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Death of Rats Airship

I enjoy the heck out of online Virtual Reality environments, and this is a perfect example of why; I get to be the Death of Rats (one of my favorite Terry Pratchett characters from his Discworld series), flying one of the Airships featured in the recent Steampunk movie version of the Three Musketeers. The universe these pictures were taken in is Second Life, which has been around for a while but is still an awful lot of fun. I had found that ship an hour or two after the Role Playing class I attended (last picture; it is difficult to see me hidden by the wings of the fairy sitting behind me), where the instructor was a red demoness on a bar stool, with her assistant teacher being a 10 meter long yellow dragon. Some of the smaller non-humans brought their own seating arrangements, like the cushion the mouse lady in the lower right corner of the picture is using.

Steampunk Death of Rats
Steampunk Death of Rats
Flying up to the Airship
Flying up to the Airship
Role Playing class
Role Playing class

Stuxnet Explanation

This video is a very good explanation of the most dangerous virus released so far. The sad part is, your tax dollars may have paid for it, depending on where you live. And if you do live there, don’t be surprised when it comes home to roost, as all such things do. Having a good way to leave the planet might be useful when that happens, so hopefully any government that would build and unleash such a thing would be funding its space program well into the future, to protect its citizens.

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

New Real Steel trailer

Real Steel hits the big screen in October, and they have turned loose another few trailers to get us ready for it. If you have ever built your own combat bot (all of mine have been in the Nano class, I can’t afford the heavy weight hardware it takes to make it to Robot Wars), you will appreciate this movie. It is also yet another Sci-Fi movie starring Hugh Jackman that has no mutants in it (remember The Fountain, or Van Helsing , or Kate & Leopold?).

Lifetime SIGGRAPH: Charles Csuri

Congratulations to Charles Csuri for receiving the 2011 Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art. As far back as the 1960s he was introducing computers to artists and art to programmers, creating computer art and animations, and creating curriculum’s that would teach those skills to others. Any one who has been to the movies over the past 30 years has seen the results of his work in CGI special effects and animation, but it was equally important to the development of computer sciences, resulting in advances in flight simulators, computer-aided design, architecture, magnetic resonance imaging, and the visualization of scientific phenomena. The 2011 SIGGRAPH Conference is going on this week in Vancouver; check the video for some highlights of the presentations.

Best Travel Apps

Planning on taking a trip this year? I have to recommend the Epic Fu episode Best Travel Apps, as seen below. Zadi puts together some of the best compilations of useful information online about using the online environment, and she has done it again with this one. If you are planning to travel any time in the next year or so, watch this video and start collecting the Apps that will help your journey the most.