Ursula K. Le Guin reading from "Always Coming Home" at Potlatch 18, streamed into Second Life

I read The Dispossessed for the first time during my junior year of college, and its lesson, in a friend’s words, that “it’s always more complicated” has stayed with me, even if I don’t always remember it. Three Roads Four Ways to Forgiveness should be read by any would-be liberator from oppression.

Earlier this year, I was very happy to help arrange for her reading from Always Coming Home at Potlatch, a small literary SF convention, to be streamed into Second Life. Every time I see that screen shot, I can’t help but think that she’s conversing with the machine intelligences in the City of Mind.

Happy Birthday, Ms. Le Guin, and thank you for your books.

It’s been hooked up to TiddlyWiki, and the creators are looking at how to make it work with the new HTTP-in (every prim a server) functions in LSL so you can update the StoryMachine instance from outside of Second Life.

Strata is a world-class geek and polymath: she’s co-authored one of the go-to books on system administration, teaches project management at USENIX, gardens, dotes on her cats, dives, blogs, and operates HAM radio.

Last year, she joined us at Linden Lab. If you recall my employer’s recent announcement hosting IBM’s annual Technology Academy meetings in Second Life behind their firewall, Strata’s project management acumen made that possible.

I’m starting to do more project management in my job, and Strata’s been a great mentor to me as I learn those new skills.

Thanks Strata. Happy Ada Lovelace Day.

There’s a whole host of women geeks I’ve known in-person and virtually to recognize as well:

Dorothea Salo, whose journey from linguistics grad student to authority on Open Access digital archiving it has been a pleasure to read these past few years.

Dori Smith and Shelly Powers, both excellent explainers of technology.

Liz Henry, who I’ve known for ages. She picked up, took her laptop, and went to Houston to help Katrina refugees who were getting short shrift from FEMA. And that’s a small part of all the great things she’s done over the years.

Our cousin Vito Excaliber, with her wit and sketchpad.

K. Tempest Bradford, netbook maven, and unflinching vanguard for women of color in science fiction fandom.

Tess Chu, our team’s technical lead: unflappable, wise in the ways of C++, and mentors other women engineers and students.

Florence Chan, artist and wrangler of sculpted prims, whose landscaping makes Second Life a beautiful place to visit.

Meadhbh Hamrick, striving to get a pack of assorted vendors and technologists to march in the same direction on interoperability standards for virtual worlds.

And of course, Cynthia Gonsalves, beloved wielder of x-rays, focused ion beams, and knitting needles.

The above is Hiro’s Molecule Rezzer constructing a ball and stick model of a lactose molecule in Second Life. It’s reading data from the HyperChem database converted into a notecard.

You can get one for free from the American Chemical Society’s sim*.

This is one of several examples of data visualization tools in Second Life mentioned in Rose and Tess Linden’s presentation at the She’s Geeky conference last weekend.

Daden Prime combines Google Maps with news feeds from the BBC, Al Jazeera, and CNN; earthquake data from the USGS; and 3D maps and panoramas of Birmingham.

* When you get Hiro’s Molecule Rezzer, select it to edit, then select “Recompile Scripts in Selection > Mono” from the Tools menu. The Rezzer will run much faster.

This quarter, I’ve stepped away from programming to manage the Open Grid Public Beta program: the first step towards breaking out of the walled garden of virtual worlds.

In this stage, identity is what’s portable. Participants sign in to what we’re calling an Agent Domain on Second Life’s preview grid (aditi.) Then they can log into regions supporting the Open Grid Protocol. Some of those regions are hosted by Linden Lab, the bulk of them are externally hosted, running a special version of the OpenSim virtual world toolkit.

You’ll show up as a default avatar, without a prim or pixel of clothing to your name, because managing inventory, permissions, and the copyright issues surrounding them are out of scope for this part of the program. But you can jump between virtual worlds.

My coworker Periapse Linden coined a wonderful term for the participants, they are gridnauts, a word evoking the romance of the space program.

If you’re interested in the project, read the Second Life wiki page to learn more. If you want to know more about what’s behind all this, Tish Shute has a background piece on the program at Ugotrade (thanks, Tish, by the way, for letting me have the last word, so to speak.)

In an email to the Lab, I paraphrased Alasdair Gray, and called this the early days of a better metaverse. There’s a lot of work to do. It will be fun and not so easy, and I believe that virtual worlds are the place to be right now if you’re looking for interesting technology and governance challenges.