South Pole stilt-base builder to give lecture in Sadville

The man in charge of constructing a scientific base mounted on extending stilts at the South Pole will give a talk on his experiences next Wednesday - in Second Life, the online masquerade park popular with bedroom explorers. Jerry Marty is the facilities construction and maintenance manager for the National Science Foundation …

[Robert Ramsay]

I guess...

...it's nice to see the Reg slagging off worthwhile things as well as useless things :p

I'm sure he's able to give his demo with an actual working model of the Station, which would be impossible in normal circumstances.

I'm supremely indifferent to Second Life (tried it out, and as the Elizabethans say: "So what?") but I'm still confused about why El Reg doth protest too much.

[Mike]

Sadville??

Please. I mean its ok that some online hack doesn't "get it" (or probably any, real or virtual). But I for one enjoy the time I spend in SL. I feel that the term"Sadville" is a misrepresentation, most people there are happy, and no more sad or abnormal that any standard Reg. reader. (which isn't really saying much is it..). I have met people from around the world, held virtual meetings, raised money for charity, and generally have a good time. And yes I own a flying penis gun, as well as a cow gun, a chicken gun, a watermelon launcher, etc. And the best part is that what started me in SecondLife was The Reg articles about how bad and evil it was. My wife and I spend most of our evenings together running our little playground in SL, and it certainly better than sitting in front of the idiot box all evening, Stop by the rolyat estate sometime, we have themed costume parties every Friday and Saturday night. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Broo

I guess I am going to have to have a come as your favorite Reg. Hack night ;)

[4a$$Monkey]

Elements

Its a bit off topic but on the IceCube site is says:

"We actually use large volumes of ice below the South Pole to watch for the rare neutrino that crashes into an atom of ice."

So Ice is an element? Have they thought out using atoms of Fire, Earth and Air?

[Don Mitchell]

Sadville

The Register and Wired Magazine have both written about exagerated population figures on SL:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/20/second_life_analysis/

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-08/ff_sheep?currentPage=1

How are we to believe the latest claims then?

Compared to social websites like Facebook or to professional-quality 3D games like World of Warcraft, Second Life is hardly worth notice. It is also a repeat of 3D social worlds, which have been done over and over since the mid 1990s (Alphaworld, The Palace, Worlds Away, Microsoft V-Chat, There.com, etc).

[Reg Varney]

@ Mike

Hmm. I'm either misreading your irony, or you're taking the use of "sad" literally. In this case, it's not in the sense of "unhappy" but in the sense of "get a (first) life".

Hope you feel better for knowing this ;-)

[Peter]

Moving on...

I'm glad I'm not the only one who has noticed that El Reg seems to "protest too much." I enjoyed the first few articles—after all, it's all in good fun, and it is the Register. Pretty soon, however, the articles took on the feel of zealots stoning a harlot who died quite a while ago. In some cases, I'd begun to get the feeling that someone from Linden Lab had run over one of the hack's puppies. Enough is enough, lads. Maybe it's time to stop writing about Second Life at all. If you've got that much against it, you should consider: it's free advertising for them.

Mine's the tombstone: in the hopes they'll let these non-stories rest in peace.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm with...

...Peter et. al. You're starting to sound like The Inquirer, and you don't want that, now, do you?

[Adrian Esdaile]

@"actual working model of the Station"

Yeah, because everyone knows you can't build a working scale model, it's IMPOSSIBLE without Second Life.

Did you know the ancient Egyptians had a build of Second Life that ran on water clocks? They used it to model the pyramids, because building a scale model was IMPOSSIBLE!

This clown should probably have given his lecture on-site in Anarctica - more people would turn up.

[elderlybloke]

I want to know

what is this "Second Life"?

I can't help it, I live down in the South Pacific,where the world passes us by.

[Dave Cheetham]

Yawn

Same old boring reg put down of second life. Getting tedious guys and showing a complete lack of originality in your articles.

@Don, professional quality like warcraft? Whether you like second life or not, the technological achievement linden labs has made is nothing short of incredible and puts it way ahead of WOW in professionalism. WOW is a computer game, SL is created by users in world.

If you don't understand it, don't comment.