In Second Life, everything is made from primitives - cubes, cylinders, prisms and so forth that you can place together to create pretty much anything. There’s a size limit of 10×10x10 metres that’s sometimes a real pain in the arse.

I’d heard of something called megaprims that allow you to make much larger blocks (for walls and the like) and, wondering how they worked, I found out why they’re banned.

Kuula buried under Megaprim - in which, on Jan 11, 2007, Kuula and nine other regions (about 50 hectares in total) were struck by disaster - a massive sheet of 5m thick virtual plywood plummeting from the sky. Those underneath were not crushed, but caught inside the prim, causing bizarre and erratic behaviour

It’s not quite the alien attacks of Sim City, but as far as virtual disasters go, pretty awesome

While waiting for pizza this evening, I read an article by David Allan Grier in IEEE Computer about the ways in which technology has changed entertainment, particularly the theatre, over the last 40 years or so.

In particular, he discusses how automated lighting, sound and so forth can afford a stage manager the opportunity to calibrate the response of the audience by controlling the timing of cues much more closely, much in the same way a live television producer does the same. What this has meant is that show production, in addition to be a massive organizational exercise, is now a performance unto itself.

Later, he goes on to talk about ways in which producers of other media gauge audience reaction and adapt accordingly - focus groups for TV and movies, golden ears for music, and now, with technology, learning systems based on customer profiling and crowd-sourcing, that can supplement socially driven recommendations such as friends or local record store owners - last.fm being a prominent example.

So inspired, here’s an interesting extension that occurred to me:

What if specialized AI, running locally, could be injected into traditionally mass-produced media like music, TV, or movies to act as a kind of virtual stage manager? It could observe you, the audience, a focus group of one, then tweak the timing, the content, the tone, and even the script of media to better suit your current mood, your tastes, to stimulate you in ways to which you are more sensitive, or even to better fit your available time.

I’ve been using the chat client Digsby for a while now, and it’s pretty awesome. It’s comparatively new (less than a year), but quite stable, feature complete, and adds a bunch of new features that simplify things substantially.

• Cleanly integrates with all the traditional instant messenging systems, adding gtalk, facebook chat, and twitter.
• Integrates mail and event notifications from almost any mail source, as well as facebook and myspace’s event feeds
• Free!
• Almost cross platform - the initial release is Windows only, but they’re releasing OS X and Linux versions soon
• Lets you neatly merge multiple accounts on different services belonging to the same person. Then, just tells you if they’re online on any service, and intelligently uses that one to communicate with them.

Given the proliferation of social networks and messaging networks, it’s quite nice to have one tool that bridges them. I don’t have to deal with the fact that not everyone uses the same tools - Digsby gives me a list of everyone, and when I want to talk with them, it just works.

I love tools that hide complexity without being simplistic.

A while back, there was a post on Coming Anarchy that referenced this fatwa concerning the question of whether a woman could, under Shariah, lawfully refuse her husband’s request for sex if she is tired from having performed her other Islamic duties (such as nightly prayers).

I’m not at all impressed by the conclusion reached - at best, it’s medieval sophistry, at worst, it’s little more than institutionalized rape. That’s not what motivated me to write this post, though.

For those not in the know, a fatwa is basically a ruling on Islamic religious law issued by an imam or other Islamic authority. Since they’re issued by a wide range of individuals and institutions distributed throughout the Ummah, they often disagree with one another, sometimes violently. Taken together, though, they’re an organic body of law quite different to what we have in the West - probably the closest parallel is English common law - Shariah, however, is much more diverse and, it seems, much less structured. As a method of making and applying law, its distributed nature is actually somewhat attractive; however, as it’s based on literal interpretations of a religious text, it is, by definition, fundamentalist, and thus thoroughly unattractive.

There’s a number of online repositories containing fatwas, some with comparatively liberal outlooks, others extremely conservative. I find them interesting because they offer a window into Islamic law and culture that I’ve not had before. While I’m sure there’s a selection bias based on which groups are willing to put their fatwas online and in English, they still contain a diversity of opinion, and really interesting to browse through.

Bias time - I’m a filthy materialist, looking with a perspective similar to someone visiting the zoo. Some fatwas repulse me, others vaguely disturb me, and still others make a certain amount of sense.

It’s really important not to judge Islamic culture in its entirity by these; many Islamic cultures do not rely solely on law derived from fundamentalist interpretations of a religious text. Even so, it’s hard not to be dumbfounded by the quaintness of it all. Take, for example, the particularly convoluted line of reasoning in the first link below, in which video recordings bypass restrictions on images by virtue of the fact that you can’t actually see little sports people when you look at the tape. It’s a good demonstration of how literally applying 1400 year old writings to modern situations leads to absurdity.

So, in the interests of learning, here’s a few that I’ve dug up:

• Fatwa Online - on the watching of sports competitions
• Fatwa Islam - on suicide as a tactic in war
• Islam Today - on the laws of war
• Islam Online - on homosexuality.
• Dar al-Ifta - an almost utilitarian ruling on abortion in the case of harmful deformity

The BMW GINA uses a rubbery fabric stretched across metal struts in place of metal skin. This makes the design seems eerily alive in places.

If you’re in the business of writing and delivering presentations and you think that there might be people out there interested in seeing them, I heartily recommend SlideShare.

It’s simple - make an account, fill out your profile, then upload presentations as PowerPoint files or PDFs. Then they’re viewable in your browser using their flash widget. You can restrict who has access to slides, or make them public. There’s even a full screen presentation mode; in principle, you could substitute it for actually hauling copies of your presentations around with you - just bring them up in the browser..

Anyway, I’ve chucked up a bunch of old presentations from my Masters. Later I’ll upload some more recent works including the lecture slides for Educ122. All available at http://www.slideshare.net/xorgnz

I wasn’t going to post anything more about the Phoenix Lander, as the media’s picked it up now, and I don’t have a lot to add.

But then, I saw this photo..

It’s Phoenix decelerating with its parachute in the Martian atmosphere, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Not a high quality image, but there’s something totally awesome about this. It’s not just telemetry and indirect guesses - that’s a man-made probe, landing on an alien world, and we can actually see it.

If you’re not in awe of that, what exactly does it take?

via The Planetary Society

Just quickly, I wanted to link to this rather awesome animated map of England from 0 -> 1050 CE, drawn by Curzon at Coming Anarchy

Over the weekend, I encountered OECake, a demo application of a 2D physics simulation called the Octave Engine. It models gravity, particle interactions, and momentum, as well as evaporation and condensation of water particles.

So, I made a steam engine.

via Open the Future

3D Animation of the Phoenix Lander, due to land on Mars in about 17 hours.

This expedition promising interesting results. It’ll be our first chance to sample soil beneath the Martian surface as it carries on board a digging arm capable of digging a trench half a metre deep. In addition, it carries a wet chemistry lab, a mass spectrometer, and several other instruments, allowing it to analyze whatever it finds.

Not a lot is known about the soil on Mars. Take, for example, this photo, taken by the Spirit rover. It shows a surprisingly pale soil rich in silica found just beneath the red soil surface. It wasn’t found through any deliberate effort, rather, it was spotted when, at one point, the rover’s camera was brought to bear on the trail left by its wheel in the soil. Hopefully this mission will result in a lot more information about the role and amount of water in Mars’ climate and geology. If we’re lucky, it’ll give much more conclusive evidence of whether or not there’s ever been life on Mars..

For those who are really geeky, there’ll be live footage of the NASA mission during the landing available from NASA TV on Monday from about 10am onwards

Either way, here’s hoping the landing goes well..

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