Third Party Viewers have been big among many established residents of Second Life. There are those - for example a lot of educators - who won't use TPVs of any kind on their university's machines, an approach I completely understand. But for the rest - if you believe the numbers (and I don't know if I do) Emerald was getting about 50% of the log-ins every day into Second Life.

Add in Imprudence, the official 1.23 viewer that never got taken down following the outcry about Viewer 2.x, Cool Viewer, RLV and more and even if Emerald over-counted their numbers (as some suggest), there is still a big problem with the adoption of the official viewer with those who feel they have a choice.

As a clear indication of just how popular Emerald was, no fewer than two spin-offs (Emergence and Phoenix) have appeared using essentially the same code (without the naughty bits in it we're assured) and without the team members that LL identified as unacceptable. For me Phoenix is the only option of these as Emergence is dropping Mac support.

Normally I probably wouldn't have written about this, but Emerald, Emergence and Phoenix have gone down a route of tonnes and tonnes of preferences. About 50 screens of them in total. Linden Lab on the other hand are trying to justify having almost no preferences. I don't think I've ever seen such a unified response to a blog post - whoever they are, they are saying "This is the wrong approach" - it will be interesting to see if LL take any notice. I won't be holding my breath though.

Let's be honest, looking at the trailers and the cast I ought not to be in the demographic for this film. But actually, it really, really worked well.

Although one of my movie-going companions is very teasable about this, if FAQ About Time Travel was a nerdy rom com about time travel, Scott Pilgrim is a geeky rom com about video games. There is, most certainly, a rom com storyline in there - boy meets the girl of his dreams and has to overcome obstacles to woo her. In a move that will have literature professors spinning in their graves, or falling into them early, it even has some elements of classical romantic literature with most of the lead characters showing development, developing maturity and the like.

Of course, for Scott Pilgrim, the challenges are not social opprobrium (yes Mr. Darcy I'm thinking of you), interfering families (actually there are interfering family and friends but they're not the big challenges, they more comic relief), and the like. They are the Seven Evil Exes. These defeats could all be metaphorical and allegorical - some of them clearly are, even while watching the film without further reflection - but they are also where the video games come into it - each challenge takes the form of a battle (not necessarily a fight) from a video game.

If I was more of that kind of geek I would doubtless know them all. As it is, I wasn't into musical video games (I know about Guitar Hero, who doesn't? But I've never even see a copy of it in use for real), and I wasn't into the Street Fighter etc. genre either and that's where the battles are set. Despite that I think we all know enough about the style of the games, certainly I found I did, that even if we miss many game specific references (I'm sure I did) it's still funny. And funny it was - well it's a comedy after all - laugh out loud funny on a regular basis.

The film also has a ton of visual style that refers back to the gaming. Many sound effects are accompanied by visual cues - not quite Batman (TV Series) "Ka-Pow" captioning but getting there. There are a couple of potty-mouth scenes with black-boxes to stop lip-reading and beeping out of the words - not played to keep the rating down as much as for the laugh about games that do that. Many characters have little information cards that pop-up, very CCG tie-in friendly. Ramona's ever changing hair colour and style is a throw-back to the kind of graphics we had when games first went into colour, all those years ago. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't get the colour range into 8-bit colour schemes, but it was still the right sort of look.

It was loads of fun. It's not going to be in the running for the best film of the year in my book (Inception is still up there, chased by Sorcerer's Apprentice and Percy Jackson) but I'm pretty sure it will be in the next tier down - good solid film that I thoroughly enjoyed and would probably see again.

So, some time ago I wrote a blog post about British sport in which I mentioned that Cricket is probably the sport with most influence on our culture. In case you need to refer back to it I also wrote a longer post about Cricket and the rules.

I hadn't expected such a dramatic reinforcement of those statements.

Last Sunday one of the Sunday papers (the News of the World, nicknamed News of the Screws because it specialises in salacious gossip rather than news usually) carried a story about a sting operation in which someone had taken money to fix betting on a Cricket match.

Although I didn't know about this in advance, Cricket allows spot bets - that is bets about the outcome of a particular delivery. You might, as a fan, turn to your neighbour and say "I bet the next ball gets hit for six" for example - although informal that's the nature of a spot bet. Of course the betting fraternity is a bit more organised and does it for money. The allegation is that this person could guarantee certain deliveries would be no balls - another possible bet and one that's essentially fixable because the bowler can deliberately overstep to make it happen. If Cricket leaves you confused, imagine being able to bet that the first pitch of the second innings would be a ball - that's the same general idea and then that someone gets to the pitcher to encourage them to do this.

Since that time this has been in the news every day. And I do mean every day. In fact, except for Wednesday which marked both the publication of Tony Blair's memoirs of his time in power and the minor event of the end of US combat operations in Iraq, this story has been the leading story on every news bulletin, the top story on the BBC News website and more. It still is today.

The "Bloodgate" scandal in Rugby, various scandals about cheating on the rules trying about trying to induce transfers in Football have, in the past made the news. Sometimes they make the front pages where the serious news is printed, well was, but normally it's the sport's headline not the main news headline. If you search for Pakistan, for it is three of Pakistan's cricket team that have been accused of this cheating, on the BBC News site, there are more stories about this than trivial (in the sense of obviously less newsworthy) things like the floods in the last month!

How embedded in our culture is Cricket? More deeply than perhaps I'd imagined. We certainly have our share of criminals and cheats but there's something about Cricket and its image of honesty, fairness and friendly competition that seems to resonate within our culture. Seeing it threatened like this makes it a news story that is much more important than it would otherwise appear. I'm not quite sure what the equivalents would be in other cultures. The only one I can really imagine is fixing now the winner of the Superbowl. "Oakland haven't won recently, it's their turn" and being caught doing it.

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Having been rude about The News of the World (NOTW), it's worth pointing out that the Pakistan Cricket Board are saying that NOTW faked the sting operation after between the Friday (when all the incidents took place) and the Sunday when they ran the story. Normally this would get short shrift but NOTW is all over the news for another story today - illegally hacking or attempting to hack mobile phones. Several people with a fair degree of influence are saying that if things are not cleared up and made clear they are going to be taking NOTW and the police force that investigated it to court for judicial review. NOTW are certainly not angels in terms of what they do to make or get a story.

Salt is an odd movie to try and review. To quote one of my companions "There's nothing wrong with it" and actually there's quite a lot that's good with it but we all left it feeling a little disappointed.

Part of the problem is that, unlike a James Bond movie say, there's a clear bad guy, actually lots of clear bad guys but there's not really a good guy. You may or may not like Bond as the roguish hero but there's no doubt he's a hero throughout. With Salt that is far, far less clear even at the end of the film. From that point of view it put me in mind of some of the darker, grittier spy stories. I guess I'm thinking Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and the like from the John Le Carre true Cold War era where everyone is tainted it's just a case of trying to work out not only who has done unconscionable things but done the wrong unconscionable things from the point of the view of the country they're employed by.

Of course Le Carre novels and the films and TV series adapted from there were rarely high octane summer action blasts. Salt most definitely adds that to the mix. If it had been Tom Cruise, Jason Statham or someone like that the film would have been just a modernised Cold War spy story with nothing special about it. Having a female lead changed that somewhat. It shouldn't - there's no doubt that we have female spies after all but the Hollywood action genre is so dominated by men that it's hard to remember sometimes that their ought to be females doing some of these things but Angelina Jolie pulls it off and carries the film along happily. She's as plausible as any male action star in the fighting scenes, the running scenes and the jumping around doing unlikely stunts scenes. Actually in many of them she's more plausible because while I'm sure she has an ego it doesn't come out in "my jump's got to be bigger than his" and so when she's climbing around, jumping around etc. they've got some concept of plausibility rather than "bigger stunt than that guy's." There are various points where all of us wondered why the people she's beating up didn't just step back and shoot her. OK, it's common to the genre but we each noticed one or two such cases enough to comment on them.

Despite feeling a bit disappointed I don't regret having gone. It is quite like a modernised Cold War movie complete with mad, bad Russian sleeper agents and the works. It won't be for everyone but it's fun enough if you enjoy that type of thing.

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Addendum: What I was trying to say has become a bit clearer on reflection. The summer blockbuster movies, be that Bond, Bourne, Die Hard etc. have a clear and unambiguous hero. Even in Bourne, where he's trying to uncover his identity and so on, he's clearly a hero. It's a part of the trope. Salt doesn't have this - instead it has the more intellectual spy novel approach; le Carre is an excellent example - where it's not clear if Salt is a hero or a villain in bigger terms, although she's clearly the protagonist of the film. But there's just a little something lurking, at least there was for me, where one needs the protagonist to be a hero to carry the action scenes where she (or more usually he) spends hero points to stop people shooting her. That wasn't there in this film and it made it not quite gel.

Although that sounds quite negative, I think it was a brave choice to try it like this. I think Angelina Jolie carried off the ambiguity of the role magnificently. And, with time (rather than reflection) the points that jarred at the time are less significant. Unlike Clash of the Titans which I liked at the time but grew increasingly dissatisfied with in retrospect, Salt was pretty good at the time but has improved in memory.

It's hard to move these days without mention of social networking sites. Facebook, Twitter and if you read this blog Second Life (OK, SL isn't a social networking SITE strictly but it has a number of features that make it resemble such a system) are regularly mentioned.

But various people have been talking for decades now about hard-wired limits to stable social networking in humans. Most famous of these is doubtless Dunbar's number at about 150 (100-230), although other estimates are up around 230-300 (notably the Bernard-Killworth estimate which has the benefit of being based on actual observations rather than a theoretical model from ancient primates and the hypothesised nature of the neocortex).

The number doesn't actually matter for this argument, just the idea that there is some limit. So what fills up that limit?

For most of us we have family - be that parents, siblings, spouses, children and in some cases in laws, cousins and the like fill some of that limit. Some of us have virtual relationships, partners, possibly those we relate to in a style similar to parents/siblings/children too. Work colleagues, whatever the environment with which we work with them atomic or pixel space and possibly only some subset of the work colleagues too, take some some of that limit. Your boss, any underlings, long established colleagues. Pre-doctoral students in your lab and the like if you're in academia, tutees and tutors, mentors and mentees all contribute to the mix. Your PLN is certainly something that bites into your Dunbar number or your Bernard-Willworth median.

Add in some friends and neighbours - the people you call, IM, Skype, email or whatever, the people you see and chat to most days around the home, in the corner shop, at the coffee shop, on the train when you're commuting or whatever the mix is.

You might notice in all of my categories I've actually put SL colleagues, friends and loved ones in the same category as atomic space colleagues, friends and loved ones - that's not accidental. Regular users of SL develop those relationships in ways that are, except for touch, largely indistinguishable from RL ones in my opinion. What does it say about our Facebook and Twitter friends though? Well some proportion of them are people inside our limit of course. They are extra ways of keeping in touch with those self-same colleagues, friends and loved ones. But the rest?

It is worth at this point remembering what the Dunbar number and Bernard-Killworth numbers are about. They are limits to the size of stable social networks for humans. When you have 2,000 friends on Facebook and 250,000 followers on Twitter you don't maintain stable social networks with them all. That probably doesn't actually need to be said you're thinking. But I would say that it does need to be said and considered. Unlike Second Life, which facilitates opportunities to turn casual acquaintances into stable social network members and also facilitates the normal processes by which acquaintances are made, maintained for a while and then moved into the "people I vaguely know" category or even "people I used to know" category rather than active members of the social network. That is, if you like, part of why Second Life works as it does.

Facebook and Twitter may facilitate the odd extra real friend, the person you meet through Mafia Wars or whatever who becomes a real friend and a genuine, stable member of your social network. Largely, though, it is either an extra tool for communicating with those you would communicate with regularly anyway OR it is a tool that allows you to stably and persistently send and receive noise to people with whom you should not strive to maintain a stable network. Suddenly there's noise in the signal. Potentially lots of noise of in the signal. When you reach saturation point with noise what do you do? You leave the network behind, secure in the knowledge that your stable social network will survive intact.

Facebook may still be growing - although like Second Life it's very hard to eradicate your account details on Facebook even if you say you're leaving so maybe it's not really growing, unlike Second Life there's no data about distinct users in the last X days available that I can find - but how long before they go the way of MySpace, BeBoo and the rest?

And, as a sideline to that, maybe that's part of why SL works for some and not others once the first hour is past but before the first month. You stay for a bit in SL and realise you're going to start making genuine friends. You don't have to be Billy No-Mates to have a bit of space in your limit number and decide (consciously or otherwise) to remain and make some new friends. You may very deliberately come in to SL for work and make some new stable social bonds with colleagues. That may also contribute to the age demographic of Second Life residents too. In your 30's and older you don't have millions of class mates and the like. You're starting to learn that some of your work mates will remain, some will be transient. You're losing touch with former close friends thanks to moving around the country and the world for work, marriage and the like. You are, sad to say, starting to lose friends and relatives to death as well. If you accept most people are social creatures and want to be connected, want to be close to their stable limit, then Second Life gives you a space to make those stable connections that is divorced from geographical accident. You make, to paraphrase one of those dreadful adverts for a dating site, connections based on similar inner values. But you have to have the space there in the first place (and get past the limits of the UI etc.). And perhaps too, that's why at various points so many people come to SL looking for cyber-sex and why the cyber-sex tag stays. We all know sexual relationships aren't necessarily stable but we mostly live in cultures that say the best ones are. It's a way to look at establishing one or may be a few extra stable social links. And it still won't help Facebook and Twitter survive unless they can offer something different.

Like a lot of inhabitants of virtual worlds there's a blurring of experience between "real life" and "second life" or atomic space and pixel space or whatever terms you like to try and distinguish them. My brain just processes experience and as someone (in the atomic sense) that strongly embodies in my avatar I would argue I even acquire some form of muscle memory. (Nick Bollettieri's tennis academy that produced such greats as Andre Agassi used visualisation of shots without actually moving as part of his training, skiers practise through visualisation, martial artists too, why would people be surprised that watching an avatar with whom you identify can evoke muscle memory too?)

Detractors from the position that virtual life can affect real life maintain there's something special about reality although I'm going to call it atomic space. If you search this blog and Google you can find a lot of examples of successful education in Second Life and other virtual environments. That has to count for something to counter their argument but doesn't stop it.

The walls may not be tumbling down in their entirety of course but it's increasingly easy to ask "what is reality?" and expect an incoherent answer. We are used to photoshopped pictures. To the extent that, rather like googling it, the terms are entering the common vocabulary as verbs rather than proper nouns. You can easily beautify someone, fairly easily insert someone who was never there into a picture even.

But this week Autotune, and possibly in the near future to autotune, has become big news. Autotune is one of a range of tools to help clean up a vocal performance. Very crudely put it takes a note (say a sung one) and moves it from where it was sung to where it was meant to be sung by changing the pitch. Cher's "Believe" used this to the extreme - you can hear the difference between her (largely unchanged) voice in the chorus and the "bubbly/warbly" highly autotuned voice in the verse. In that case it was a deliberate effect, she wanted the electronicy-roboty sound.



Of course this illustrates one of the problems that might become a lot more important in times to come. I remember the first time I heard the song (sorry, my street cred is falling, but I've always liked Cher's music, well big chunks of it) and I recognised the chorus as Cher but wondered who she was singing with. We use a lot of little tone and pitch cues to recognise the singer.

If you watch this video (embedding disabled, sorry) and the one below (same song) they're sung in similar registers. One is sung by a far more accomplished singer - one is an actress who sings and one a professional singer after all. That's not the issue. The issue is that you can (even I can with my dodgy hearing) recognise the difference between voices from the subtle differences in tones.



Just like photoshop allows you to insert a part of an image, including someone in the picture that wasn't there (and potentially making a harmless and much nicer holiday snap of the whole family say), Autotune can help you clean up a performance and/or lay down some interesting extra effects. But how long until it lets you set up an ability to perfectly mimic someone else's voice? Imagine shifting, if you're British, Enoch Powell's infamous "Rivers of Blood" speech into David Cameron's voice and playing it back... oops. If you don't know Rivers of Blood, imagine a KKK rallying speech converted into MLK's voice - that's a similar sort of speech and culture shock.

Just where is reality these days?

Although it's superficially different in almost every respect, FAQ About Time Travel is at heart from the same stable as Shaun of the Dead. Where SOTD was a rom com set in a zombie-apocalypse, FAQATT is a rom com set against the backdrop of three nerdy mates who can't get a girlfriend, one of whom is the biggest nerd of the bunch with serious chats about time travel and the like.

Anna Faris plays the unlikely time cop who falls for the famous (in her time) but unattractive time travel nerd. It's quite tempting to say she's superfluous to the plot but she's obviously essential to the rom part of the rom com - Hollywood wouldn't have gay nerds in a rom com after all, although given this was jointly funded by HBO and the BBC they might have got away with it. The bulk of the humour, apart from his mates not believing he met a beautiful woman who was in to him, is really in the nerd territory. We have time-travelling editors who try to assassinate public figures at the height of their fame for posterity as the bad guys. Anna Faris' character as a junior time cop who should be able to explain The Grandfather Paradox and can't. Layering of time tracks as they bounce back and forth through time and see themselves from dozens of different perspectives at various points.

The jokes are well paced and if you didn't think a comedy about time travel was possible but the idea is intriguing, you could find a much worse way to spend 90 minutes or so.

Linden Lab is moving to change one of the supposed perennial bugbears of Second Life - the forced surnames and log-in names being the same as "character" names for want of a better term. I vaguely remember, all those years ago, being slightly surprised that you couldn't change your name easily. Although I'd not tried WOW etc. back then (actually there wasn't an official European WOW server back then or it was just into closed beta) I had played online games where you'd create an account with one name and play a character with a different name. Lineage and Shadowbane for example.

But, once I'd got used to the system for SL I didn't look back. Since that time tools such as Facebook etc. have made most of used to the idea of unique user ids by email address but shared names. If you search Fb for that all-time supposed favourite "John Smith" you get about 7 people with that name. Of course that other great social networking institution, Twitter insists on unique display names too, so you get names like John_Smith8 etc.

LL is changing from the Twitter model to the Facebook model if you like. OK, it predates Twitter, but that's the style of the change.

Broadly speaking I don't have a problem with this. I can't see actually using it myself but I'm generally for wider choice. I can see the benefits to some types of role-players, augmentors and the like. My problem? Well the display names can include the user name of someone else. Someone can set their display name to "Eloise Pasteur" stand in my shop and take orders from customers for me. NOT fun. If you're a teacher, someone can set their display name to your name and take some avatar that looks like you, with your name clearly showing, to any kind of dodgy club you like, take photos and post them to flickr or similar. That will be fun for someone. Alternatively they can mimic you and bully a classmate in the guise of you. That will go down well!

Linden Lab, in a wonderful display of "we know best" is ignoring all of the protest comments. So if you want to protest the way this change is being implemented, try voting for VWR-20859 on the pJIRA please. A system that makes it very clear what the display name is AND the account name AND lets you easily distinguish them both at all times would be the minimum to make this acceptable. I'd quite like to see a twitter-like no duplicating of display names and no duplicating user names with display names too. I can set my display name to Eloise Pasteur, you can't. The UTF-heads will say that you can set other character sets to look like my name, but only a few people will bother to do that, and the combination of a simple check and an always showing user name in all places will help and make it less attractive for the potential hackers of the system.

The people that have a genuine use for this won't be bothered - role players can ignore bits of naming easily enough, they already do with they play a different character after all. We'll all become adept at reading "Hamlet (aka Blue Linden): To be or not to be..." etc. soon enough.

Otherwise I might just have to become Eloise Pasteur™ and we'll see what LL does about protecting my intellectual property. Aimee Webber might be the poster-child for that already...

I like to think I'd make a good juror. I'm smart, I under the science, I have a lot of training in basing decisions on evidence. Sounds like a good combination for a juror, no? In all that I have to admit I'd probably be a terrible juror on a rape case. I think the whole situation around the way rape cases are put together and tried makes it such a hard thing to do that the victim of the crime has to be pretty convinced that it's that person and to want to carry it through possibly even force it through.

So imagine my surprise when I read this article about the founder of wikileaks being charged with rape and thought "what bullshit." A few hours later I was quite relieved to hear the arrest warrant was cancelled.

The reason I'm confused is partly that my instant reaction was "That's bogus" rather than the "castrate the bastard" that I'd normally think. And I wonder what it says about my attitude to the supposed leading nation of the free world that, to be honest, my instant reaction was that this was all a sort of James Bond-like smear campaign straight out of the cold war. Julian Assange very clearly embarrassed the US Government. The, to my ears at least, bleating of the DoD spokesman that he was risking lives may or may not have any validity (I'm inclined to think little or none but that's just me) but it just sounded too much like a statement of "how dare anyone embarrass us by the telling the truth we don't want to have told, we'll try to make him look wicked too" to gain any traction. I'm guessing that in the US it probably convinced a section of people who think that the government can do no wrong and hardly anyone else. Attempting to smear him with a crime like this, a crime that evokes a very strong emotional response in most people, just feels like the next step in the escalating campaign.

So I'd just like to congratulate the US Government and whoever came up with this wonderful idea. You've probably just created the only person in the world who can commit just about any crime with impunity for the next year or more. Unless you manage to assassinate him and claim he was resisting arrest AND make it look really good in the inevitable evidence and video footage, who is really going to believe he's guilty of anything more than embarrassing you?

I was half expecting to be writing a blog post saying "I'm moving my blogs, please update your RSS feeds" but instead I'm here writing about the blogging software instead.

b2e has a very nice feature - it supports multiple different blogs on the same installation. Past that it's... well it's blogging software. You get to make posts, add comments, there are tools for multiple users, multiple blogs, widgets to let you have trackback, auto-twittering new posts and more.

There are a couple of places where it's a bit cantankerous but I got it up and working actually quite quickly. So why isn't this an "I'm moving" post? Well because the effort to transport posts over proved very high. Add to that the pain of telling you to redirect RSS feeds... and it's just not worth it. If, however, I was setting up blogs for a school say or a class, I'd go for it I think. It was all pretty easy to do from the look of it and a blog per child that you can get into all of, that they can only post to their own - sounds good to me!

So, Philip's speeches at SLCC have rather put the cat among the pigeons again.

First he's announced that the teen grid is to be closed, no space (at the moment) for under-16's, 16-18 year olds into the main grid.

This isn't quite how I saw it all changing but overall I think it's a good thing. Others will disagree. For a group that still includes a lot of creative early-adapter types, SL oldbies are, en masse, remarkably resistant to change. It's easy to go and read archived email and blog posts in SLogosphere saying "OMG the sky is falling!" Just like the sky has fallen with the introduction of sculpties, the delay in introducing (or cancellation of the introduction, or the potential introduction of) meshes, the dismantling of the telehub system and so many more things.

I'm not an unthinking neophile, just as some of those opposed to this change are not unthinking neophobes. There are changes, some of them so well established that only the oldest few hundred or maybe thousand surviving active residents remember them, that I think were mistakes: they were changes for the worse and they restricted our choices about how we interact with Second Life. Some of the changes are newer too - whilst I applaud the shared media in the viewer 2.x line and I quite like the idea of inventory links (things that let you make multiple outfit for ease of wearing), the UI redesign of the new viewer is an absolute disgrace. I had to edit that line several times until I could resist my urge to swear throughout it. I am sure there are some proportion of people for whom this change is a disaster, possibly as big a disaster as the viewer 2.x interface. At least one of them has resorted to hyperbole essentially saying "OMG this is bad for me, so LL must hate all educators" - no, it's bad for you, and it's bad for other school-educators in your situation. There are other people who educate people under-18 who seem sanguine about it, positive about it, willing to wait and see and more. Some of them even working in the same project as the source of the hyperbole. Really that says it all for me: there is going to be a change, it almost certainly won't be the change that kills Second Life even if it kills some small number of specific projects. It will, doubtless, help others, probably more in fact.

There are people saying "OMG, they're taking away my playground where I can be safe from the kids" too. Some of this depends on your country and your ideas about teen sexuality of course. I live in a country where you can, and many are, be legally sexually active from age 16, you can watch "brief and discretely portrayed" sexual behaviour from 12 (potentially younger with an adult), and "nudity is allowed" - that's the wording in the 12A guidelines from the BBFC. Perhaps this make me blase about 16 year olds seeing pixel nipples and the like. It should also be noted that although I don't have any desire to seduce a 16 year old, unless I'm teaching them it is quite legal for me to do so. I don't have kids, if I did I don't think I could imagine giving them consent, but it's legal for 16 year olds here to get married with parental consent. Plus, of course, however imperfect they may be, it's quite possible for those who are worried to implement 2-way bans.

You don't want your kids exposed to nasty older people - put them on your island and hide it, lock it and throw away the key. If you do it properly outsiders can't even find your island in any version of search, let alone actually get there. Thanks to the Teen Grid (although I believe it was around before) Second Life already has the code to limit avatars to a specific estate and there are certainly the tools to limit where you can go in existence. If the estate locking is moved over (I think it's built in to RegAPI in fact so it should be quite doable) and probably moving to something I asked for ages ago with the creation of Zindra, the creation of PG and M as well as an A continent so you can't mistakenly land in a PG sim and pan into the next sim to watch the M activities and it will be reasonably safe and easy to apply. I'd be quite happy to see a D (for Disney) rated continent too, that's even more strictly behaviour and clothing controlled than the current PG rating.

It's going to be interesting to see how it comes to pass. And whilst there are a lot of people moaning about the terrible timing, I can't help but wonder if that's actually deliberate. Education on the Teen Grid has a huge Australian user base. It has others too, but there are a lot of Aussie schools using TSL and all speaking through a single unified project. Change over in December? Great, just in time for the new school year to start in January/early Feb down under. Smart move for them, even if less desirable for the Northern Hemisphere groups IF anything actually changes for them save their under-16's.

The second big change seems, at least on the radar that I have, to have gone more uncommented. Perhaps I'm just reading the wrong blogs. The development cycle is going to be really short and "aggressively include open source code and external coders." That might be fascinating to see. Which of the many extra features you can find in your TPVs will be integrated back into the main development viewer system and eventually into the main viewers? Bouncy boobs? Avatar radars? Spell checking and instant translation? Extended building tools? Encrypted IMs? Double-click tps? RLV in the mainstream as an option (or some subset of RLV - there are a lot of features that people who aren't interested in the rest of RLV like from the list, including changing clothes by spoken command)? Layered attachment points?

Sadly someone's got into the modern management lingo and it's going to be a "modified scrum process" - woo-hoo:S

Mind you, whilst I'm very cynical about the management buzz-words, if there really is a fortnightly dev release programme and a good, fast cycling of these back into the main viewer, along with the "few mandatory upgrades" rule being reapplied then maybe we'll start to see the more egregious problems with viewer 2.x fixed and SL will become faster and easier.

It does seem like SLCC becomes a point where LL choose to stir the pot. They did it last year, they've done it again this year. Sounds like an interesting place to be, in the sense of the old Chinese curse.

On occasion I rant about how terrible the science is in a TV show or film.

I recently had a revelation about this. On Tuesday we had a CSI Miami episode where the script writers were obviously short of ideas on how to make the episode run to length so what did they do? The CSIs suddenly lost a basic awareness of food hygiene and forgot that, by miles, the commonest source of E. coli food poisoning is faecal contamination and trotted out the old, hugely incorrect, line that "all E. coli are poisonous" - so how about the billions and billions in your gut right now? ARGH!

At the same time I've been watching Fringe which often has bad science mixed in with it's fringe/loonie science and there were a couple of mistakes in The Sorcerer's Apprentice (the radio with perfect reception in the Faraday Cage, really!). But I stop and watch them quite happily.

What's the difference? In Fringe they make no bones about the fact that the plot devices are junk science. When they mix in just plain bad science, so what. They tell good stories where the junk science is core to the plot and worked in. I'm willing to give up the "Uh oh, crap science" problems because the whole premise is crap science but it makes for a good story. In the Sorcerer's Apprentice I was also quite happy watching a film about magic so a little bit of bad science that didn't affect anything was OK.

In CSI they tell the story as a piece of hard science. When they screw up the science they're messing up the plot. No, NO!

OK, that's not perfect. If the bad science is sufficiently egregious I'll still complain at the time. I still notice the bad science in Fringe and TSA and so on. But rather than hair-pulling I get on with the show. When CSI Miami does it, I start wondering about just giving up on the whole show.

According to one review I read the idea for this film was to take the famous "Sorcerer's Apprentice" scene from Fantasia, you know the one with Dukas' music and Mickey Mouse shown below courtesy of YouTube, putting it into a more modern movie and building a movie around it.



I have to say if that was the plan, they should have more ideas like this at Disney/Jerry Bruckheimer Films because the result is a jolly old romp of an adventure story. You know it's from Disney and aimed at children, so there's the inevitable happy ending but it's not cloyingly saccharine. The title character is delightfully nerdy and there are a series of nerdy jokes and references built in that delighted the pair of us and several points at which the adults in the audience burst into laughter to the confusion of the children who were there in force. Nick Cage makes an an excellent, and occasionally disturbing, centuries old magician carrying emotional pain and hope for 1200+ years and an entertaining mentor and trainer. There is, in a way I don't remember seeing in a movie before, a five minute info-dump for (most of) the back-story right at the beginning. It worked very well for me and didn't seem to bore the range of kiddies surrounding us so that was good and avoided nasty exposition scenes later on, letting the action flow and the little bits of extra information that were added come out of the drama in a suitable way rather than as exposition.

The chief baddy is suitably villainous and also has a string of good lines.

You might be surprised, as I was, to see a car chase scene in a movie about magic, but actually it worked surprisingly well as various magic tricks were used throughout the chase scene. It didn't have the length or poise of, say, Matrix Reloaded, but it was a fun and fresh take on it.

All in all, very satisfying. My only caveat? It was possibly a bit testosterone rich, the women are mostly in ancillary roles and there look pretty or be evil, or both. Is this really a world post-Xena, Buffy and Alias? There's a moment of redemption for the girls that I won't spoil, and some of the plot lines would have needed tweaking to have a more significant female character but I can't help but think they could have managed that- couldn't the apprentice have been a female nerd rather than a male one, and fancied the handsome, male music student? But asking Disney to challenge stereotypes like that might be a bit much to hope for!

But still fun and currently contending with Percy Jackson for the number 2 spot in my end of year rankings.

Last week our wonderful new government announced that Christina Hendricks' and her 'fuller figure' is a healthier ideal for women to aspire to than the ultra-thin model look.

Part of me, I must admit thinks this is basically a good thing. The implication that it's OK to have curves is great for those that have them and might prevent some people attempting to starve themselves to lose their natural figure. I'm not going to even suggest it will generally stop people developing eating disorders but it might stop a few who are borderline about whether they will develop some sort of eating disorder from actually developing it and that's a good thing.

But... what happens if you're naturally slim and, in the commonest parlance athletic rather than voluptuous. You can, most definitely, be healthy and attractive with a figure like that. Will it encourage more women to go down the route of breast augmentation? Whilst various workers in and around the sex trade and glamour modelling may regard this as a positive move and there are absolutely times when it's the best solution to a medical/surgical situation, I'm not convinced it's a good idea to encourage it more.

But that's my academic background as a BioMedical Scientist showing through.

Where is the figure to aspire to for men? If our government is going to tell women this is the healthy ideal when it's clearly one of a range of healthy options and it's a figure that is almost certainly maintained with the aid of a rigorous personal training regime that many people won't have the time or money to try and emulate, why aren't men being told their healthy ideal is Jason Leonard if they want a fuller figure (he was nicknamed The Fun Bus by his fellow rugby players, that might give you some idea of his build) or Phil "The Cat" Tufnell if you want a thinner figure. (He was nicknamed for his relaxed attitude and ability to catnap supposedly, but he's still built like a lean, lithe cat). Why is it only women need to be officially told what they should like?

Sixty years ago, it might have been acceptable, but in the 21st Century? Really?! No.

Enter Mercury a properly tabbed web-browser of the iPad, with a smaller version for the iPhone.

Apparently earlier versions were prone to crashing, but the latest update seems pretty stable to me in quite a bit of playing. The iPad version, when you fire it up, looks like a pretty typical browser. Actually, visually, it could be a port of the desktop version of Safari, complete with some tabs, a button bar with a URL field and a google search field. There is also a string of icons along the bottom of the screen.

You get your bookmarks, a home page, something like the Safari favourites buttons too. But along the bottom you have some more buttons - back and forward, expand/contract, an 'extra functions' button and a hide/show button. Most of those are straight forward, but the expand/contract button hides the button bar and tab bar, letting you expand the web-page to fill the whole of the screen which is a nice touch. The hide/show button does what you'd expect for the row of buttons along the bottom so you can use almost the whole screen for viewing.

Gestures replace a lot of the navigation functions that are, apparently, lost by hiding everything away, and it is easy enough to set up your own from the pre-prepared list. There are also, it appears, methods for importing your bookmarks although I haven't tried that as yet. This is the only place Safari on the iPad seems to win against Mercury, that integration you get by being the manufacturer's supplied browser.

It renders pages fast, even moderately complex ones like the BBC News website. It flicks between tabs very efficiently. I suspect I will continue to use wikipanion and the google apps in their places, but Mercury has displaced Safari on the button bar for the moment.