The final remake...?
I certainly hope so. Hollywood has always recycled - if I recall correctly The "Bogart" Maltese Falcon was the third attempt at filming Hammett's novel.Now we have a remake of the classic "The Day The Earth Stood Still". With Keanu Reeves. OK, so the original looks dated & somewhat hackneyed 56 years on but will CGI save the planet from the ravages of Keanu? Somehow I doubt it.
And whilst we're on the subject of film, RIP Paul Newman.
This is water...
I was only vaguely aware of David Foster Wallace before his death last week. Sorta bundled him in with Jonathan Franzen & Richard Powers & never quite got round to reading them, well, apart from Powers (File under "Difficult but (probably) worth the slog").The McSweeney's Blog & Open Culture kinda explode & you wonder, well, maybe I should have been reading the guy instead of ambulance-chasing after the fact.
And reading yesterday's Guardian Review at 3.00 a.m. this morning, well, it struck me that here was a guy with whom I could totally empathise. I know that it's easy to romanticise the (recently) dead but on re-reading these articles this p.m. Shit, it strikes a chord. (Em7).
Speech by David Foster Wallace.
Christopher Tayler's appreciation.
Thinking Worlds
Having been ridden out of Second Life on a rail for asocial networking (convicted introversion) and having failed miserably to furnish my Google Lively world either with avatar (straight from the Next dummy line) or paraphenalia (ersatz-IKEA), I have tended to avoid virtual worlds. Unless of course they have decent draught beer & a sociable clientele.Then suddenly a double whammy. The JISC RSCs in Scotland are hosting a Virtual Worlds 2008 conference / seminar at the University of Stirling on October 29th & the September / October 2008 issue of Educause Review is virtually (sorry) awash with the (real) uses of virtual worlds in (US) Higher Education.
And then I discovered Thinking Worlds. Thinking Worlds is a learning educational game authoring engine which is effectively Open Source or at least is free for non-commercial use. Which I suppose (and this is stretching a point in this fiscally-driven FE world) means us. And very good it looks too.
The package consists of the Thinking Worlds player & an authoring program. There are also a lot of existing add-ons (learning modules) & assets (basically some off-the-shelf worlds that can be used to build your own add-ons). There's certainly enough documentation in terms of pages but then we don't read manuals, do we? Can be installed on a server (aye, right; we canna have that) or locally if you have local admin privileges.
There is probably a lot of work involved in developing any learning package although I suppose that the Medieval add-on, say, might be customised (and they can be) to resemble the mental if not the physical aspects of FE librarianship. A jest...
Certainly worth a deal of further investigation. Persuade an HN Games Programming student that this represents a worthwhile college project.
One gripe. Both the documentation and the online help suggest that there is a Thinking Worlds community. This would obviously be very useful but I sure can't find it.
Dammit, they've probably set one up in Second Life...
http://www.thinkingworlds.com/
OpenSim? Methinks not!
...and I feel fine
Well, we same to have made it safely through the first 3 hours since the CERN Large Hadron Collider was switched on. Which, I suppose, is something of a relief. (There may be, for some, a certain prurient satisfaction in watching other people's disasters - hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, etc. but the potential mass-production of black holes a mere 1299km away is too close to home for this physicist. (Higher, 1970))Geneva, 10 September 2008. The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery.
CERN (Centre Européen de Recherche Nucléaire)
http://public.web.cern.ch/
CERN TV (YouTube Channel)
http://www.youtube.com/user/CERNTV
What was supposed to happen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXzugu39pKM
Guardian Science Interactive Big Bang Machine
http://bit.ly/4tmUiq
...and just remember who Tim Berners-Lee (& friends) were working for when they invented this WWW thing...
Google Chrome
Oh God, not another web browser! Ah but it's a Google web browser. Only been using this for about 20 minutes so no comments other than to say it has a nice clean interface - just exactly what's beneath the bonnet I don't know. Is it a Firefox killer? An IE killer? Or as some in the blogosphere are suggesting, a Windows / Microsoft killer.
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