Brooders

So I bit the virtual bullet and created an account a while back.

I don’t know anyone yet, So I guess that’s why I don’t have much to do and I haven’t seen too many people. Or so I thought. However, Warren Ellis (Second Life columnist, Cyberpunk Comic Author, + other things !), also noted in Second Life Sketches: Shipwrecked And Abandoned

And I’m tripping from place to place, and seeing nothing but abandoned buildings wherever I go.

I also don’t know what I was expecting .. after hearing that it was modeled on the Metaverse from the book “Snow Crash”. It’s not the bustling world described in the book.

This virtual world has very real costs in the actual world – If you read about Electricity and Avatars, Avatars consume (apparently) more power than the average person in some developing countries.

So, my thoughts?

Just logging in to wander around is like going to a suburb to wander around … probably interesting, but you get bored after a while.

The interface is a little sluggish (although that could be my PC old thing, but new video card), and it’s surreal watching things warp into existence when they load.

Will I log on regularly? Not sure .. it’s kind of interesting, but I think playing a game would better interest me.

and all I could think to say was “that sucks”.

I’m not sure what to think.
He’s someone we say hello to and have brief chats with.
He seems calm enough.
I now feel my own mortality,
and a sadness for his.

Live ink .. interesting research and way of looking at written text.

Over at venture beat, they talk about LiveInk offering a better way to read text online. a couple of points they make:

Did you know our primitive brains weren’t wired very well to read this paragraph?
…
When our ancestors first invented written language about 5,000 years ago, they unfortunately didn’t have armies of neuroscientists standing by to tell them block type was the wrong way to format their papyrus rolls. But fret not. Help is on the way.

So .. when writing was invented it was immediately functional, but perhaps not the most efficient?

To explain what this is about take a look at a sample (borrowed from: liveink.com)

Liveink text:

Easier to read
      because
            it’s easier
               to see.

Original text:

Easier to read because it’s easier to see.

The theory goes that we have a very narrow field of view (circular) from which to read. If text is spaced so that we see only the current words without the distraction of the words above and below, it’s easier and faster to read. See Liveink for their explanation and demonstration.

Maybe with the rise of online material we’ve reached a point where typography will evolve. Who knows, at any rate it might start to explain (partially) why blogging is effective. Most blogs have margins and a small narrow area for reading, perhaps this easy to read typography has contributed to its popularity? I don’t know. At any rate visual appeal seems important to information absorption.

What’s interesting to me as a programmer is this way of formatting looks like it could be easily scriptable via Perl, Ruby or Python (pick your language of choice). Although it looks simple, I guess Live Ink has 80 patents for a reason, it’s probably harder than it looks.

( Via Kurzweil )