Posted by Jerry on June 13th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Travel
What is Paris? My guess is it’s more Amelie than Da Vinci Code – at least in Spring. In this city I’ve seen more kisses per square km than any other. The art Nouveau apartment buildings are lit by window boxes bursting with flowers. The narrow cobbled side streets reveal Smart cars parked like shopping trolleys and the pavements are packed with scooters and mopeds. Every corner has a cafe filled with the aroma of fresh baguettes, coffee, cigarettes and the sound of people talking like a bite of chocolate just melted down their throat.
For some it’s the sense of history epitomised by the Louvre with the contrast turned up. Some are not keen on Pei’s glass pyramid entrance, while others are intrigued at the inverted pyramid beneath.
But it’s not where you think it is.
And the Venus de Milo, considered by some to be perfect, stands in the shadow to one side. The back is quite roughly finished so it’s clearly designed for a niche rather than all-round viewing. It is certainly striking, as are the three Graces.
For me it’s about the people – friendly, spontaneous, a little chaotic – like their streets, but always stylish.
The metro subway system is easy to use and fairly clean, and the pneumatic tyres on the trains make them surprisingly quiet. At the right time of day the stations can be almost deserted.
Many of the stations retain the art nouveau signs and lights designed by Hector Guimard that lend form to function in a wonderfully organic way.
The Sunday street market at Port du Vannes is a delight whether you are looking for antiques or buttons and beads
But for many – this is the quintessential Paris icon
According to the lift operator there can be up to three marriage proposals per hour on top of the Tower. At the turn of last century this was where pioneer aviator Santos Dumont used to tie up his personal dirigible!
Posted by Jerry on June 11th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Steam
A while ago I bought a small oscillating engine off eBay for less than half the price of an equivalent mamod or wilescoengine. This one was made in India. It isn’t finished as well as a willesco, but it was delivered promptly and looked quite serviceable.
Being a new, previously unfired engine I felt there were a couple of stiff points when i rotated the flywheel by hand. So I unscrewed the bolt holding the piston connecting rod to the crankshaft and carefully withdrew the piston from the cylinder. Then I sprayed with Tac chain grease on the piston and all moving parts – including the valve surface. Then I removed the filler screw and safety valve from the boiler and inspected them. I filed down some roughness on the mating surface on the boiler, and inspected the boiler carefully for any dents or obvious breaks in the seals. It seemed solidly built and about twice the size of the equivalent mamod engine.
After reinstalling the piston I used a small funnel to half fill the boiler, then reinstalled the filler screw and safety valve. Then I got a couple of firelighters and placed the in the burner tray and lit them, placing he burner beneath the boiler. There was a bit of smoke and a lot of flame and after about ten minutes there were definite kettle noises emerging.
I tried the whistle and saw a blast of steam, but no whistle sound. I shut the whistle off and waited a couple of minutes before taking a tentative spin of the flywheel… And here’s the result 🙂
There is no maker’s plate, but I’m told that an Indian firm makes them. The boiler has a very large capacity – around 600mls (an imperial pint) and with the firelighters looks to have possibly close to an hour’s duration once steam is up. The engine runs smoothly, and I suspect it will run faster once it is fully run-in.
SL has been seen as the ‘mosaic of the 3D web, and it reflects this in several ways. Firstly, although rich in visual texture, it is still relatively low-resolution. And of necessity it works within the constraints of bandwidth.
As it is, it requires a fairly fast broadband connection to make it work anything like smoothly – and even then the lag between command and action can result in your avatar overshooting the mark and bumping others.
Secondly, this has implications for the bandwith of information exchange. And this manifests in several ways. There is a strong need to affirm one’s presence as a human being behind the avatar. So there is an emphasis on the physical – and especially the appearance of the avatar. One of the most expensive items people buy are photo-realistic skins – which they then proceed to clothe in culturally coded ways.
Some use dress codes to push boundaries the would never contemplate in RL. So some avatars dress in a sexually provocative manner – perhaps even equipping the avatar with sexual animations that can be played out with willing partner avatars.
But it is easy for the press media to make too much of that. Yes there is a ‘mature content’ aspect to SL and there will always be a percentage of newcomers or ‘newbies’ who will play their avatars in that way until they get bored and start to build their own spaces and engage in all the other aspects of SL – like live music, academic conferences and teaching spaces and so on. My take on this emphasis on physicality – including the youth and vigour appearances most avatars seem to have – is that such affirmations of physicality are the direct consequence of a low-bandwidth social medium.
This was also the case with text-based MOO spaces and there were moral panics raised over those – just as there were in the 19th century over the emergent novel – such as the court case over ‘Madame Bovary’. The media debate over secondlife interestingly reflects again the literally age-old questions raised by any mediated third-party communication medium right back at least as far as Plato around 244 BC.
And these come down to about five key issues.
Firstly, there are issues of authenticity and authentication. This is reflected in media articles on whether or not people are ‘playing false’ – lying about their appearance, race, gender, and importantly, age. It is also reflected in articles about the economy of Lindens – the SL currency – which can be bought and exchanged with real money. Yes, real fortunes have already been made by early adopters and those with a good product to sell, be it a good skin, or a swirling dress, or a virtual hang-glider. And most of the big money has been made on virtual real-estate – and there are already RL real-estate speculators starting to play and make money with virtual real-estate.
Of course there is an actual aspect to this – the real-estate may be virtual, but the server space is real. And that’s what you are actually purchasing when you buy virtual land in SL – more server space.
All of which requires at some levedl, trusted communications to enable the real money to be exchanged for Lindens.
The age one raises the issue of how to protect minors online from sexual predation or exposure to mature content. And that also speaks to the second of Plato’s five big issues: authorised access to information.
When it was face-to-face communication there are several biometric verification codes – you can see who you are really talking to, and this would give some measure of assurance – a person could give their word, and their reputation would assure that they were really the right people to receive the information you impart – or at least the trusted agent of the business. But with writing there was no such assurance – once out of sight, the message could be read by anyone with the access and necessary level of literacy.
With writing as with portraits – as Henry VIII of Britain found out – in cyberspace no-one knows what the real person is like.
As educators come to grips with the need to teach visual literacy so too more and more educational institutions are appearing in SL. And, predictably, there are already debates over whether SL is a real tool for education, or just another gimmick.
Plato was worried about that too. He warned us that this game-space of writing was not for serious stuff. And he was concerned at the damage it would do to young minds – they would lose their memory, they could read things and pretend to be knowledgeable when they lacked understanding. Writing would produce pseudo experts. And he was right.
But any modelling space, including SL also provides a safe space to develop skills in reading the culture, and in learning how to deal with relationships in a relatively safe mediated environment.
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At the risk of sounding polemical, secondLife is arguably little different from any other virtual world or cultural space. When you strip away the hype and the individual modalities of how you navigate such a space, it quickly becomes apparent that SecondLife performs many very familiar functions.
Firstly, it is a genuinely interactive social space. It is a space for people to engage with each other. It has been marketed to some extent as a ‘game’ – and insofar as it provides a creative role-play space it is. But it is also much more than that.
Like the text-based Multi-user Object-Oriented Domains (MOO) of years gone by, SecondLife provides a space in which your proxy character, or ‘avatar’ interacts with other avatars, as well as with objects built within the world-space. SecondLife takes the concept of a MOO a step further by making it visual, and hence more apparently part of the 3D web, rather than a 2D text space.
Of course we are all in virtual space all the time. And arguably, we always have been. The way we articulate the real social space is already mediated by and through language and other systems of signification. Even in RL that mediation is apparent in the dress codes, proxemic codes, social markers, body language and so on. So it is not too surprising that these same cultural codes apply in virtual worlds.
People operating avatars appologise when they accidentally bump another avatar with their own. If an avatar stands too close, others will move theirs back a little to make room.
And that would be an interesting phenomenon but for the fact that behind those avatars are people, and the avatars form a visual representation and virtual body stand-in for the person – just as the screen stands as the matrix upon which we project all computer mediated communication.
Okay, so in SL we are not (yet) interacting tactilely, but leaving aside the technology for a moment, we are really dealing with people interacting with people. Just as we do in RL.
But even in RL we arguably articulate ourselves through avatars based on clothing codes (suits, casual gear, sporting and other uniforms etc) which we change according to the social situation in which we find ourselves.
These dress codes are part of a broader set of systems of signification that facilitate our social interactions with other people within a cultural group. But this is not new.
Moreover, the kinds of social spaces that have been set up in SL remain very much the kind of social spaces we see in RL. Among the more popular spaces in SL are pubs and dance venues – designed very like pubs and dance spaces the world over.
Education and performance spaces are similarly culturally coded – amphitheatres with seats, conference rooms, office spaces and so on reflect designs established in some cases thousands of years ago – suuch as those based on Greek and Roman amphitheatres.
The lack of a roof serves several functions – it facilitiates avatars flying in to the space, making navigation easier. And it isn’t going to rain so the roof is not an essential piece of architecture – other than where you want to connote privacy. And the lack of a roof saves on ‘prims’ – the building material in SL – which would otherwise add to the server space and bandwidth requirements.
Shopping spaces are familiar designs – kept fairly uncluttered to enable maximum display with minimum obstacles for the navigationally challenged.
SL has been described as the ‘Mosaic’ &tm; of the 3D web. And in many ways it is. It provides a visual dimension – in much the way that Mosaic added images to gopher space – the pre-browser version of the internet, before it became recognisably the web we know today. Tomorrow, I’ll explore this issue further.
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