DIY: Digital trash

Lamprecht & Moderegger sign for digital dump, New Scientist

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Most of us have had to clean files off that overloaded hard drive eventually: at least this was true before the days of terabyte drives. But inventory in an MMORPG or a virtual world like Second Life is a different story. In-game inventory space disappears fast; in Second Life carrying around 14,000 items (at last count) can slow you down. And abandoned builds can be pretty unsightly.

There are archeologists that sift through digital trash to learn about the players, according to the New Scientist. It's a fascinating article, well worth the read. One observation that struck me is

Eventually, Lamprecht and Moderegger hit on the idea of getting the rubbish to decay... 

Suddenly the [digital] dump took on a new light. “It was hard to see things disappear; it was like living with daily loss,” says Lamprecht. Some objects were intricate, things people had put care into making. Many were no more than a few months old. “When is a digital object ready to die?” she asks. “It doesn’t look chipped, it doesn’t become spoiled, it doesn’t start to smell bad.”

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Dumpster Drive logo

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Taking the idea of digital trash dumps a step further, there's Dumpster Drive: Exchange Your Digital Trash with Strangers, which operates on the premise that one person's trash may be another person's treasure. Currently it's only available for Mac OSX 10.6+; you can learn more about the application and download it at the Dumpster Drive site. There are some thoughtful comments about it at PCWorld.

If you're really serious about cleaning up your machine, here are 5 tactics for dumping digital trash, proposed by a study at Johns Hopkins University. The study itself is in PDF format and can be found at the Cornell University Library e-print archive. As an aside, I'll bet Google and other portals like Flickr and Tumblr have a lot of digital trash to deal with.


-- Marge

Avatar seducers and beggars

Ashley Madison' Sensuous Kitten, Gizmodo

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A New World Notes post today was titled: With Ashley Madison's Babe Bots, Life (Once Again) Imitates Second Life. If you'll remember Second Life is that virtual world that seems to have faded into obscurity. It hasn't died yet, though. It still has residents, around 43 million of them, not all necessarily actively playing.

Keeper of New World Notes, Wagner James Au, in his article links to Annalee Newitz's How Ashley Madison Hid Its Fembot Con From Users and Investigators. She writes:

The developers at Ashley Madison created their first artificial woman sometime in early 2002. Her nickname was Sensuous Kitten, and she is listed as the tenth member of Ashley Madison in the company’s leaked user database. On her profile, she announces: “I’m having trouble with my computer ... send a message!”

Sensuous Kitten was the vanguard of a robot army. As I reported last week, Ashley Madison created tens of thousands of fembots to lure men into paying for credits on the “have an affair” site. When men signed up for a free account, they would immediately be shown profiles of what internal documents call “Angels,” or fake women whose details and photos had been batch-generated using specially designed software. To bring the fake women to life, the company’s developers also created software bots to animate these Angels, sending email and chat messages on their behalf.

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Second Life: Sign at a high traffic shop, New World Notes

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And speaking of avatars that act as decoys meant to suck your money, take a look at beggar bots in Second Life (aka flatterbots). Here's a sample:

James Au: I didn't reply [to Flatterbot1] or give her any money, she just ran through her script from start to finish, even after I'd left the area. Now compare the speech above with this snippet from the second flatterbot I dealt with that day:
Flatterbot2: don't you be pushin me!
Flatterbot2: I'm just kidding but we can be bumper car avatars!
Flatterbot2: holy crap you have an amazing avatar!
Flatterbot2: I am art retarded, I never make good avatars! Did you make yours?
Flatterbot2: I just got back to SL from a long break, omfg everything is so different
Flatterbot2: you look like you have been in SL for a long time, have you?
Flatterbot2: being back here after so long I don't remember anything about the sliders at all, I keep making a chubby round face lol

Apparently, while some scripts are automated, some are being run by a person at a keyboard. James reports on Flatterbot3:

This morning I popped over to a store with a heavy bot presence and while I received the same tired story from today's bot-du-jour, she was simultaneously arguing with a customer in local chat who had presumably called her out:
Flatterbot3: I can just tell by what you say that SL is all you have
Flatterbot3: that is reserved for fat people who are quite invested in a subreality
Flatterbot3: because they can't make stuff happen irl

This is a virtual world that simply mirrors "real life (rl)."

-- Marge

DIY: easy winter trips to warmer places

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After the chilly, snowy surprises of this winter, a desire to be someplace warmer is understandable. You can go to sunny, calming places with a few clicks of your mouse and relax. No airport security, no sardines-in-a-tin-can plane seating, and no serious dents to your wallet.

To remind you what you may be slipping away from here's a video by the Weather Channel's Brainstorm Team about wind chill.

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Places I'm suggesting that you visit are in the metaverse, namely Second Life and Landmark (the game).

Second Life is virtual world like no other. There you can build, script (hopefully your build and not to grief other players), form social bonds, dance, outfit and shape your avatar--the list is virtually endless. There's an emphasis on creativity. You can play for free, but membership has its perks. Getting started can be a steep learning curve, but that's true of many MMORPGs as well. Sign up at the Second Life website.

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Landmark is currently in closed beta, so if you want to get in you'll have to acquire a beta key. Walmart and GameStop may still be offering them--I'm not sure. You can also gain access through Steam (a Settler pack is $19.99). If you belong to a guild, it may be offering give-away keys; a friend who plays may have extras. Landmark interests me in several ways, but mostly I continue to want to see how the voxel-based world develops and what the developers come up with next. BTW, the developers interact directly with the players, a refreshing difference from many MMORPGs I've seen. The blog Procedural World discusses voxel development in detail.

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You can also find these last two videos in my YouTube channel playlists under the title De-stressing in virtual worlds.

-- Marge

Bake fail equivalent

A bake fail in Second Life may seem trivial but it could be where we're headed in real life -- a point where what we know as real no longer resolves into what we see as real and vice versa. 

The term being applied to this moment is technological singularity and it seems to be fast approaching:

The technological singularity, or simply the singularity, is a theoretical moment in time when artificial intelligence will have progressed to the point of a greater-than-human intelligence, radically changing civilization, and perhaps human nature. Since the capabilities of such an intelligence may be difficult for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is often seen as an occurrence (akin to a gravitational singularity) beyond which the future course of human history is unpredictable or even unfathomable.

Mathematician John von Neumann (1903-1957) may have said it best.  He was the first to postulate singularity, calling it accelerating change. Stanislaw Ulam reports:

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.

Ray Kurzweil -- author, inventor, futurist, a director of engineering at Google, and another supporter of the singularity theory -- wrote the book The Singularity Is Near, which is part fiction, part non-fiction.  In it he interviews 20 big thinkers like Marvin Minsky.

So far the references have been artificial intelligence and software, but hardware is also fast approaching a point of singularity, as exhibited by Moore's Law.

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Benzirpi, Microprocessor Transistor Counts & Moore's Law, Wikipedia

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Concerns about society being overwhelmed by rampant artificial intelligence (think SkyNet) are being addressed by such organizations as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI).

Personally, I wonder if our effectively living in virtual worlds, such as Second Life or your favorite MMORPG, is really preparing us for a completely virtual life.  Others are looking at the possibility, too.  Futurist Thomas Frey asks "Are We Destined to Merge With Our Avatars?"  And columnist James Wagner Au reports in New World Notes, "Scientists Testing to See if First Life is Really Second Life."  He, in turn is quoting an article in the Huffington Post:

The theory basically goes that any civilisation which could evolve to a 'post-human' stage would almost certainly learn to run simulations on the scale of a universe. And that given the size of reality - billions of worlds, around billions of suns - it is fairly likely that if this is possible, it has already happened.

Which in turn reminds me of the old, old theory, jokingly made, that our world is only a molecule in a frying pan.

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Mike, Technological Singularity, demotivationalposters.net

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-- Marge

DIY money laundering

Many of us don't need to launder money, mostly because we don't have that much money and and don't need to cover up its source.  However, it seems to me you might be interested in how easy it is and how it's done.

To do it yourself, sign up for an account with a virtual world that has its own virtual currency, such as Second Life, then download and install the Bitcoin client.  Then start converting real life dollars to Linden dollars, then Linden dollars to Bitcoins.  If you think this is silly, take a look at this article from New World Notes.  Here's a current Bitcoin chart tracking Second Life transactions. The Economist explains how Bitcoin works.

And you thought virtual worlds are silly.

This Alex comic strip (Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor) from The Telegraph (U.K.) might explain money laundering a little more (click on the image to see it larger).

 

Word on the street says the U.S. will be applying money-laundering laws to Bitcoin and other 'virtual currencies.  The Wall Street Journal concurs.

What's a shady entrepreneur to do?  You could ignore the new rules, since you're probably doing something illegal anyway.  Or you could be too-big-to-fail, like HSBC.  This cartoon by Adam Zyglis sums it up nicely:

This whole too-big-to-fail thing is just plain wrong.

-- Marge

Second Life therapy

It's my firm belief that frequenting virtual worlds has more benefits than simply entertainment.  In support of this is an article, Woman with Parkinson's Reports Significant Physical Recovery After Using Second Life - Academics Researching, published by Wagner James Au at New World Notes. A follow up article about the support site was published the next day.  Here's a screenshot:

Many research projects studying virtual worlds and articles discussing such worlds, especially Second Life, are available online.  For background, take a look at Newsmaker: A brief history of the virtual world, written by Daniel Terdiman and published by c/net in 2005. Duke University has a case study -- Reality in the Virtual World - A Study of Second Life -- available online.  The University of North Carolina at  Pembroke has a Center for the Study of Virtual Worlds (data copyrighted 2011).  MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has what looks like a virtual world portal, where it invites you to  "Step into another world and explore the 'other' MIT..."  How to get there is not clear.  Checking in Second Life, I found that a number of other universities have campuses there, but not MIT.

One university very active in Second Life's art scene is the U of Western Australia.  Here's a screenshot of the campus' enchanted forest.

Virtual worlds as interactive 3D virtual environments, especially ones that offer the opportunity to build, interest me most.  If you would like to see what building in a virtual world is like, try a visit to Bowling Green State University's sandbox and rez something there (menu items: build/select build tool/create tool, then place the object on the ground).  You'll need to download a viewer and join first -- both free.

Careful, you might get sucked in.

-- Marge

Sim-on-a-stick, part 1: the basic idea

This information in an October 22nd article by James Au at New World Notes caught my attention the other day:

Last week I wrote about how Sim-on-a-Stick, a portable, offline version of OpenSim, was used to generate $300K in services for real world clients working on a contract for product placement in several dozen movie theaters. In Comments, Renee "Ener Hax" Miller, who led development on that project, explained why Sim-on-a-Stick (or SoaS) was better for this purpose (simulating these cinema spaces) than an online Second Life (or for that matter, I suppose an online OpenSim), for this application...

This is an interesting use for a virtual world instance and could be applicable for many businesses where a sale is dependent on visualizing a 3D space, such as architecture, real estate, interior design, and home renovation.

For better understanding, in the next few posts I will be discussing -- and showing -- how virtual worlds work and the language used when describing them.  We will be visiting some of the worlds, namely OSGrid, Kitely and Second Life.

Later, then.

-- Marge

Out filming (sort of)

I'm preparing a video to illustrate virtual world sims, prims, and how objects are built. It's not done yet.

In the meantime, take a break.

Heart Gardens in Second Life

-- Marge

News from Second Life and some machinima

As a semi-retired citizen of Second Life (SL), the virtual world, I still watch the happenings there.  One of my main sources of news is the New World Notes (NWN) by Wagner James Au.

Second Life is an immersive experience and host to some of the finest, most eclectic artists I've seen.  Here are some photos of the build, Twomoons Island (no longer on the grid), where JAS store is located.  If you've never been to Second Life, you'll need to sign up (it's free), and download/install a viewer, to see this location in person.

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Machinima is very popular with Linden Lab, the creator and overlord of Second Life.  By definition machinima is produced by fans, and this is the case with SL as well.  And some of the works produced are indeed outstanding.

This first video was produced by Douglas Gayeton, whose site is called RumpleFarm; he's an accomplished multimedia director.  To see the back story, check out this article in NWN.

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This second video was submitted as an entry by Nitwacket for a competition titled "Seek Wisdom," sponsored by the University of Western Australia (UWA).  To me, the video oddly exhilarating:

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-- Marge

3D printing: you can print with chocolate, too

When my friend James OReilly in Second Life asked me to join a group called "Immersive Worlds & 3D Printing" I asked "so what's this about 3D printing...and why should I care?" As usual he immediately threw 3 URLs at me in rapid succession:

What is 3D Printing? http://ow.ly/aZuSk

Immersive Worlds & 3D Printing
   In Facebook http://ow.ly/aZuaK
   In Scoop.it http://ow.ly/bakid

Solid Learning http://ow.ly/aZudy

DIY 3D Printer & Crowd Funding
http://ow.ly/aZuiI

 O.K., maybe it was more than three.  Wikipedia has a good article on it too. You can even build your own printer or buy a kit for one.

With a 3D printer, the proper materials and a 3D drawing, you can print objects like these at Shapeways.  This site also has lots of information and offers the materials you need for forming objects.  

Services to do the printing for you are available as well.  Stratasys Learn category has good information.

If you want to do the whole thing yourself, you'll have to buy (pricey) and learn (steep learning curve) a 3D application, sometimes called CAD/CAM (computer-aided design, computer-aided modelling).  At Shapeway's site you can find a list of supported applications. 

Kinda brings to mind StarTrek's replicator.  "Earl Grey tea, hot."

-- Marge