Troy McConaghy

I'm not sure what to make of this... It's billed as the "first scientific conference to be held inside the World of Warcraft" starting today (May 9) and going until until Sunday (May 11).  Curious?  More information at:

Official Website 

Article in Virtual Worlds News

One of the things I track on this blog is the growing occurence of virtual conferences.   Today there is a nice article in Business Week about how Cisco recently had a virtual conference alongside a physical conference in Hawaii.  They used a special-purpose virtual world system made by Unisfair.  One interesting quote from the article (talking about Unisfair and their conference events):

The Menlo Park (Calif.) company has arranged more than 400 events since it started in 2002. "It took us almost four years to get to that first 200, and in the last 12 months we've basically doubled in size," says Brent Arslaner, vice-president for marketing at Unisfair.

Cisco also has a substantial presence in Second Life.  They were one of the major sponsors of the Life 2.0 Summit in March. 

This past week I made the "mistake" of noting that I have a free & open-source Slide Presentation Screen for Second Life (SL) on the SL EDucators mailing list.  After that, I got something like 40 requests for a copy!  It's nice to know that I can be of help, but gosh, I thought almost everyone already had a slide presentation screen of some kind already.  Slide presentation screens (which can also show video) happen to be the main media tool used at almost all talks in SL.

Dr. Rob Knop giving a talk in SL

One thing I hear a lot is: "Why are you showing slides in SL?  Can't you do so much more?"   Yes... but if you want to show a drawing, some text, a video, or a photo, what are you supposed to do?  It doesn't make much sense to make some things three-dimensional.  Another thing I hear goes something like: "3D virtual worlds will replace the (2D) Web."  Um, no, because two-dimensional text, art, photographs, video, etc. will remain good ways of communicating.

In other news, I was interviewed on Cypress Rosewood's weekly radio show this past Monday.  It gets broadcast live on the air in the Nashville area.  Every week, he interviews a different person who's using SL, typically someone in the arts or sciences, asking how they found out about SL, what they've done in SL, how it's affected them as a person.  If the guest is a musician, they'll often perform a piece or two.  Very few shows, blogs, podcasts, etc. are doing in-depth interviews like that.  Tonight Live with Paisley Beebe is one, but the interviews on her show tend to be short because she's got to cram three interviews into each show.  Metanomics has some interesting interviews, but they tend to be focused on virtual worlds at a higher level of abstraction (e.g. comparing different virtual world platforms).

My current project, The Earl and the Leviathan, is coming along...  The 3D model of the Leviathan (giant telescope) has around 1100 prims, so there was no way it was going to fit into my parcel on Caledon Moors; that parcel can only hold about 700 prims.  I did some looking around and finally made a deal with Rocket Sellers (SL name) for some land on the Space Island sim, which is part of the SciLands.  The parcel has been subdivided and terraforming has begun.  Tomorrow I've got a meeting to see about making a pathway connecting it to the Science Friday sim (associated with the eponymous NPR radio show).  I've placed a lovely Victorian house in my parcel on Caledon Moors for now... what will go there in the future?  Stay tuned!

The SciLands Senate changed their weekly meeting format last week.  Now we tour of a different SciLands sim each week.  Yesterday we toured the Genome sim and that led to interesting discussions about using SL for education.  The main person behind the Genome sim is Max Chatnoir (SL name).  She's a professor of biology at Texas Wesleyan University.  Next year, she'll be taking a full-year sabbatical to develop educational content for SL.

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No you won't get a pony.

Photo credit:  pony by steve_lodefink on Flickr.

My current project - The Earl and the Leviathan - is off to a great start.  Jimbo Perhaps (his SL name) has built a life-size model of the Leviathan (the largest telescope of the nineteenth century).  He also built a model of Lord Rosse's first telescope!  If you're not familiar with Jimbo, you may be familiar with his work:  he built many of the exhibits at the International Spaceflight Museum, including a detailed model of the Space Shuttle.

Meanwhile, I've written the first draft of the script (in the audio-visual sense, not the computer sense), including the narration (to be heard as audio) and visual elements visitors will experience at the exhibition.  While researching Lord Rosse,  I found a historical gem using Google Book Search:  the library at the University of Michigan has a copy of an 1844 book about Lord Rosse's monster telescopes.  Google scanned it into their database, so now the whole world can read it online!  (Its copyright expired long ago.)

Here's a draft of a poster, done in a style that was common in the Victorian era:

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently got a land parcel in Caledon Moors, one of the Caledon sims.

My intention was to use the parcel for a new science-themed exhibition. Because Caledon is nineteenth-century Victorian, I felt the exhibition should be relevant to that time period.

There are a great many things that happened in the sciences in the nineteenth century, so I had no shortage of ideas. I was curious which scientists were born in 1800, so I looked it up in my copy of Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, Second Revised Edition. Among the six people listed, one caused my eyebrow to raise: William Parsons, the Third Earl of Rosse. Impressed by his title, I had to read more.

He's best known for building a really big telescope (completed in 1845).  Known as The Leviathan of Parsonstown, it was the world's largest telescope for over 70 years.  The photo below shows it on the grounds of his family's castle (Birr Castle) in Parsonstown, central Ireland.

What was discovered with the telescope?  How well did it work?  What became of it?  Stay tuned - for I'm doing an exhibition about it!  The exhibition will be called The Earl and the Leviathan.