Welcome SidLit!

Science Simulations for students in Second Life at SidLit July 31, 2009.
















Welcome from Simone Gateaux and her carbon based side kick Paul Decelles!

Install the Second Life viewer first and create your avatar.

SLURL to Sidlit Notecard with landmarks:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Carmine/87/145/135

When you arrive, touch on the box which will offer you a note card with landmarks to the sites discussed in my presentation. Accept the note card into your inventory.

Other links-not SLURLS:

Some scripting resources:

Scratch for Second Life:
http://web.mit.edu/~eric_r/Public/S4SL/

Autoscript: A web based script generator:
http://www.3greeneggs.com/autoscript/


Other virtual World Systems:

Virtual Worlds: Best Practices in Education 2009:
http://www.vwbpe.org/

Wonderland
Blog Entry about Wonderland:
http://slbiology.blogspot.com/2009/03/wonderland.html

Sun's Wonderland Site:
https://lg3d-wonderland.dev.java.net/index.html

Video about iSocial at U of Missouri in Columbia MO:



OpenSim Links:
Blog entry about OpenSim and Intel's Science Island:
http://slbiology.blogspot.com/2009/03/opensim.html
OpenSim main site:
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page

Exit Reality
Blog Entry about Exit Reality:
http://slbiology.blogspot.com/2009/02/another-virtual-reality-system.html

Exit Reality Site:
http://3d.exitreality.com/

Mitosis I Wigglies

Animated and wiggly duplicated chromosomes (Reddish wormie things*) scripted to separate and behave as they do during anaphase. The green structures are the paired centrioles, the pink box when touched tells the sister chromatids...those are the wigglies... to separate into unduplicated chromosomes.

*notice the precise biological terminology in this post.

Lots of stuff: Part 1

Been busy teaching in first life this summer but also with Second Life as well. In about 2 weeks I in my first life presence as Paul Decelles will be giving a presentation on doing simulations in Second Life to the SIDLIT conference in Kansas City. My topic is Scientific Simulations in Virtual Worlds and I will cover some of the stuff I did on my sabbatical, lots of which is on this blog, and also discuss alternative virtual world systems for doing simulations.




Also, I am part of a group of Second Lifers working over at Nature Magazine's Second Life site at Elucian Omega associated with their Second Nature site. The idea is to have people share lab space to work on their own projects and by sharing space and working in close proximity hopefully the collaboration engendered will lead to greater productivity.

The group includes a bunch of really talented people including Max Chatnoir, whose Genome Island Site I have visited numerous times. Another really talented person doing some exciting work on visualizing proteins is Hiro Sheridan who does lots of really cook stuff on visualizing protein structure. We each have our own project areas, my project is to build a mitosis and meiosis simulation, something I have wanted to do, but it is a bit more complex than the other things I have done and so its only now do I have the background in scripting to attempt this.

Since we have people at different levels of Second Life experience, we are having some basic workshops to get us started. For instance the first week was basic building, given by Hiro. I don't know about the other participants, but I thought it is really valuable to see how another person explains Second Life.

In Second Life there are often several ways to ummm build a cat. So it is easy to get stuck in one way of doing things. For instance, when I duplicate an object I always do it from the pie menu and had forgotten about the little shift and drag trick, which is actually a lot easier. Another example: our first homework assignment is to build a chair and while I have done some building had not built my on chairs-just quickly slapping things together not not being too concerned with the llSitTarget function.




So this morning, I spent some time building a chair and using llSitTarget...and of course it needed a table, and a nice rug. The result is shown here. Now I can replace those lumpy cushions in my lab space!