It’s time to highlight another week of storytelling in Voice by the staff and volunteers at the Seanchai Library. As always, all times SLT, and events are held at the Library’s home in Nowhereville, unless otherwise indicated. Note that the schedule below may be subject to change during the week, please refer to the Seanchai Library website for the latest information through the week.
Monday, April 4th, 19:00: When They Saw
Having graduated from the juvenile education system, Ana Mia decides to join her sister as a part of Fort Hope’s Midnight Guard. Fort Hope is a stronghold, protecting its inhabitants from Earth’s alien invaders; and the Midnight Guard forms the eyes, ears and guardians of the stronghold’s Wall.
Without the Guard and without the Wall of the stronghold, the aliens would be free to harvest humanity, using their ships and the Coyotes who form their eyes and ears in opposition to the Midnight Guard.
But now things have changed. Now Ana is something more, as she notes herself:
I never expected to be abducted. But here I am, standing onboard Their ship, facing Them down for the first time in my life, seeing the true face of the Earth’s invaders from another world.
My task is simple: to act as Earth’s emissary and negotiate peace. But it is far more complicated than it seems. I know nothing of politics, and even little of persuasion, but I have no choice. I must do this to keep my friends, and my world, safe. I cannot afford to fail humanity.
Join Gyro Muggins as he reads the second volume of Kody Boye’s When They… saga.
Guest Singh Albatros (Chris Mooney Singh) presents selections from his latest work: poems, short prose pieces, original audio recordings & fabulous new videos. Love Knot Tantra shares insider perspectives on traditional India, its culture, myths with highlights on ancient tantric fertility practices..
Wednesday, April 6th: Dark
No readings.
Thursday, April 7th 19:00: Scary Stories for Sleepovers
Logos representative only and should not be seen as an endorsement / preference / recommendation
Updates from the week ending Sunday, April 3rd, 2022
This summary is generally 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.
Note that for purposes of length, TPV test viewers, preview / beta viewers / nightly builds are generally not recorded in these summaries.
Official LL Viewers
Release viewer: version version 6.5.3.568554 – formerly the Maintenance J&K RC viewer, promoted Monday, February 28 – no change.
That’s the invitation Cica Ghost presents to visitors to her April 2022 installation, Make a Wish, which she opened to the public on Sunday, April 3rd.
It’s a setting – for me at least – conjured up thoughts on nonsense rhymes and children’s tales. I’m not entirely sure why, but it did; I think it might because the installation is rich in a sense of fun and silliness, together with some fantastical amphibious fish that deserve their place in children’s rhymes.
Cica Ghost: Make a Wish, April 2022
The fish bask on the stony land or upon smooth, holding themselves up on fore flippers and fat tails, dorsal fins raised like sails, eyes roving around as they observe everything on this island of humpy hills and rather amusing stick-like houses that vie with the trees to lay claim to being the tallest objects within the setting.
Ladders climb the sides of some of the houses to allow visitors to work their way up onto their roofs, where poses might be played with. Elsewhere sturdy ropes slung between tall poles may offer tightrope walkers a chance to exercise their skills or, for the more sedate, benches present places to sit, either alongside houses or under the gaze of either the local storks or the giant pink blobfish sitting at the edge of one of the setting’s pools.
Cica Ghost: Make a Wish, April 2022
Caught under s grey sky and softly lit, Make A Wish is a simple, enjoyable installation, where even the ladybirds can take a break from their busy lives and give one another a flower over which to make a wish!
Lost Dreams, April 2022 – click any image for full size
Following a poke from Shawn Shakespeare, I hopped back to Cathy Vathiany’s (zaziaa) ever-evolving region design Lost Dreams, which has had a further re-dress (and relocation), with a design that now exists in a region of two distinct halves, with several secrets awaiting discovery.
To the west, and with a north-south orientation, sits a very temperate-looking landscape which encompasses the landing point within a very rugged setting. This presents a pair of cliff-sides plateaux separated by a low meadow that is home to most of the local wildlife and spanned by a tall suspension bridge that picks its way over an inland body of water fed by falls dropping from a curtain of cliffs.
Lost Dreams, April 2022
From the landing point sitting alongside a cobbled path, it is possible to walk path west and then north to where it runs down a slope to a set of steps to where a small waterfront town sits. This is a place of broad paved roads, a busy wharf and waterfront where artists of both the visual and performance kinds have found a home, and posters on the walls give the setting something of a French connection.
Following the cobbles south from the landing point quickly leads to the tall bridge and the southern plateau, a slightly wilder setting offering camping (or glamping, given the use of ultra-modern geodesic domes), with a hint of history with the presence of the ruins of a stone-built church. Winding across the plateau, the path runs down to a southern shoreline and a small island. Those wandering down to this should be aware that there is a rental cottage tucked into the south-west corner of the setting.
Lost Dreams, April 2022
To the east, and again with a north-south orientation, the region takes on a completely tropical look. Separated from its temperate neighbour by a broad channel of water, this tropical environment can be reached via a broad bridge connecting the north-western town with a broad events space with café and fairground rides.
Beyond this, the sandy landscape points southwards – although again, be aware that the southern end of the beaches is again given over to a further pair of rental cabins – and these are not the only rentals here. Sitting off the east coast is an arc of tiki rentals, each on its own little sandy hump for those facing a holiday on the water.
Lost Dreams, April 2022
Within these two environments, however is more to be found. Clues to this can be found in the form of a couple of teleport portals – one in the temperate one on the tropical – that are hard to miss, and more subtle teleport disc scattered around. Find the right one, and you may be transported under the waters to a sunken gardens, or another to find yourself in a skyborne multiple-room lounge that has – for those of a sensitive nature – a decidedly adult theme (although other adult, umm, pointers, can be found floating on the beachside waters of the intervening channel between the two halves of the region). While sitting over those waters is a cliff side house that – I believe – is open to the public, although access is somewhat restricted.
There are also multiple touches of detail that await photographers – not that the entire setting is in any way unphotogenic; but small details are often what bring a place to life; so these are worth looking out for. There are also curious dichotomies within the region. Take the town for example: it offers something of a European tone with a pub, outdoor café, the street performance, etc., – and then sitting on the streets is a pair of stagecoaches right out of the American west.
Lost Dreams, April 2022
Compared to past versions of Lost Dreams – and Les Reves Perdus (“Dreams Lost”) before it – this iteration of Cathy’s vision is very different in tone, simply because of the way it offers that temperature / tropical split whereas past designs have tended towards just the one overall theme for their setting, be it Nordic, temperate, tropical or pastoral. However, it is clear Cathy has taken extraordinary care to make sure the two sides of the region work both as individual settings and as a united whole, with equal care being taken to keep the rentals sufficiently apart from the public spaces so as to minimise the risk of intrusion from public to private.
The Artemis 1 Space Launch System (SLS) rocket stands on its mobile launch platform at Kennedy Space Centre’s Pad 39B, where it is undergoing a full wet dress rehearsal ahead of its launch later this year – see later in this article for more. Credit: NASA
The Furthest Star
My previous Space Sunday update ended with a note that NASA would be making an announcement at the end of March 2022 concerning a new discovery by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) that could have repercussions for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), once it commences its scientific mission. Announced on March 30th, that discovery was revealed to be the imaging of the most distant individual star from Earth yet discovered. So distant, in fact, that it has taken the light from it 12.9 billion years to reach us. By contrast, the next oldest individual star we have detected using Hubble was born when the universe was already some 4 billion years old, taking 9 billion years to reach us.
Christened Eärendel, the Old English term for “morning star” (and, as Tolkien fans like me will know, was the name initially given to the half-human, half-elven navigator, prior to Tolkien changing the name of that character to Earendil), the star was discovered as a part of a HST programme called RELICS -the REionisation LensIng Cluster Survey, intended to capture to light from really far distant objects born not long after the Big Bang.
To do this, RELICS employs the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, whereby the mass of a huge object such as a galaxy or cluster of galaxies bend and focuses the light coming from objects far beyond them, allowing us to see them as magnified, arc-like objects. In this case, a cluster of galaxies called WHL0137-08 was found to be lensing the light of a galaxy far beyond them, drawing the collected light of that galaxy out into a slender crescent Hubble could see and which astronomers nicknamed the Sunrise Arc.
The red arc of the Sunrise Arc galaxy, and within it, the single point of light of Eärendel. Credit: NASA, ESA, Brian Welch (JHU), Dan Coe (STScI)
For the most part, the Sunrise Arc is blurred and instinct, like sunlight diffracted by the ripples on the surface of a swimming pool cast blurred clouds of light on the bottom of the pool. However, by coincidence, at the time the images of the Arc were recorded, Eärendel appeared directly on, or extremely close to, a curve in space-time that provided maximum brightening, allowing its light to stand out as an individual point within the blurriness of the Sunrise Arc – just like some rays of light can strike the surface of a swimming pool at precisely the right moment to avoid diffraction by the surface ripples and form pinpoints of light on the bottom of the pool rather than being blurred.
Initially it was thought that the star might in fact be a cluster, rather than a lone star, but careful analysis of Eärendel ‘s red shift has swayed astronomers towards believing it is most likely just the one star (although the potential for it to be a binary system hasn’t been entirely ruled out) of enormous size at least 50 times the mass of the Sun and correspondingly enormous luminosity.
Such is Eärendel age, that it at the time its light departed it, the star was likely only made up of primordial hydrogen and helium following the Big Bang. This makes it a prime target for study by JWST – which thanks to is infra-red capability can pick out more information about a target object than HST -, as doing so could reveal more about the state of the early universe and early stellar development.
However, such is the nature of things that – whilst referring to the star in the present tense, it’s important to note that it is very likely that while the most distant individual star observed by HST, Eärendel is not the oldest star yet found; in fact, it probably no longer exists. This is because such supermassive stars tend to burn through their available fuel stocks in mere millions of years, rather than billions. It’s therefore very likely that at some point when the light captured by Hubble was still making its way towards us, Eärendel either violently exploded into a supernova, or collapsed into a black hole – something we’ll only know for sure a few million years into our future.
The Nature of Sound on Mars
We’re all familiar with the concept of the speed of sound. Here on Earth and at sea level, with the temperature at 20ºC, sound travels at 343 metres per second (m/s). However, that is not an absolute; it varies according to the relative atmospheric temperature and density. At altitudes up to 20 km, the speed of sound slowly declines due to the thinning of the atmosphere; however, above 20 km, whilst the atmosphere continues to thin, its temperature actually increases, making it more excitable, and so the speed of sound increases once more.
Much the same was thought to be true on Mars, where the relatively thin atmospheric density close to the surface of the planet was thought to limit sound waves to around an average of 240 m/s (again, allowing for variations in temperature). However, what no-one expected was that the speed of sound would vary according to frequency – but that is what the Mars 2020 mission has revealed.
An international team of scientists reached this conclusion after analysing recordings made by one of two microphones mounted on the Perseverance rover. The SuperCam microphone mounted at the top of the rover’s mast is somewhat directional in nature in that turning / tilting the SuperCam unit allows the microphone to be pointed directly at sound sources, allowing it to record them with a good level of fidelity.
The Mars 2020 rover’s SuperCam system with the “directional” microphone highlighted. Credit: NASA/JPL
This is been done a number of time during the rover’s mission. For example, the camera has been pointed towards the Ingenuity Mars helicopter, allowing it to directly record the low-frequency beating of the helicopter’s rotors. It is also naturally pointing at rockets targeted for “zapping” by SuperCam’s laser. It has also been able to listen to tools and equipment operating at the end of the rover’s robot arm. All of these sounds have now been collectively analysed, and scientist have been surprised to find that while lower frequency sounds – such as the beating of Ingenuity’s rotors – travel at the expected Martian average of 240 m/s, sounds at frequencies greater then 240 Hertz, such as the higher-pitched click-click-clicking of the SuperCam laser actually travel around 10 m/s faster – the first time this has ever been observed.
The cause for this unusual difference is thought to be the result of the Martian atmosphere being largely carbon-dioxide. In studying the tenuous Martian atmosphere, scientists have discovered during the day, the heat of the Sun, deflected as it is by the surface of the planet, generates an unusual turbulence in the first 10 km of atmosphere above the planet. This turbulence has an unusual impact on the carbon dioxide that isn’t seen in Earth’s denser atmosphere: it allows higher frequency sounds to excite the carbon dioxide molecules a lot more than low-frequency sounds, allowing such higher frequencies to be more rapidly transmitted through the atmospheric medium.
Because this effect happens almost smack in the middle of the bandwidth of sounds audible to the human ear, it means that if we were able to stand out in the open on Mars and listen to something like a symphony being played a few 10 of metres away, rather than hearing all the notes collectively as we would on Earth, we’d hear the higher notes a second or so ahead of the lower notes, resulting in a discordant mess. However, a more practical outcome of this discovery is that engineers believe that by listening to the different frequencies within the sounds made by various pieces of audible equipment on the rover, they could potentially identify if that part of the rover is experiencing issues, and thus be forewarned that action might be required well before a potential failure occurs.
Spread across two levels in the south-west corner of the main structure, the gallery space is a blend of the antiquarian architecture of the core build mixed with modern glass-and-steel elements to present a space that is both enclosed enough so as not to impinge on the sense of history found within the rest of the build, but also in and of itself carries a sense of being light, airy and free from any sense of being confined within the larger build.
The Antiquorum Art Gallery: Alexa Wulfe – Landscapes – My Personal View
The aim of the gallery is to to work alongside the ballroom and other facilities found within the Hanging Gardens to provide a “home for some of the best artists in the grid to show their work, together with a very exclusive cultural programme of concerts and cultural events”, and April 2nd, 2022 saw the opening of Landscapes – My Personal View, by Alexa Wulfe (Alexa Bouras).
Supported by Mistero Hifeng’s familiar sculptures, the exhibition presents some 24 images by Alexa spread across the gallery’s two levels. As the name suggests, this is a very personal view of Second Life, one seen through the eyes of the artist-observer, offering unique views of our digital realm. Most of which have been post-processed with the aim of presenting them as paintings (primarily watercolours, although a couple have the heavier sense of oil about them whilst others offer a finish suggestive of having been drawn.
The Antiquorum Art Gallery: Alexa Wulfe – Landscapes – My Personal View
However, the one thing all of them have in common is the fact that they have been beautifully executed to offer richly engaging views of Second Life that cannot fail to capture and hold the eye and the imagination. With them, we can voyage through several of SL’s popular public regions and see them as Alexa viewed them in her travels, the colours and finish of each allowing us insight into Alexa’s sense of her subjects and the tales they may have formed in her imagination.
For me, the exhibition was a superb introduction to another highly talented Second Life photographer, and I look forward to seeking out more of Alexa’s work in-world – and also to visiting more exhibits to The Antiquorum Art Gallery.
The Antiquorum Art Gallery: Alexa Wulfe – Landscapes – My Personal View
Having graduated from the juvenile education system, Ana Mia decides to join her sister as a part of Fort Hope’s Midnight Guard. Fort Hope is a stronghold, protecting its inhabitants from Earth’s alien invaders; and the Midnight Guard forms the eyes, ears and guardians of the stronghold’s Wall.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 