadeun Angulo, an archaeologist at Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. concludes that Angulo’s physical evidence, from a 1300-year-old crypt in Toniná, Mexico, beneath a pyramid called the Temple of the Sun, is still rather sketchy, but there are lots of suggestive carvings and writings to back up the idea.
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In the Popol Vuh – the Maya creation story – the underworld had a ball court in which the game was played with human heads. At the site of the ancient city of Yaxchilán, also in Mexico, meanwhile, there are sculptures showing captives inside rubber balls being chucked about. A figure, resembling Cliff Richard leading rained-off audiences in a singalong, has yet to be assessed.
Power play
Lest we assume the ancients were, in comparison with ourselves, a bit odd, Matteo Lupetti, writing for , comes bearing tales of a new video game. I Am Jesus Christ, invites us to “perform amazing miracles, interact with a cast of biblical figures and travel around the Holy Land from Jerusalem to the Galilee”. The game is still in development, and publisher SimulaM is, appropriately enough, fishing for beta testers.
The cell game
Feedback is already hooked, however, on something else: Excel spreadsheets. A tip from led us to the high-pressure, high-stakes world of the Financial Modeling World Cup (official slogan, “Excel Esports. Yes. It’s a Thing”). Highlights of a recent “all-star battle”, featured on CNN, included a yacht race game created entirely in Excel and a reverse-engineering task in which you had to guess the winner of a fictional game from its rules and a list of moves. In future tournaments, extra points may be awarded for working out whose ashes ended up in the ball.
Amazon corner
It seems that you can put whatever you like on a screen and someone will watch it. Entertainment news site reports that MGM Television (owned by Amazon) is developing a wacky, clips-based show hosted by comedian Wanda Sykes and fed by scenes captured by Ring home security cameras (produced by Amazon). With home-footage fame in the offing, perhaps Feedback should invest in a Roomba robo vacuum cleaner (produced by iRobot, which was bought, last Friday, by Amazon).
Hold on, though. Interviewed by , privacy advocate Evan Greer pointed out that people think of Amazon as an online retailer, “but really Amazon is a surveillance company”, and may therefore have an interest in devices that map and photograph your home.
On the plus side, Feedback (as entrepreneurial as any Amazon exec) can now realise as the mass spectator event it was always meant to be, even while crowdsourcing the hunt for that rubber ball.
Stay alert
Feedback wonders what footage could result from the Ford Motor Company’s new idea (US ). It outlines an app to alert pedestrians if an approaching autonomous vehicle isn’t going to stop. : “Somehow, asking pedestrians to constantly watch their smartphone to know when a car is headed for the crosswalk seems less than ideal.”
Good advice
Such is the zeal among some for self-driving cars, has published an impassioned open letter to one enthusiast and reader, headed “Don’t do that”, and one quickly sees why.
Enraged by what he considers an unfair TV campaign against Tesla’s self-driving software, the reader has put out a call for a child to demonstrate the excellence of his car’s Autopilot system. “Is there anyone in the Bay Area [of San Francisco] with a child who can run in front of my car on Full Self-Driving Beta to make a point?” he asked Twitter, adding: “I promise I won’t run them over.”
Er, you just said it is in beta…
Superhuman challenge
Our robot overlords’ grip on reality may be getting worse, not better, according to a Wired of the captcha test hellscape (or “human-computer interaction atrocity” as it has also been dubbed).
One Jared Bauman, for example, founder of a creative marketing agency in San Diego, California, was recently asked to prove his humanity to a web log-in page by saying which of nine pictures contained smiling dogs. “To be honest,” he says, “I had a bit of a moment.” Eileen Ridge, a tech adviser in Virginia, also admits: “Something about the dogs broke me a little.”
Look, you myopic metal minions, we are over here! We are the species that turns its rulers into tennis balls, makes home movies with vacuum cleaners and uses smartphones to cross a road. Do you see us now?
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