Sim-on-a-stick, part 2: some virtual world basics

Highlighted today is a video, the first in a series of visits to virtual worlds.

The region being visited Terra Virtua in Kitely.  Kitely describes itself as "Virtual Worlds on Demand" and states "Each account includes one FREE virtual world." If you sign up at Kitely, you can either use their plugin (the Imprudence viewer) to access your world or launch the viewer of your choice independently of the website.  Kitely is based on OpenSim and they state in the FAQ that they

use a combination of standard OpenSim running in a ROBUST configuration, with our own proprietary OpenSim modules and web services.

Because the worlds are generated on demand, the user must wait for the world to be up and running.  This includes teleporting, which can cause awkward pauses, especially if your destination has particularly complex builds or many objects.

In "Virtual World Tours: Kitely" below, I'm offering basic terms used in virtual worlds and attempting to show what they mean.  There are sections showing building, primitive shapes  and terraforming.  I particularly wanted to show how avatars interact with the 3D environment.  Note that avatar Jamie walks into a structure and moves around in it.  If there were scripts in place, she could sit on the furniture and interact more fully with things.  This video is also available on YouTube in a larger format.

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Whew! Three working copies and a total restart later, the video is done.


-- 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

I can do bad all by myself...

...is a movie written, produced, directed and acted in by Tyler Perry.  You may know him better as Madea, the pistol-packin' mama.  To me Perry is a perfect example of artist.  He took a difficult early life and transformed it into works that speak humanely (and with great humor) about this stew we live in.

From the article about him in Wikipedia --

Around 1990, he moved to Atlanta, where two years later I Know I've Been Changed was first performed at a community theater, financed by the $12,000 life savings of the 22-year-old Perry.[10] It included Christian themes of forgiveness, dignity and self-worth, while addressing issues such as child abuse and dysfunctional families. The musical initially received a "less than stellar" reception and was a financial failure. Perry persisted, and over the next six years he rewrote the musical repeatedly, though lackluster reviews continued. In 1998, at age 28, he succeeded in retooling of the play in Atlanta first at the House of Blues, then at the Fox Theatre. Perry continued to create new stage productions, touring with them on the so-called "chitlin' circuit" (now also known as the "urban theater circuit") and developing a large, devoted following among African-American audiences. In 2005, Forbes reported that he had sold "more than $100 million in tickets, $30 million in videos of his shows and an estimated $20 million in merchandise" and that "the 300 live shows he produces each year are attended by an average of 35,000 people a week"

His website is nicely interactive and beautifully designed and there he invites visitors to interact with him.

Below are videos from some of his works (he's definitely prolific).

A trailer for "I Can Do Bad All By Myself:"

A second trailer, this one for "Madea's Witness Protection:"

A video from his scapbook of funny moments:

And a song by Gladys Knight from "I Can Do Bad...:"

Simply beautiful.

-- Marge

Electric Sheep

Back to evolving software and artificial life, this time it's electric sheep.  According to Wikipedia,

Electric Sheep is a distributed computing project for animating and evolving fractal flames, which are in turn distributed to the networked computers, which display them as a screensaver.

Note that electric sheep is a distributed computing project.  Other distributed projects include SETI@home, which searches for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence; Bitcoin, the most widely used alternative currency; and ClimatePrediction, a project to investigate and reduce uncertainties in climate modelling. In other words your computer becomes a member of a network for the purpose of extending the project's computational ability and/or information processing.

According to an article by Ryan Naraine in eWeek, Grid Computing Can Allow Security Threats, (2005).  (Sorry, it's a fairly old article, but the only one I could find that isn't a scientific paper and locked up tighter than ...)

Wait a minute.  The terminology has evolved: what we're looking at is cloud computing. And "cloud security"

is an evolving sub-domain of computer security, network security, and, more broadly, information security. --Wikipedia

Back to electric sheep.  There are many samples of what the screensavers look like at the electric sheep site and information about how to take part in the project.  Terms for using the application's output are on the remix and reuse page.  Here's a video showing electric sheep on an Ubuntu desktop, published at PinoyGeekdotOrg:

A note to the wise: don't install this application at work without checking with your network admin first.

-- Marge

Artificial life in virtual worlds

Interesting news from the Second Life front:  In an article titled "Student Creates Code Which Generates Second Life/OpenSim Avatars... Based on Simulated Genetics!" Wagner James Au reports on a project being developed by "the University of Western Sydney and the Federation of American Scientists." Here's the video that demonstrates the work:

Envirtech is the group doing this work and they call the project Artificial Life Lab. For background, see the Wikipedia article on artificial life (aka Alife); note that the article directs you to the talk page -- there are a number of "challenges" to the article.

Knowing that MIT has been working with artificial intelligence for a long time, on a hunch I looked to see what might be going on with respect to virtual worlds and found this page on Digital Humanities and this quote mid-page:

It used to be that we in English departments were fond of saying there was nothing outside of the text. Increasingly, though, texts take the form of worlds as much as words. Worlds are emerging as the consummate genre of the new century, whether it’s the virtual worlds of Second Life or World of Warcraft or the more specialized venues seen in high-end simulation and visualization environments. Virtual worlds will be to the new century what cinema was to the last one and the novel to the century before that.

As an aside, I also found the article "‘Artificial leaf’ moves closer to reality" at the MIT site.  It fits in with the artificial photosynthesis article of a few days ago.

I love it when things mesh together.


-- Marge

YAHOO! Friday

In 2012 YAHOO! News had a comics and editorial cartoons page that listed many favorites. It's gone now, but the cartoonists and their magic remain. Here's a small selection of four:

Frank and Ernest:

Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller:

Over the Hedge:

Strange Brew by John Deering:

And that's a wrap.

-- Marge

Aarghhh! printers

Any printer eventually turns out to be my nemesis.  Especially any one I own now.  I finally got the right drivers installed, the correct IP address, and the printer printing.

This is how I feel about it.

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But it's still not right, probably getting too old (in digital equipment years).  *sigh* -- Marge

What's happening in artificial photosynthesis

Enough of politics...how about a little science for today?

With the promise of gas prices rising again and a depletable supply of oil, the time to start developing alternate sources of energy is long past. One promising field is artificial photosynthesis.  The sun pumps out an amazing amount of energy, but solar panels can only capture about 30% of it, although they're getting better all the time.

While the main purpose of natural photosynthesis is to nourish the plant (and, in the larger scale of nature, cleanses the air), the purposes of artificial photosynthesis are different, more specific to whether the output is carbon or oxygen. These purposes include splitting water to produce hydrogen for fuel cells and carbon fixation for biofuels.

The article "How Artificial Photosynthesis Works" from How Stuff works by Julia Layton explains the process. There is now a Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP), established in 2010 as a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Innovation Hub. An article, dated April of 2012, at Science Daily reports "Artificial Photosynthesis Breakthrough: Fast Molecular Catalyzer."

Details of the photosynthesic process are amazingly complex, so I opted for a much-simplified diagram from Estrella Mountain Community College's page on photosynthesis.

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I've long thought that artificial photosynthesis would lend itself to developing a battery.  Apparently so do two chemists at the University of Texas -- Christopher Bielawski and Jonathan Sessler. Their work is detailed in the article, dated September 2010, "Electron Switch Between Molecules Points Way to New High-Powered Organic Batteries."

Note: this post was updated in May, 2016. And there's a lot more information on this topic out there.

-- Marge

Citizens United is not the same as citizens united

In my email this morning there was a call to action from Change.org to sign the following petition to the US Supreme Court and Federal Elections Commission:

Disqualify Mitt Romney from running for President and file felony charges.

Research shows that it's a super PAC that's funneling the money to Romney's campaign.  In fact, super PACs came into being following the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission which

held that the First Amendment prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by corporations and unions.

However, Romney's campaign may have overstepped the line when accepting a donation from a foreign-owned corporation as reported in the article by Michael Beckel at the Center for Public Integrity, "Huge Donation To Romney SuperPAC From Foreign Firm Raises 'Red Flags'."  For more on super PACs and their effects, take a look at this article by Mike Lux of Democracy Partners, "The Hidden Effects of Citizens United and Super PACs." (Note that Mike is CEO of "Progressive Strategies, L.L.C., a political consulting firm founded in 1999, focused on strategic political consulting for non-profits, labor unions, PACs and progressive donors.")

This is what PACs and superPACs mean to most of us (from Dave Granlund):

At the Center for Public Integrity site, you can check the sources of funding to super PACs. At OpenSecrets is a list of super PACs, both conservative and liberal, and data on recipients, donors, expenditures, and more.

More sunshine is always good.

-- Marge

Defending democracy

When America was just getting started and settlers were moving into the new territories it was necessary to fight (yes, bear arms) to defend home and family.  It's time to do that again, this time to defend democracy.  To do this we must arm ourselves to vote and vote well. To do that we need good, impartial information. 

Instead of just calling Washington a black hole and broken, let's start watching what's going on there and maybe say something when things are going awry.  Roll Call, is a newspaper published in Washington, D.C. that

reports news of legislative and political maneuverings on Capitol Hill, as well as political coverage of congressional elections across the country. (Wikipedia/Roll Call)

There are sites that welcome your input on political issues, such as Americans for Democratic Action.  And new sites that support defending democracy are starting up, such as Votizen (renamed Brigade),  Memeorandum, and Nationbuilder, as reported in an article by Josh Constantine in TechCrunch.

One alternative is to stand by and watch the candidates make fools of themselves, as shown in this cartoon by Dana Summers, editorial cartoonist for the Orlando Sentinel:

Considering all the political vitriol exchanged in the last few years, and other evidence of a fragmented society, my best solution is to begin rebuilding the real America.  Good luck trying to find any usable information (read not partisan) on the topic online.  The closest I could come was this article by Sabrina Stevens at AlterNet.  The concept of building a village isn't new, but becoming more and more important.

Guess it's time to get out of my chair, go offline (gasp!), and reinvest in the "real world."

-- Marge

Internet health

Seems to me it would be helpful to share some links and information about the internet and internet health, since many of us use it daily and some rely on it for their livelihood.  Unless you work for or connect to the internet via a Tier 1 network/company, you probably pay an ISP (Internet Service Provider) to connect.

There are sites you can check when your internet service slows down, such as Internet Health Report, a breakdown of mobile and internet service by company (note that Level3 is a company as well);  Internet Traffic Report, a well-established and world-wide monitoring service.

Many ISP's offer web pages that perform a speed test; note that these tests only work for connections between you and your provider.  Some ISP's offer a page that reports the status of their network. Another thing that affects your experience of the internet is how fast pages load.  This is mostly a function of your browser. Clearing the cache and recent history will often fix slowdowns.

Graphics that show internet backbone congestion are also available, but limited.  The Akamai Technologies site offers a suite of visualization tools online.  Akamai accounts for 15-30 percent of the global web traffic.  For truly inclusive real time internet usage in a visual format, you may have to develop a viewer.  CAIDA (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis) is a good resource for information.  The problem appears to be that each company owns its part of the internet and doesn't want to share.

Companies own the undersea cables that connect distant areas as well.  For an idea of how countries/areas are connected, take a look at this map by Nicolas Rapp.

Hmmm, if so much of the internet is owned by private companies, maybe we do need to assure that the internet is kept free. BTW, wikipedia's annual campaign for donations is on; give 'em five.

-- Marge

Friday walkabout

Not having a particular theme in mind for today's post, I just wandered around the web picking up what caught my attention.  Yesterday's theme of tactical frivolity is still in mind, but don't have a plan -- yet.

At Fuffermutter there's cartoonist Mitra Farmand. The cartoon below is one of hers.

Clay Bennett was found hanging out on the web. His site is nicely organized; here's one of his cartoons:

Remembering Kevin Kallaugher's (KAL) site, I took a look at his portfolio and found this

Brian Crane draws Pickles for the Washington Post. Here he is hard at work.

I like Brian's style of work, think I'll give it a try.


-- Marge

Tactical frivolity

Tired of all the seriousness I've posted lately, I decided to post some frivolity.  First stop was a Google search on frivolity where I found a Wikipedia entry on "tactical frivolity." Sounded interesting.  It is.

One of the references is an article in the Guardian, titled "Carnivalistas slink in with a pink revolution" and written in 2000.  Here's how the article begins --

The idea was sound. Fill up a lorry with 13 women dressed as pink fairies and drive it to Prague for the World Bank meetings to lend glamour to the demonstrations and defuse the confrontations between riot police, anarchists, unions and environmentalists with "tactical frivolity" - carnival, art, song and dance.

The article goes on to detail a comedy of errors surrounding execution of the plan.

Looking for an image to illustrate tactical frivolity, I came across a blog called the South Florida Lawyers with the byline "a law blog done with jealousy, love, snark, humor and civility."  It had this picture --

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The South Florida Lawyers' blog also had this video of Alan Alda in a clip from "Crimes and Misdemeanors," uploaded by TheDukeofMadness.

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Two things -- lawyers can be very funny and I may be "cursed" with seriousness.

Oh, and "If it bends, it's funny. If it breaks, it's not funny!"

-- Marge

The WELL: story of an online community reborn

"WELL Community Members Create For-Profit Corporation in Bid to Buy The WELL," an article by Wagner James Au, talks about user/members of the Well, who bought their community in order to keep it alive. In an essay Wagner wrote for Internet Evolution -- What Went Wrong With the WELL & Why It Matters -- he explains:

Once called "the world's most influential online community" on the cover of Wired magazine, at its peak the WELL counted users like the sci-fi authors Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow; visionaries like the musician Brian Eno and the virtual community expert Howard Rheingold; EFF founders John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, and Mitch Kapor; and even rock stars like Billy Idol and David Crosby. The quality of its users' posts -- smart, funny, creative, and provocative on every imaginable subject -- inspired countless Internet entrepreneurs and thinkers.

The previous owner of the WELL, Salon Media Group, publishes the site Salon. To know more about Salon check this Wikipedia entry.

The WELL's site is somewhat barebones. You must join and pay for a membership to view conversations, as well as participate. According to the Conferences page "Conferences are the heart of The WELL:"

Conferences are where we gather - the heart of The WELL. A vibrant community emerges from thousands of conversations in hundreds of ongoing forums traditionally known as conferences.

Each gathering place has a distinct flavor. A few are open to the world. Most are open to all members. Some limit access to a private group. Others are not listed here by request of their founders. Participants check in frequently at one, five or more conferences, to offer expertise, dissect one another's best ideas and indulge in gossip, mutual aid and general banter.

There are two conferences open to non-members -- Inkwell.vue and Deadsongs.vue -- that you can participate in by emailing the conference hosts.  Click on the "How to participate" link at each for details.

Looks like these conferences might actually be fun.

-- Marge

Art of World of Warcraft

After starting, then abandoning, a post about all the products Google now offers that began to look like an advertisement for them; and then trying to figure out why my machine gets lost in the ozone when I leave it for 5-10 minutes (I think it's one of Microsoft's September updates), I've decided to find something more fun to post about today.

About two months ago I started playing World of Warcraft (be very, very careful -- it is indeed addictive).  Besides its intriguing quests and multitude of environments, it has some of the most beautiful artwork I've seen.  Take a look at this trailer for the new expansion pack, Mists of Pandaria:

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In WoW, as in many MMORGs (Massive Multi-player Online Roleplay Games), there are races, mobs (aka creatures), and non-player characters (NPCs) that advance the storyline.  The members of each race have a dance that can be initiated by the player.  The following video, uploaded by ShadowRoxas87, shows the origins of these dances. I'm guessing that this is the uploader's version of history, but it's amusing just the same.

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Here's another one of the dances from Patricia Rosa that was filmed in game:

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And here's a video I found that is just too funny.  It was uploaded by thesolekeep, and is an ad for Mountain Dew.

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OK, OK, back to work.

-- Marge

Climate and extreme weather and flight delays

This is the third day of high winds in Anchorage and I don't remember when we had winds that lasted this long.  And we're in for more, according to the Fairbanks Daily News - Miner, "A third windstorm takes aim for southcentral, Interior Alaska."  Thoughts turn to climate changes.

According to Wikipedia climate

...encompasses the statistics of temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, precipitation, atmospheric particle count and other meteorological elemental measurements in a given region over long periods. Climate can be contrasted to weather, which is the present condition of these elements and their variations over shorter periods.
A region's climate is generated by the climate system, which has five components: atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, land surface, and biosphere.

Whew!  What a lot of science. What a lot of words.

Today I'm offering links to sites that track Earth's climate changes and offer ways for you to participate; some links for getting extreme weather alerts on your cell phone (if you haven't gotten an app for such already); and a site that gives information on flight delays/cancellations.  A word to the wise -- step lightly around the predictions, no one knows the future.

U.K.'s The Guardian has a Climate Change page that offers up-to-date news from around the world.  A webfeed via rss is available.  For measures proposed and being made to find ways that work to help the environment, take a look at Environmental Defense Fund's site. ScienceDaily offers Earth & Climate news, articles, videos, images, books and more.

If you're in the U.S. and want to speak up on the topic of clean energy, sign up at One Million Calls for Clean Energy.

This article was updated in May (2012) -- "Extreme-weather text alerts set to begin" -- by USA Today.  AccuWeather offers weather apps for most of the major operating systems/devices; they also have severe weather and climate change (also has breaking news about conditions) web pages.  Explore the site to find info on world conditions.

If you're planning to fly somewhere, FlightStats is a handy site.  They have mobile apps, too.

As for me, I'm staying home -- it just might be safer there.

-- Marge

A laugh on casual Friday

Casual Friday is here for many of you, so how about a little humor with your day.

Cartoonist Doug Savage does chickens -- on sticky notes.

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Randy Glasbergen really understands the concept of casual.

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And what would Friday at the office be without Scott Adams' Dilbert?

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-- Marge

Whether to protest or not to protest

This morning I received a request to sign a petition protesting HR347, passed in March 2012.  This is some of the text in the email:

Imagine an America in which the government can prevent protest in any public space it deems fit. Where wearing a dissenting shirt around an elected official could be construed as a felony. Where First-Amendment protections become privileges subjectively doled out by the state. Sadly, that America is pretty much here.
In March, Congress passed HR 347, a bill that limits Americans' ability to protest in public and on government grounds. Mainstream media didn't raise peep, but now there's finally some anger building. The bill, passed almost unanimously, makes it a federal offense punishable by up to ten years in prison to "knowingly" protest in the vicinity of the Secret Service -- that is anywhere the Secret Service "is or will be temporarily visiting."

Considering some of the crazy decisions government has been making in the last few years, I jumped on the band wagon -- signed and posted the following to my Facebook page [note: format altered]:

10 years in prison for peaceful protest, thanks to the "Anti-Protest Bill" HR 347 -- Let's change it
act.watchdog.net
You walk into a campaign event holding a dissenting sign. Or you wear a shirt critical of a senator in the airport she's passing through. Or you organize a peaceful protest at a government building. All of these could be deemed felonies by Congress's new "Anti-Protest Bill." Act now to amend it!
Then I started wondering -- if it was passed in March and no one said much, what's it really about then?

If anyone would speak up about it, it would be the ACLU.  Their one article, titled "How Big a Deal is H.R. 347, That “Criminalizing Protest” Bill?" by Gabe Rottman states

Recent days have seen significant concern about an unassuming bill with an unassuming name: the "Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011." The bill, H.R. 347, has been variously described as making the First Amendment illegal or criminalizing the Occupy protests.
The truth is more mundane, but the issues raised are still of major significance for the First Amendment.
It's important to note — contrary to some reports — that H.R. 347 doesn't create any new crimes, or directly apply to the Occupy protests. The bill slightly rewrites a short trespass law, originally passed in 1971 and amended a couple of times since, that covers areas subject to heightened Secret Service security measures.

Here's a copy of bill H.R. 347 (PDF format).

While looking around for info, I did find an interesting and relatively new site called the Inquisitr; this is from the about page:

The Inquisitr offers a constantly updated mix of the latest stories to hit the web, covering a diverse spectrum of topic areas including technology, news, sport, entertainment and offbeat stories.
Founded in May 2008...

The quote below is from an article, "President Obama Signs 'Anti-Protest' Bill H.R. 347"

Occupy DC protesters are calling the modifications an infringement on their First Amendment rights, because of the areas of D.C. that have been added to the protected areas portion of the act. Approximately 80 protesters organized a silent march to symbolize their Freedom of Speech being taken away–some even taped their mouths closed to visually show their feelings about the bill. The part of the Bill of Rights they are referring to is the following:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Here's a toon commemorating an Occupy Wall Street event from John Cole at the Times-Tribune:

I took the notice off my Facebook page. Now I'm wondering if the bill has set a precedent.


-- Marge

Online art magazines revisited

A while back I came across a reference to Juxtapoz magazine which describes itself as the "Online version of the leading monthly contemporary and underground art bible..."  Being of the curious sort, I surfed on over and took a look.  It has an interesting array of topics available -- Videos, Illustration, Erotica, Street Art, Tattoo, Graffiti, and Music -- to name some.  I'd show you some samples of what I found but the popup ads for vodka were too insistent to read any of the content.  Apparently the original Juxtapoz, which was started by a group of artists, has been "acquired" by Complex Media, an extensive network of vodka-dominated sites geared for 20-something males. Moving on....

There are many magazines related to art online.  For a list to use for exploring, try this link.  The ones that looked most useful to me are the following.

The Art Newspaper where you will find information on recent shows. One piece shown this year at the Sydney Biennale was an interactive one, described thus:

Philip Beesley’s “Sibyl”, 2012, is a magical multi-media installation which responds to visitors’ touch with flapping feathers, lighting bulbs, and inflating balloons. Inspired by the Greek concept of “hylozoism”, the belief that all matter has life, the work consists of a system of interconnected mechanisms recalling a human neural system

Artist Beesley explains his concept of hylozoism and it is demonstrated in the video below.  It seems to me most interesting that he is using his art as a precursor to architectural innovation.

Absolute Arts appears to be mostly a site for selling artwork, but there are some features useful to artists, as well.  (Face it: galleries are a necessary evil for the artist who would like to eat and have a warm place to live.  They take a large percentage of the sale price.)  Artist portfolios are hosted and the art patron/collector can find news on latest art trends.  Here's a piece by Cheryl Hrudka titled "5276 Self Portrait" (2012).

Art News presents all kinds of information about art; the main categories are new, investigations, features, trends, profiles, market, looking at art, reviews, and books.  Here's the headline for one of the articles:

Charting a New Course

By William D. Cohan Posted 09/06/12

Under the leadership of its founder’s son, Vienna’s Leopold Museum is attempting to identify potential war loot in its collection 

 I'm closing with a quote that has been coming to mind a lot lately:

Research means going out into the unknown with the hope of finding something new to bring home. If you know in advance what you are going to do or even find there, then it is not research at all; then it is only a kind of honorable occupation. 

--Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

-- Marge