The Aesthetics and Beauty of Knowledge
Shih was the opposite of facts and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist chooses colours or light to make her pictures, a master of shih chooses textures of knowledge – various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories – to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of knowledge – this was shih.
– David Zindell, The Broken God, 1993
Geek Attitude
The attitude thing is about flexibility, portability, creativity, sociability and jamming (ran out of suitable “ity” words!). It’s about improvising – in the practical and musical senses of the word; not getting tangled in boundaries and the “right” way to do things.
Definitely the only way to travel.
– Martin Delaney – “Laptop Music”.
Kuehleborn's Unfathomable Thoughts
14/3: Pi – Day.
As written before: I was up to something new in Second Life. Since the last entry in my journal I logged in regularly (twice a week), but I almost never found what IÂ was looking for. So I took some snapshots and left. The only thing that gave me some pleasure was the gnome I bought
.
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Where? I’m not sure, but it was in a little shop in the neigbourhood of the Black Sun. This gnome tracks all my avators that show up in a circle of 50 square meters of my house. Interesting? Not at all, but the daily list of names in my mailbox is a reminder of my Second Life. Everything changes; The Black Sun is changing rapidly into a sort of conference centre
and two weeks ago I spoke to Giulio Perhaps about his plans with Uvvy Island. He told me that in a few weeks I wouldn’t recognize the place at all.
And he was right: tonight I visited the Island, but no traces of the centre of Transhumanism were left. What next? A notification about pi day (3/14; also Albert Einstein’s birthday) popped up in my screen when I logged in. So I visited the science museum at Spoland. It was dedicated to the number Pi. What is Pi? It is that strange number, represented by the Greek character:
You learned in school that Pi was 3,14? Wrong!
Why bother about Pi? I don’t know, it has something to do with circles:
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Finally I took a ride in the dome.
That was cool!
This week Los Angeles Times had a story about Second Life, written by Dan Neil, who lived in the Metaverse for one week.
Of course he visited the wrong places:
I can’t even begin to hint at the polymorphous perversity available in Second Life, but the most popular place, at the moment I check, is Naughty Neva’s Free Sex Orgy Room, where virtual sex workers pole-dance and lure customers into back rooms.
If that is what you’re looking for, I agree it is better in First Life. And I doubt it will ever be better in the Metaverse – I think we don’t need sex in the metaverse.
If you had the drive and the imagination—not to mention the absurd amount of free time—to create a business or design a product, why wouldn’t you do it in real space? If you could find friends and brainstorm good ideas and fuel a love affair, why wouldn’t you do it in the here and now? Come back from Second Life, people. First Life needs you.
Hm. I admit I have my doubts about Second Life. It is not as exciting yet as I thought it would be. But I still think (or hope) it can be great, someday. Just a matter of time.
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[…] year I wrote about a virtual celebration of Pi-Day in the Metaverse of Second Life, and now there is again an opportunity to meditate a little on the […]