101 Obscure (and Useless) Facts

To most in our generation, Pixar represents an integral part of our childhoods (to those who disagree, I’m sorry your childhood was just objectively worse). Their storytelling and commitment to quality is relatively unmatched among most animation studios. A classic example of this quality assurance is the Toy Story series: one of the pinnacles of animated storytelling. Did you know, however, that the second Toy Story movie nearly didn’t make it to the big screen?

Back in 1998, Pixar’s chief technical supervisor, Oren Jacobs, was working on the Toy Story 2 animation files with one of his colleagues when something strange began to happen. In the directory, the file for Woody’s hat suddenly disappeared. Jacobs refreshed again. Now almost all of the Woody file was gone. Uh oh. Jacobs quickly realized what was happening: one of the animators had run the command /bin/rm -r -f. This command is meant to delete everything below a current directory to remove unwanted files; however, someone had accidentally run the command and the root level for the entire Toy Story 2 directory.

Jacobs quickly and frantically called down to the machine room which housed the main servers containing the files and told them to cut the power. Unfortunately, this was a very abnormal instruction for such a large server, and the operators hesitated. By the time the plug was pulled, 90% of the movie had been deleted, and many hundreds of hours had been lost. So, they tried to pull up the back ups; however, it was not standard practice to check back ups in Pixar at the time. As soon as they tried, they discovered a critical flaw: the file size was too large. Material had been overwritten and the entire structure was messed up. It seemed hopeless, until….

Enter Galyn Susman, the supervising technical director for Toy Story 2. Susman had recently had a baby, and so she had been working with her fellow animators on the movie from home. Because of this, Susman had her own backups of the animation files on her home computer. As soon as the technical team discovered this, Susman and Jacobs hopped in her Volvo and drove to her house to retrieve the computer. They wrapped it in blankets, seat-belted it in the backseat, and drove the entire way to the studio well below the speed limit with their flashers on. After all, the files on that hard drive were a part of a movie that would gross 250 million dollars… The movie was saved!

 

After that whole debacle, you may think the animators would treasure each and every file and never delete them again, right? Well, about 9 months before the movie was set to release, legendary Pixar story writer, Joe Ranft, joined the project and the executive team collectively decided the current movie was not up to snuff. The project was scrapped and built from the ground up in only 9 months, an utterly insane feat for the Pixar animators. With that, Pixar would truly illustrate its dedication to the quality of its movies.

Let’s face it: we humans aren’t too good at this whole pandemic thing. We can’t consistently wear masks, socially distance, or even isolate appropriately in the event of a fast spreading disease. For many scientists, it’s infuriating; how can you model something like COVID when humans behave so irrationally? Unless…

Enter World of Warcraft (WoW), a Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) game where players live and interact in real time. Back in 2005, developers released an update to the game which added a new region and a new high-level raid boss: Hakkar the Soulflayer. One mechanic in the new Hakkar fight to challenge players was a debuff called Corrupted Blood — Players infected with Corrupted Blood would lose health over time, and they would spread it to other players if they got too close. The developers intended for this debuff to remain isolated to Hakkar and his lair, but a small glitch allowed Corrupted Blood to be spread outside of the quest area.

 

Within hours of the update, players were returning from the Hakkar fight, unknowingly bringing with them a deadly disease. Corrupted Blood began to quickly propagate through the cities and hubs that players would converge at, leaving trails of destruction in its wake. High level players could ignore it, for it posed relatively low risk with their large health-pools; however, low level players infected with Corrupted Blood would stand little change, and they soon began to die in droves. Additionally, Non-Player Characters (NPCs) could contract Corrupted Blood and spread it to players. This essentially modeled asymptomatic carriers as the NPCs could not die from the disease.

As Corrupted Blood spread from city to city, a few patterns began to emerge among the WoW community. Players would intentionally travel to infected cities, mimicking the behavior of real life journalists. In the process, they contracted the disease, then proceeded to spread it once they left. Other players tried to act as first responders to the epidemic — They would go to affected areas and attempt to use healing spells to help others. Unfortunately, this soon began to backfire as these first responders would contract Corrupted Blood themselves then spread it if they left the area. High level players would ignore it as a minor annoyance, and in the process they would spread the disease to new areas instead of isolating themselves. Some players even tried to intentionally spread the disease (sounds like a University of Alabama COVID party…). The developers of WoW attempted to lockdown the major epicenters of the outbreak, but as soon as the lockdown was announced players quickly left these cities before it went into effect. 

A week later, the frantic developers reset the servers to eliminate Corrupted Blood once and for all. Despite the frustration caused to players, some good came from the event. Eric Lofgren, an epidemiologist at Tufts University, was one of the many players who played during the Corrupted Blood epidemic. Lofgren found the virtual epidemic, and players’ responses to it, fascinating, and he later wrote a paper on the event. Suffice to say, the unexpected behavior of humans in the game bears shocking similarity to the current pandemic. Perhaps we can learn more from how people behave online than we thought.

Picture this: an authoritarian leader with no respect for nature comes to power in a large country and, rather predictably, implements a horribly stupid environmental policy that has awful consequences on millions of people. No, I am not talking about the United States in 2016; I am talking about The People’s Republic of China.

Our story starts back in 1958. The new communist government, led by the notorious Mao Zedong, had taken control of the country less than 10 years prior, and they had big plans. Mao wanted to make China an industrial superpower similar to the United States and the USSR; however, China and its economy were still years behind these goliath world powers. In order to catch up, China would have to industrialize fast. So, Mao implemented his master plan: The Great Leap Forward. The GLF promised to industrialize China at lightning speed using China’s massive manpower. Normally, countries industrialize by gaining capital over time then investing that capital into heavy machinery, but for Mao, this process was far too slow. Mao had a vision of all of China coming together to show the world that China was ready to play with the big boys. Unfortunately, things didn’t exactly go as planned…

One key part of the GLF was a campaign called the Four Pests Campaign. The premise was simple: eliminate four pest creatures that were impeding China’s progress forward. These four evil creatures were as follows: mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. The first three were targeted largely because they contributed to the spread of disease, but why sparrows? Sparrows, in Mao’s opinion, ate too much grain. These nefarious little birds were reducing China’s grain output, slowing the progress of the GLF. So, in order to solve this problem, Mao called upon the people of China to wage war on these pesky birds. People would shoot sparrows, tear down nests, and even chase birds while banging pots and pans to prevent them from landing until they died of exhaustion. This brutal campaign is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of sparrows. 

 

Unfortunately for Mao, his hatred for sparrows quickly came back to haunt him. Another thing sparrows eat besides grain is insects. One of these insects happens to be locusts. As soon as the sparrow populations were decimated, the locust population exploded, and they were far more damaging than the birds. Grain production collapsed as locust swarms swept through the country, and soon people began to starve.

Sparrows were quickly removed from the list of the four pests and replaced with bed bugs. In the process, Mao had learned a very painful lesson about controlling nature. Officially, the government reported 15 million deaths as a result of the Great Famine; however, most estimates of the actual number are 45 million or more deaths. This event scarred families and caused horrible atrocities across China; thousands of people were murdered and eaten by the starving masses. Today, this horrible tragedy serves as a solemn reminder to humanity: nature does not exist to serve our needs.

The concept of a one trillion dollar coin first emerged in 2011 as a result of the U.S. debt ceiling crisis. To understand why this seemingly absurd idea arose, one must first understand the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is an arbitrary limit set by congress determining the amount of debt the government is allowed to take on.  Every time the U.S. has approached this limit, congress has passed a bipartisan bill raising the debt ceiling. If the U.S. were to pass this limit before congress raised the ceiling, there would be extreme consequences, and the government may be forced to default on its debts (for everyone taking econ, you know this is a VERY bad thing). 

Now that the background has been set, we can look at the infamous one trillion dollar coin. In 2013, the U.S. was quickly approaching the debt ceiling of 16.699 billion dollars. Normally, this would not be a big issue; congress would raise the debt ceiling and the government would be in the clear for a few more years. However, the bill to raise the ceiling was stuck in congress – Republicans were refusing to pass the bill as a political leverage tool to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The democrats, including then President Obama, refused to meet their demands, and instead they looked for other solutions to the debt crisis. One of these ideas was the one trillion dollar coin.

 

The basic idea goes something like this: due to a loophole in a bill back in 1996, the U.S. Treasury could mint platinum coins of ANY denomination. This was originally intended for the minting of commemorative coins, yet it also meant that the U.S. treasury could mint a platinum coin and declare it to be any amount of money, even one trillion dollars. Due to this loophole, some democrats proposed an idea for the treasury to mint a one trillion dollar coin, then deposit said coin into the federal treasury. This is similar to a fiscal mechanism the government uses called quantitative easing, and it would artificially lower the federal government’s debt. Now, before you comment about what a horrible idea this is, it was not meant to be permanent. The plan was a temporary solution to bypass congress, and, if the government did implement it, the treasury would buy back the coin as soon as the debt ceiling was raised.

Eventually the debt ceiling was raised and the one trillion dollar coin plan was dropped. However, the trillion dollar coin idea emerged once again in March 2020, this time championed by democratic congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, as a possible solution to the financial crash resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Some have even taken to twitter to express their support for this proposal under #MintTheCoin. At the time of this post, no one trillion dollar coin has been minted.