Backbytes: Microsoft Flight Simulator's 'out by 100x' error and Melbourne's mystery monolith

Melbourne is widely considered one of Australia's most liveable big cities. Plenty going on in terms of sport and culture, great bars and restaurants, relaxed lifestyle, decent climate, pleasant leafy suburbs unblighted by high rise developments.

Yeah? YEAH? Then what the Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo is that then?

Budding pilots strapped into Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2020 were surprised to spot a hugely tall and improbably thin monolith rising incongruously from Melbourne's northern suburb of Fawkner, from which no such edifice should rightly rise. Could this be a star gate, a portal sent to usher humankind to the next stage of its evolution, as in 2001 A Space Odyssey? Seems a little far-fetched.

Credit: Alexander Muscat, Twitter

Might it be an ambitious home extension project?

"This house is too small now we've got the kids, Bru, let's move somewhere bigger."

"Nah, I like it here - let's just build up, another couple of hundred storeys should do it."

Possibly. Or could it be a massive stack of tinnies after a week-long barbie at AC/DC drummer Phil Rudd's place at which fellow Melbournite Barry Humphries was a guest?

Sounds more likely. Sadly, the answer to the mystery of the majestic Melbourne monolith is more prosaic: a simple "off by a factor of 100 error".

Turns out that an OpenStreetMap editor by the name of Nathan Wright tagged a building in Fawkner, Melbourne as having 212 floors instead of two. Other editors were quick to spot and correct the error, but not before Microsoft had downloaded the dataset and incorporated into the latest version of its long-running simulation series.

Twitter sleuths later tracked down Mr Wright, who responded appropriately with "Lol" and requested the virtual scraper be named the "Melbourne Monolisk".

Fair dinkum we say.