Avatars representing the Dalai Lama and TV Radio personality Cathy Wurzer in Second Life during the Dalai Lama’s address to Mayo Clinic staff, Monday, February 29th
Monday, February 29th saw a special event take place at the chapel of Saint Marys Hospital in down town Rochester, Minnesota, when the Dalai Lama addressed Mayo Clinic staff in a special event which was livestreamed on the Internet and into Second Life, using the Mayo clinic’s in-world facilities.
The address, entitled Compassion in Healthcare, followed on from the 80-year old spiritual leader, who has been undergoing period treatment for prostate cancer at the clinic, speaking for 3 hours – twice what had been planned – before a crowd of 3,000 people in Minneapolis on Sunday, February 21st. That event was to mark the Tibetan New Year, and his Holiness’ address, delivered in English and Tibetan, focused on valuing education and compassion.
The Dalai Lama at the chapel of Saint Marys Hospital, Rochester, Minnesota, where he addressed Mayo Clinic staff, with his words streamed to an audience in Second Life (image credit: event livestream)
The February 29th address was introduced by Mayo Clinic President and CEO John Noseworthy, and moderated by Minnesota TV and radio host Cathy Wurzer. As the address began, both Ms. Wurzer and the Dalai Lama were represented in-world by avatars at the Mayo clinic’s Second Life conference centre. In both cases, care had been taken to ensure the avatars resembled their flesh-and-blood counterparts.
While I missed the first part of the session, when I did arrive, some 80 people from across Second Life were in attendance, and the Dalai Lama himself sounded energised and related stories with good humour and aplomb through his address, and responded to questions from the audience at the venue, it was not clear to me if any questions were taken from the in-world audience.
The Dalai Lama “addresses” the audience in Second Life
While some be tempted to critique the event on the basis that the avatar in-world was not actually operated by the Dalai Lama, they would actually be missing the point. While his holiness may not have been operating the avatar, being seated in the chapel of Saint Marys Hospital, the thoughts and words steaming into Second Life were his, and as such, the event offered a means for people who might never otherwise get to hear him speak, listen to and appreciate his wisdom in an almost first-hand way.
The address, with a question and answer session, lasted a little over 90 minutes. The livestream is currently being archived by the Mayo Clinic, and the event was also filmed in-world. I’ll update this article when either video is publicly available.
This summary is published every Monday, and is a list of SL viewer / client releases (official and TPV) made during the previous week. When reading it, please note:
It is based on my Current Viewer Releases Page, a list of all Second Life viewers and clients that are in popular use (and of which I am aware), and which are recognised as adhering to the TPV Policy. This page includes comprehensive links to download pages, blog notes, release notes, etc., as well as links to any / all reviews of specific viewers / clients made within this blog
By its nature, this summary presented here will always be in arrears, please refer to the Current Viewer Release Page for more up-to-date information.
Maintenance RC viewer version updated to 4.0.2.311655 on February 26 – 38 updates, fixes and tweaks for memory leaks (download and release notes)
HTTP updates and Vivox RC viewer updated to version 4.0.2.311302 on February 22 – combines the Project Azumarill RC and Vivox Voice RC updates into a single viewer (download and release notes)
The MER rovers first arrived on Mars at the start of 2004. One, Opportunity, is still operating today (credit: NASA / JPL)
Spirit, one of NASA’s two solar-powered Mars Exploration Rover (MER) missions, may have ceased communications with Earth on March 22nd, 2010 and the mission declared over on May 24th, 2011, but its science legacy lives on.
Originally designed with a 90-day primary mission duration, Spirit massively exceeded this, ranging across Mars for a distance of 7.73 kilometres (4.8 mi) over 1,944 days of mobile operations before becoming bogged down in a sand trap on May 1st, 2009, almost 5.5 years after it had arrived on Mars, after which it operated as a stationary research programme for a further 751 days.
During its mobile period, Spirit explored a small rocky plateau dubbed “Home Plate” in 2007 / 2008. Whilst exploring the rock, the rover imaged several peculiar small rock formations resembling cauliflower or coral. Analysis by the rover’s Mini-Thermal Emission Spectrometer (Mini-TES) revealed the formations to be almost pure silica (SiO2), a mineral associated with volcanic environments.
Silica is formed when water (rain or snow) seeps underground and comes into contact with rocks heated from below by magma. Itself super-heated by the rocks, the water is vaporised and rises back through the ground, dissolving silica and other minerals as it does so, which it deposits around the vents or fumaroles it uses to escape back into the atmosphere.
the “cauliflower” or “coral” formations imaged by MER rover Spirit around the “home Plate” plateau in 2008 (credit: NASA / JPL)
Warm, rich in silica and minerals, on Earth these fumaroles and vents become havens for bacterial life which is known for creating curious bulbous and branching shapes in silica formations here on Earth which are strikingly similar to those imaged by Spirit. Such is the similarity, that planetary geologist Steven Ruff and geology professor Jack Farmer, both from Arizona State University, have been carrying out detailed studies in the high Atacama Desert, regarded as the most arid non-polar region on Earth, harbouring conditions thought to be very similar to those of ancient Mars.
In particular, they have been investigating the remote geyser fields of El Tatio, some 4.3 km above mean sea level in an environment which has much in common with the Gusev Crater region of Mars, where “Home Plate” resides. This includes being exposed to high levels of ultraviolet light from the sun and extreme temperatures. Their investigations revealed forms they call “micro-digitate silica structures” which are both remarkably similar to the formations on Mars, and to those found around fumaroles and vents at lower altitudes here on Earth which are formed by bacteria.
A comparison between images of the formations found on Mars by the MER Spirit (top right), and those imaged by Ruff and Foster in El Tatio, Atacama Desert (credit: S. Ruff, Arizona State University)
While the pair have yet to come up with definitive evidence that the El Tatio formations are the result of microbial activity, they believe the objects may be “micro-stromatolites”. Nornally of a much larger size, stromatolites are formed by bacteria “cementing” mineral grains together to form a thin layer. Over time, these layers accumulate one over the last, forming a laminar mound or rock. The oldest stromatolites on Earth are estimated to be some 3.5 billion years old, a time when both Earth an Mars may have shared much closer atmospheric and geological similarities. So, if the formations found at El Tatio do prove to be the result of bacterial activity, then it offers a hypothesis that the formations on Mars may also have been the result of bacterial activity.
Dream Chaser: the Dream is Alive
In January, I wrote about NASA’s surprise decision to award an extended contract for uncrewed resupply missions to the International Space Station to both of the existing contract holders, SpaceX and Orbital ATK, and to Sierra Nevada Corporation, who will use an uncrewed variant of their Dream Chaser space plane. At the time I wrote that update, reader Devin Vaughn indicated an interest in learning more about Dream Chaser, which has an interesting heritage.
As I noted at the time, the vehicle had been one of four private sector contenders to fulfil the role of “space taxi”, ferrying up to 6 at a time from US soil to the ISS. The idea being that by spinning-out the ISS crewed flights to the private sector (with financial support from NASA), the US agency could focus its manned space flight development programme solely on the Orion / SLS programme, which is intended to form the nucleus of US (and possibly international) crewed mission ventures well beyond Earth orbit.
Dream Chaser was unique among the commercial crew transportation proposals as it was based on a “lifting body” design , allowing to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and glide to a landing on a conventional runway – aspects which still make it a very flexible vehicle (credit: SNC)
Dream Chaser ultimately wasn’t selected for the crewed mission contract – which caused some friction between Sierra Nevada Corporation and NASA when it was announced in 2014 – but the US space agency continued to work with SNC to help develop the vehicle, with the Dream Chaser Cargo variant being the result – although SNC has not given up on developed the crewed version of the vehicle.
Dream Chaser Cargo is designed to fly up to 5 tonnes of cargo to / from orbit. This can be both pressurised and unpressurised material, and the vehicle includes the ability for unpressurised cargo to be directly transferred from its cargo module to the exterior of the space station should this be required. As with the original crewed variant, Dream Chaser Cargo will launch atop a rocket, but return to earth to make a conventional runway landing, the latter greatly speeding up the transfer of returned cargo (e.g. science experiments material, etc.) from the vehicle to its intended destination.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 