Electrum Spiral @ Caerleon Art Collective

I’m working on this new thing.  It started out as a sketch on graph paper in RL.  Then I turned it into a 3 foot by 3 foot painting:

Original Spiral Fractal painting in RL

Then I rendered it in prims in SL in 2D.

Then I turned it into 3D in SL.

Soror Nishi asks if I could put some steps up to the fractal.

At the suggestion of Desdemona Enfield, I knocked out some of the cubes and this is the result:

We put those cubes back in and it starts to look like a twisted Mondrian painting:

Copyright © Wizard Gynoid 2009

I asked Xenophile Neurocam if he knew anything about this fractal.  Because it’s definitely not the Golden Spiral.  It’s not derived from a Golden Rectangle and it doesn’t encode the Golden Ratio or the Fibonacci Series.

My good friend Xeno is so smart.  He said look into something called the “Pythagoras Tree.”

Bingo!  Discovered by Albert E. Bosman (1891-1961), a dutch mathematics teacher, in 1942.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras_tree

This version is different from all other variations I’ve seen of the Pythagoras Tree, so I’m calling it an “Electrum Spiral” because it’s definitely not the Golden Spiral.  Electrum is an alchemical mixture of Gold and Silver and the other five classical metals.

You can see it at my new parcel on the Caerleon Art Collective sim, courtesy of Georg Janick:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Caerleon%20Art%20Collective/212/120/27

Evidence of Extropy is in the Building.

Wizzy keeps building geometric objects of more and more intricacy and complexity.  Wizzy’s building is therefore necessarily Extropic.

6672 prim E8 Polytope

This is my latest project.  A 6672 prim E8 Polytope.  This one is more representative of the E8 than any of my previous attempts.  It took several attempts to successfully rez this object, and even so the sim creaked and groaned.

This particular rotation of the E8 Polytope is important because it shows *all* 240 of the vertices.  Each vertice can be seen above as a meeting of edge struts.

From this angle, we can see a clear hole on this axis going straight down through the object.  When flattened down to two dimensions this object would look this:

The 2D graph commonly recognized as the E8 Polytope

This 2D version has 240 recognizable vertices or nodes.  If Second Life had less perspective programmed into our view, from this axis or view we could see the object like this.

Some of you might wonder why I am so obviously obsessed with this object.  It is considered to be the most beautiful and elegant geometric object known to mathematicians.  That alone is probably reason enough…

But as I proceed with this obsession, at each step I learn more and more.  I gain a more intuitive grasp of what this thing is all about.  Each new discovery is a wonder and a joy.

Another axis of symmetry reveals itself

Where do I go from here?

The direction of higher complexity leads from the eighth dimension up to all 248 dimensions of the E8 Group.

The direction of lower complexity leads downward to the G2.  The cube-like, hexagonal symmetry of the G2 lends itself to demonstrations of how quarks and the strong force relate.

Next stop, G2.

This is what we do!

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

This video made me cry.  It reminds me of the video by Robbie Dingo:

New Star of Diablo III is WIZARD!

I used to be a Diablo and Diablo II player.  I was a maniac about it.  Then World of Warcraft came out and everyone forgot about Diablo…

Well, Blizzard has been working on Diablo III and the new star character is… Wizard!

Ta da!

Second Life CEO Mark Linden likes me!

Back in October 2008, I received an IM from someone named M Linden.  He told me he was looking at some of my work and wanted to buy some.  I asked him where he was and he said he was at Rezzable Visions.  So I immediately dropped everything and TP’d over there.

Chatting with M Linden

M Linden happens to be Mark Kingdon in Real Life, and he is the Chief Executive Officer of Second Life!

Luckily, I knew that when he IM’d me.

I helped him buy some of my stuff, and he said at the time that he wanted to put them up in his own personal sculpture garden in SL.  I went looking for his land at one point but it happens to be on protected Linden land, so I couldn’t get in to see what he did with it.

I thought that was the end of that.

Yesterday, Torley Linden posted a Tweet (on Twitter) about a Flickr picture of M Linden’s SL office.  I was ecstatic to find a picture of two of my sculptures floating over his office:

Two of my geometric sculptures floating over M Linden's office in SL.

I then went through all of Mr. CEO Linden’s posts on Flickr and found some more good shots of his visit to my Rezzable Visions build.

"I love this. Bought one from the creator and it's sitting on my roof :)"

Invisiprim Bot Farm

Wizzy found an Invisiprim Bot Farm. These bots are hidden in an invisiprim box.  I got inside the box and found that the bots also had invisiprim bodies.  What are they trying to hide?

What are they trying to hide?

Crashing Rezzable Alpha Open Sim Grid

My marching orders are to try to crash Rezzable’s Alpha Open Sim Grid.  So I set about to do that with a passion once scripting was turned on on my two regions.  Somehow Foolish Frost fixed the script engine, commenting that Rezzable Open Sim doesn’t use the Xengine script engine.  In that case, I would expect this grid to behave differently from the Reaction Grid.  So far, all behavior seems very similar.

Rezzing the E8 Concentric Circles Projection on Rezzable Alpha Grid

Next, I tried to “stretch” the object as large as I could, given the limitations of the Linden Lab viewer.  Initially I had a lot of problems getting the viewer to allow me to stretch.  It was acting kludgie and I think it might have had to do with the sim stats.  Check out the sim speed:

Note the Frame and Sim Times

After I relogged, I was able to “stretch” (after the selection tool accepted all 2956 prims).  With the ten meter limit on prim size however, it didn’t stretch much.

Stretching the object

After I stretched it to maximum, I moved it straight down to ground level.  This is easier said than done, because you’ve selected about 3,000 prims to move and the sim creaks and groans and complains.  It’s not done easily, let me just say that.

E8 Concentric Circles on Wizzy sim & Desde sim in the background.

Remarkably, with almost 3,000 active scripts on the region, I was able to rez a prim and create and compile a script afterwards.  Only one anomaly was noticed – I couldn’t “take” a prim that I should have been able to.  Instead I had to delete it and then restore it.  This small anomaly might count toward “crashing” the sim, but so far Rezzable Alpha has been resistant to my banging on it.  Will continue to do so tomorrow.

Goth Wizzy on Wizzy sim with Desde Sim in the background.

Building on Wizzy sim @ Rezzable Open Sim

RightAsRain Rimbaud gave me two regions to build on the Rezzable Open Sim.  I’ve been testing it out and it seems to be almost identical to the Reaction Grid.  I can get to the Rezzable grid direct using a new shortcut for the SL viewer, but I would really like to use the Hippo Open Sim viewer.  The main reason for this is that the viewer allows building 256 meter objects (provided the server code allows it.)  I actually was able to log in with the Hippo viewer once.  But not since then.

I did a little testing and found that scripts weren’t working on my Wizzy region.  This is consistent with the behavior I observed at Reaction Grid.  With Open Sim 0.6.1 the script engine keeps breaking and is unreliable.  The engine can’t seem to handle much of a load.  On Reaction grid it would slow down and break after I rezzed about 3000 objects with active scripts.  I selected and “Inactivated” the scripts, but even so the script engine broke down.  Some regions continue to work though.  The behavior is inconsistent.  This is the issue: http://opensimulator.org/mantis/view.php?id=2853

Also the LSL function ( llRemoveInventory(llGetScriptName());) that can be used to delete out the active scripts from the objects doesn’t work in Open Sim 0.6.1 or is not enabled.  This is a serious bug and if fixed could be a workaround for the major issue above.

I went to the Rezzable 5 region and found that scripts were working there.  So I rezzed a complex geometric object (Compound 5 Octahedra) and added a rotation script, then copied it and rezzed it on Wizzy.  And there it is now.

Rezzing a Compound 5 Octahedra @ Rezzable Open Sim

Linking Prims and Changing Colors

Rezzed on Wizzy Sim @ Rezzable Grid

My Goth Outfit

I'm a Goth!

North Dakotan Griefs @ Metanomics

At the risk of encouraging this kind of behavior…

I attended the Metanomics presentation today in SL.  The host usually has guests on and he interviews them about the business of Virtual Worlds, and Second Life in particular.  Today, the guest was Forterra CEO Robert Gehorsam.  All well and good.

Now they can’t afford to have a big crowd in the SLCN studios during the show because of the lag effect, so they have all of these partner locations around SL where you can go and watch the show live on a video feed.  Meanwhile, the local chat of these remote locations bridges back and feeds into a common chat.  Which is then broadcast back out to all of the remote locations, and onto the Metanomics website.  This is rather a cool idea.

Today, about three quarters of the way through the show, a griefer shows up at the remote location I was at —  which happens to have been NMC Outreach.

Now remember, anything that is said in local chat at the remote locations goes out via the bridge and is merged with *all* of the local chat.

This kid (and obviously he was a kid) starts commenting in local chat to the few of us who were there in attendance on that sim.  Everything he said was immediately piped out to the entire audience.

Now the interesting thing is that he wasn’t born yesterday.  In fact, he was born today!  And… he’s from North Dakota.  I know because he belongs to two North Dakota groups.  One of them is the University of North Dakota.

Now, I spent my earliest formative years in Montana.  Yes, it’s true.  And back home we used to tell North Dakotan jokes.  This guy seems to live up to the stereotype:

[12:58]  Griefer: Second Life really sucks ass doesn’t it?
[12:58]  :: SeanCinquetti: “centrally isolated” love that term
[12:59]  :: Sonja Strom: [Griefer’s name] ?
[12:59]  Griefer: Hey you all suck
[12:59]  :: Sonja Strom: why are you here then?
[12:59]  CallieDel Boa: No not really, took my other world 7 years to become somewhat stable, SL is only 5 & 1/2
[12:59]  Griefer: because I am checking out how much this program blows for universities
[12:59]  Wizard Gynoid: [Griefer’s name] is griefing at nmc outreach
[12:59]  Griefer: What class is this
[12:59]  :: Fleep Tuque: With teleporting here, geography seems less relevant unless you m ake a REAL effort to create a sense of “place”
Tammy Nowotny: cool! a round workd wd be a good idea
[13:00]  :: Jane2 McMahon: [Griefer’s name], on the contrary, many postsecondary institutions find SL valuable in program and class delivery
[13:00]  CallieDel Boa: Perhaps you’d like to talk later, I work with people at Universities, seems those who do not understand didn’t take time to learn how to use Second Life.
[13:00]  :: Joia Sands: voice is breaking up a little again
Fleep Tuque: Best not to feed trolls. 😛
[13:00]  Griefer: WHat university is this
[13:00]  CallieDel Boa: After the show please I’ll be more then happy to help
[13:01]  :: Fleep Tuque: How many folks attend events or locations and hardly even notices the terrain or surroundings?
[13:01]  :: Al Supercharge: pdf page 12: “Integration of client pre-requisite SCORM e-learning modules hosted on the
clientâs LMS” “Integration of client-related Flash-based mini-games” please elaborate ?
[13:01]  Griefer: Wow this is fucking is stupid
[13:01]  Griefer: good bye
[13:01]  :: Fleep Tuque: I TP in and out of things all the time
[13:01]  :: Tammy Nowotny: Callie rocks
[13:01]  :: Joia Sands: Fleep, not me…I totally notice, enjoy and interact with the location/terrain
[13:01]  CallieDel Boa: [Griefer’s name] just left, disregard his comments

I just bring this up in this manner because there seemed to be no way to deal with this problem.  I was searching through my inventory for my Quantum Core in case I had to orbit him to shut him up.  Luckily, he left before I had to do my civic duty.

This was a bit timely, because only a short time earlier the topic had been the perception of young people about Second Life.  It has been noted before at Metanomics that younger people tend to find Second Life disappointing and boring.  Presumably, this is because it is not as slick as popular video games and there is no spoon-fed content.

So, consider this guys.  You have to think of a way of policing this kind of activity.  Got to nip it in the bud quicker than this.  Know what I mean?

MiniMap Reveals Symmetry

I rezzed only the vertices of the new “Concentric Circles” rotation of the E8 Polytope on the new Soror sim at Reaction Grid.  Then stretched the vertices out to fill the sim.

The scale is so big (200 meters in diameter) that my computer had a hard time rendering them so that I can see the symmetries.  I was looking for that axis that reveals the concentric circles.

By accident, I happened to look at the mini map.  Lo and behold, there is the symmetry.  The order is revealed from the seeming chaos:

MiniMap from Reaction Grid reveals Symmetry