On The Question Mark

Interrogatives?

Questions?

Who invented the question? Who sat down one day and said, "Gee, I wonder how I will ask a question?"

Interrogative sentences are curious? They are not declarative or imperative? They request knowledge of you, or demand facts from others? Aren't they annoying? It seems like everywhere you go you run into a question?

And while on the subject, who invented the question mark? Why does it signify that one is indeed asking a question of another? I'd just like to sit down with the person who invented it and have a nice long chat on their views on modern punctuation? Did they intend for their creation to be used at the end of each and every interrogative sentence in the English language? I'd just like to know, because no one else seems to sit down and think about question marks?

But what if we used them instead of periods? Would that ruin the context or syntax of what is being read? I don't think it would, after a while you would just adjust to it to the point where you'd expect that punctuation at the end of every sentence?

Would you know a question whether it had a mark or not? Can you tell when I'm asking and when I'm telling? How about no punctuation at all?

Then all of our sentences would be one long drivel with no clear beginning or end But really isn't that like an actual conversation Who stands around and says I had a nice day Period No one that's who So hearing a conversation and reading a conversation should be no different You should be able to tell what I am saying regardless of whether I put a period a comma or a exclamation point The words don't change and from the context you can guess my tone without having to see the punctuation at the end

But that's a pain to read? Something is calming and reassuring to see the end of a sentences definitively marked off as officially ended? A mark that sits down and says, "This sentence is officially ended? Here comes a new sentence"? Something like seeing the lights from your house down the street as you're driving down and back from a long long trip, it just is a relief, a finality?

I suppose, when it comes down to it, the reason why we write the way we do is ingrained in us from the moment we start learning how to write and spell? And our teachers learned from their teachers, and it's just a convention that's been passed down from one to another, and never once did anyone think anything more of it? A question mark is for a question, a period for a declarative?

And that, as they say, is that.

There

Sometimes, to really appreciate what we have in Second Life, you have to step back and examine the other options out there. And then, you know why Second Life is, for now at least, at the top of its game.

About five or six months ago, maybe more, I took a month off of Second Life to explore There. There bills itself as a stable, more intuitive, and griefer free alternative to Second Life.

I will tell you that the first shock is almost everyone looks the same. Sure, there's different color hair and skin, but for the most part everyone has the same shape and look. I thought it was rather strange until I tried adjusting my appearance. Because you can't.

You have to first find one of seven or so spas around There. All are terminally crowded, with lines. It's a pain in the ass. On at least three occasions the person in the spa went AFK and held up the lines for hours. For to each spa, only one can occupy the stall at a time. So the five spas in an area will only accommodate five residents and no more.

Once in the spa, I found why everyone looked more or less the same. All the appearance sliders are limited. There's a slider for head shape, a few for face shape, perhaps ten or so for chins/cheeks/nose/eyes, and four for body shape. It's really hard to get anything unique out of the limited options open to you. Hair isn't included as an adjustable, either. You have to buy a new hairstyle, either from the There staff or from another resident, so I ended up with the default bobbed hair style. Since I started with zero Therebucks (hereafter referred to as T$), I couldn't buy anything. As far as I could tell, there were no freebies, and if there were any they are few and far between. Many newbies ran around in the default clothes, and the whole world was one homogeneous sea of people.

Building is hard, and either freebie accounts like myself aren't allowed to build or you can only do so in specific areas and I couldn't find them. Speaking of getting around, while it's easier to run and teleport around, I could never seem to fly. I could never pull off whatever keyboard combo I had to input to be able to fly.

The There world seems fairly small. There were two or three big main islands, and about a dozen smaller ones. While each is very large in themselves, and completely seamless to walk through (a refreshing breeze to SL's crashing at each and every sim boundary), I didn't really see any unique builds, everything was default and homogeneous again.

Everything in There seems sanitized. It is SL Disney World, where any trash on the ground is picked up in 2.3 seconds. You can't strip completely to the nude, your avatar has built-in underwear that you cannot remove. You can report harassment and griefing directly to There staff and it's taken care of right away, but on the flip side it removes the delay in SL that is vital if someone is just goofing around. Most objects were bland and there are few guns. Sure, it cuts down massively on the griefers and reduces lag to a minimum, but it cuts out a lot of the freedom that one has in SL.

One lovely thing about There is that the conversion rate is extremely favourable, with one dollar buying almost thousands of Therebucks. Unfortunately, vendors adjust their prices accordingly. Also, I am not sure if Therebucks can be pulled out of game like one can do with L$. It is still one of the more positive aspects of There.

In short, I would recommend There for the person that just wants to stand around and chat, and doesn't mind pouring in forty or fifty bucks into the game to buy T$. The game may be generic and a bit bland, but griefing is at a minimum and lag is laughable compared to the amounts of it in SL. For the resident who doesn't mind trading freedom for stability.

I still play There occasionally, but not as much as Second Life. There just doesn't hold any attraction for me. SL may be laggy, unstable, and full of assholes, but I can do whatever I want, and that's all I want.

My Client I

I believe some time ago I mentioned I was starting to try some of the third party clients that are now available out there.



And I started with the Nicholaz line of third party Second Life software. It is one of the more popular ones out there (if we ignore some of the more griefer oriented clients).



First, I will say that of the three version I tried, none installed any noticeable malware or spyware or anything malicious. In fact, the download itself is fairly minimal and easy. You basically move four files into your Second Life folder, and you're done. Nothing too complex or complicated or messy. Cut, paste, finished.



The first relief is that the entire time I used it, Second Life ran like a dream. Nicholaz claims he plugged some memory holes in the code, and I believe one can really notice the difference. Rarely did I end my SL sessions in glorified lagfests, usually ending with my computer crashing out.



Another plus is that his client does away with the clunky 'Communications' button (at least, for the older SL versions. I only tried the current version with Nicholaz' client so I don't know if LL took that out themselves) and allowed me to resize the IM window to any size I desired. It made my interface a little more crowded on the bottom row, since it fits in a friends tab and an IM tab among others. But for me, I'll gladly sacrifice ease of reading client interface buttons with the ability to make the IM window not take up a quarter of my screen.



But all is not fun and games. My sessions remained lag free, but after about three hours, four hours max, it would crash out for no readily apparent reason. I don't know why, and I never sent a crash report (which I should have!). It may just be something with Second Life itself, or maybe it's in Nick's coding. It's not a deal breaker, unless you want mammoth marathon sessions. I'm of the school of playing in hours spurts, taking long breaks for sleep, eating, and RL; but not everyone is me. If you plan on playing all day long, expect to crash out and relog about three times or so daily. But it will be lag free in between those crashes.



Many of the features of this client are not noticeable or superficial. But I believe Nicholaz has hit upon an important idea. We don't want fancy new features, we want stability and a more friendly interface. Nicholaz delivers on those points: his client lags less and crashes less, and he's made almost the entire window adjustable to one degree or another. He didn't spend days and months developing some silly gimmick to get people to use his client. If LL had any mote of intelligence, they should take a hard look at what he's coded into his clients and mimic it.



Maybe then we'll see more varied comments on the Second Life Blog, comments that go beyond "Hay guyts, y is my secondlife crashign?? Pleas fix it is laggin and not stable fix plz fix plz!!1!"



I would give the Nicholaz client a 8 out of 10. I would recommend it to people using Windows (his Mac and Linux versions are kinda new and probably spotty at the moment), and who wants a stable experience but doesn't mind the occasional relog. It's great for someone who comes on, goofs around for a bit, and then crashes out and goes to bed. If you're looking for longer running clients, you might want to look elsewhere. If you like the default Linden interface, the Nicholaz version will also drive you up walls as it borrows from the much older pre-voice viewer interface. Otherwise, I would recommend it.

Updated 2:03 PDT: I Updated at 2:03 PDT

Here is a perfect example of the kind of excess I talked about in an earlier post.



Was it really necessary to note each and every increment of the rolling restarts? All we needed was the post and an update; a post that it's happening, and an update on when it's done.



Instead, we get a post that is literally updating every fifteen to twenty minutes, with such topics of importance as:



"Updated 10:55am PDT: Halfway there…
Updated 10:35am PDT: (80 / 20) x 10% = ?
Updated 10:15am PDT: Seems like it takes 20 minutes per 10%… and so it does … 30% restarted.
Updated 9:55am PDT: 20% of the regions have been restarted."



This is not necessary. It is not needed. It just satisfies the people who have extreme ADD and need to know exactly how far the update is progressing. Actually, that's not fair. I have a friend with ADD who thought it was excessive. So really, it's just the Lindens making work for themselves.



Again.



And now, a sampling of the comments from that post:



-"The last rolling restart we had, my region didn’t come back and took over 1 hour to get it back up, I hope this will not happen again!"



-"I’m in a teleport failure at moment! got logged off, but i’m showing as on-line. Don’t know if this happens alot, first time for me. Lindenlabs working on it, so i’ll be back soon."



-"It’s so nice to see from the previous blog that after about a day of frenetic resuscitation the grid has been “Stabilized.” I knew this guy who was in a train wreck and they thought he was gonna die. But then the hospital announced that he had been stabilized. I guess that meant he wasn’t getting worse



…but then he died.


Speaking of train wrecks…"



-"Rolling updates are so much better than downtime ^^"



-"hopefully this update will fix the asset problems as I am stuck right now as a very short jogauni and my SL girlfreind dosnt like it. Please help"



-"I hope it fixes the crashes !!! lol I guess SL hates me !!!! :panyway good job and will the last person to leave pls turn off the lights !!! hahhahahhaha"



-"I wish it would fix something…anything.
But I can read only that it adds code for analysing a problem..
no fix.
If we are all lucky, this investigation code has no additional bugs or will not reveal some other bugs."



-"It’s also getting to the point where the frequency of re-re-re-re-re-resolving the same problems might warrant a modicum of attention."



-"Sounds like a few of the problems you are having are client side on your PC. If you’re crashing when turning - again do as above, clear cache and update version. In addition ensure you’ve got the latest drivers for your graphics card. Also try decreasing some of the graphics settings - that may help."



-"How about introducing a survey box on logout - kind of ‘I am logging out because … tick box’



Tick box categories would include “I’m blissfully happy; I cannot TP anywhere; My hair is glued to my ass; I’m on my way to Jupiter; Could you change the shade of Grey; and so on.


The key point is to find out what the users experience is that has led them to leave …"



-"Please translate your information in french. Thank you"



-"I like rolling restarts, and jumping the restart wave. I’m going to introduce a new sport:
Grid Surfing. It’s a little like inertia surfing on a bus, but a little more complicated as it requires rebooting 16,000+ sims"



-"MY POST FOR THE BLOG ENTRY “LIGHTS ON AT THE LAB”:
Note that I couldn’t put it where it belongs, due to the fact that LL employees somehow can’t face more than a relative few responses to a blog entry.
Here’s the deal, Ginsu. Nobody is home at LL. "



-"Is this some kind of stealth rolling restart?I haven’t seen anything happen yet …"



-"Does anyone notice anything wrong with a post saying “We value open communication” that is not open for comments?"



-"Least People or Least Bots online?" (in response to a previous post asking when the least amount of people were logged on.)



-"Now that the rolling restart is completed is there a chance the Friends Online webpage will be repaired."

On Vaccinations

Forgive me for diverting from Second Life.

Nothing riles me more than people who willingly place themselves and their loved ones at risk due to irrational and misinformed behavior. People who oppose nuclear power even as our current oil and coal power plants gradually heat the planet. People who spill hot coffee on themselves and sue others claiming 'you never said it was hot'. People who honestly believe that Stalin had the right idea and that America should emulate him. People who drive 90 miles an hour in top heavy SUVs packed with children. People who let go of and hit people with Wii remotes. People who yell 'fire' in a crowded movie theater. People who move to New York. The list goes on and on.

But those are more comical than dangerous. Well, a few are dangerous, but on the whole, we pass it by and take only enough time to laugh at the silly silly people our species produces.

Until we hit something that is really really stupid and dangerous. Today's topic is people who believe that vaccinations should be abolished or reserved for adults. Their theory is that the vaccines, whether by the chemicals used in their manufacture or the actual disease itself, are causing harm to their children and stunting them mentally and physically.

I'm willing to not completely write them off as batshit insane, so I am going to, rather briefly and unscientifically, look over some of the arguments raised. That's a disclaimer. This is going to be a very superficial study. If you quote me in your high school research paper, I will disavow any knowledge of this post, and possibly make a new post making fun of you. The best idea and advice I can give you if you are serious on this topic is to look over some of my sources and do your own research from there. In other words, use this as a jumping board, but don't use it as the pool.

First, we cannot deny that vaccines have greatly increased the health of the world. Diseases that used to inflict terrible rates of attrition on children are footnotes in medical textbooks today. Even a disease such as chicken pox has become more or less unheard of as vaccines for that have come out (unfortunately for me and my parents, it came a tad too late to save me from missing a week of elementary school). Not vaccinating children leaves them exposed to diseases like hepatitis and whooping cough. Sure, you may get away with it now, since the probability of encountering such diseases in a population vaccinated against them is low, but suppose the majority isn't in the next few generations? Then you're exposed to the possibility of an epidemic spreading through the land. We can see this with smallpox, where it is a potential biological weapon precisely for the reason that the number of people vaccinated against it is decreasing and more people are increasingly not vaccinated.

So why are people so riled up against vaccines?

First, we must understand that the very first arguments, all the way from 1800 AD, were centered on that lovely topic of religion. The Church and many other Christian sects all held the belief that disease was the will of God himself, and to circumvent his will was unholy. God obviously wanted that six month old to contract measles and die, and who are we, foolish mortals that we are, to go against His will? Being the good Christians they were, many pastors took it upon themselves to threaten and attempt to murder physicians of the time who inoculated the population to satisfy the Holy One:

"So bitter was this opposition that Dr. Boylston's life was in danger; it was considered unsafe for him to be out of his house in the evening; a lighted grenade was even thrown into the house of Cotton Mather, who had favoured the new practice, and had sheltered another clergyman who had submitted himself to it."

Only after vaccinations halted epidemics that would have otherwise wiped out parishes and dioceses did most churches grudgingly condone the practice.

This is important, as we must understand that on occasion the opposition is reacting with an almost religious fervor and resort to arguments such as "I don't like it, too much science, I don't understand it, so it should not be allowed". There is nothing wrong with being cautious, and indeed caution should be the main line of thinking with any new procedure. However, after almost two hundred years of use, it can be said quite confidently that vaccines are effective, and that God has not wiped us off the face of the earth for denying His will.

On the topic of religion and incorrect beliefs, some other adherents to anti-vaccination propose that our idea of disease and microorganisms is fundamentally incorrect, and as a result vaccines are really glorified placebos. Adherents usually subscribe to something called the "cellular theory", which I will summarize here as the cells themselves and the components of our cells cause all disease. Notice I said 'all disease'. Cellular theory states that everything from the common cold to xanthoma, and not just cancer or autoimmune disorders, are caused by the cells in your body.

The fundamental flaw in this concept is that all evidence suggests against it. Microorganisms have been seen under microscopes to invade healthy tissue and infect/destroy it. The most famous example is John Snow and Cholera. Had cellular theory been correct, Snow's removal of the pump should have had no effect on the spread of the disease through Broadwick street. But it did! Kind of. The disease was hampered. Had cellular theory been correct, this should have had no effect on the disease cells. The poor health of the infected and those around them should have carried the contagion beyond the area of the rotten pump.

Cellular theory was proven false, germ theory held the day. There is much more to it than I have presented here, and I encourage you, if you still doubt me, to do your own research. Avoid Google or Wikipedia, or the internet in general, as you'll likely get millions of conspiracy websites advocating cellular theory and the man in the grassy knoll.

For a while, fundamentalists and cellular theorists were the foremost opposition to vaccines. This changed for the most part in 1998, when Andrew Wakefield published a paper concerning the effects of the Measles Mumps and Rubella vaccine (hereafter known as MMR). To be more accurate, he was actually researching Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children. In English, that is he was searching for the cause of developmental disorders, colon disease, and swollen glands in children.

The general idea was to take a dozen children with such disorders and examine them intensely through the course of a month or so. There are problems, though. Some potential big ones.

For one, his paper is terribly misleading. The tone implies that of all the possible causes, he definitively found MMR to be the number one reason for developing these diseases. I looked at it many times, hoping I was wrong and that somewhere he entertained the notion of another source, but I was proven wrong. How he came to that conclusion is rather sketchy, he notes under "Findings" that "Onset of behavioural symptoms was associated, by the parents, with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination in eight of the 12 children". Everything in his methods and interpretations is geared toward fingering MMR as the sole cause.

"In eight children, the onset of behavioural problems had been linked, either by the parents or by the child's physician, with measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination. Five had had an early adverse reaction to immunisation (rash, fever, delirium; and, in three cases, convulsions). In these eight children the average interval from exposure to first behavioural symptoms was 6·3 days (range 1-14). Parents were less clear about the timing of onset of abdominal symptoms because children were not toilet trained at the time or because behavioural features made children unable to communicate symptoms. "



Six to three days? Perhaps the parents were overreacting? If my child had such a violent reaction to a vaccine, I'm sure I'd see everything linked to it as well. When my father developed leukemia, my mother claimed she saw symptoms in me, and she did that for about six months. Parents overreact, and physicians do not want to be on the wrong end of a malpractice suit.



"One child (child four) had received monovalent measles vaccine at 15 months, after which his development slowed (confirmed by professional assessors). No association was made with the vaccine at this time. He received a dose of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine at age 4·5 years, the day after which his mother described a striking deterioration in his behaviour that she did link with the immunisation. Child nine received measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine at 16 months. At 18 months he developed recurrent antibiotic-resistant otitis media and the first behavioural symptoms, including disinterest in his sibling and lack of play. "



Who were the professional assessors? Don't make an appeal to authority without backing it up. This was behavior noted before this study actually began, so it could not have been one of the researchers for this paper. Who diagnosed a slowdown in development? The parents? The physicians? Who? And in what ways did he slowdown? The paper contradicts itself when it lists the symptoms and the actual onset of the symptoms. It claims the behavioral symptoms began at 4-5 years, when according to professional assessors it began at 18 months. Which is it? Are we picking and choosing now?

The crown achievement of this paper is the discussion, which is a masterpiece of contradiction and ass covering. In it, he reiterates the symptoms that he found, and lists one or two other possibilities, besides MMR, that could cause what he found. However, it's laden with weasel words that you get the impression he really believes it's MMR. He trips over himself to say that they found no direct link between the vaccine and the disorders, but then says that he thinks further research will reveal it to be true. He also notes that this vaccine has been given (in England) since 1988, and hey! No rising incidence has been found to support his theory (although there is supposedly insufficient data according to him). Overall, Wakefield did a masterful job at painting a red arrow to MMR, saying 'This is it! This is bad!', and then covering his behind with a lame disclaimer.

There is more literature on the glaring errors in this paper, and more problems that I, as a student, cannot comprehend or discuss, and again I encourage you, the reader, to do your own research. For now, let's continue.

Despite a wide variety of following articles in science journals proving and debunking Wakefield's research and claims, the big problem is that it has all the airs of a scientific study. It was in the proper jargon, with all these fancy graphs of things, and was written by a man with a PhD. To most people, that's more than sufficient to give validity to these claims, and indeed safety in all manners of health and medicine is the foremost concern ("First do no harm"). The man may have more holes in his research than the Titanic, but if there is a possibility it should be investigated, right?

But it already has been. The National Health Service in the UK, among many others, have researched into this and found nothing to these claims. And it was found again and again that vaccines are, outside of the occasional one in a million chance freakish accident, for the most part safe and effective.

It was found that the mercury in vaccines is in trace amounts, and of a form (because chemicals almost always come in compounds, and rarely in a solid element) that passes rather quickly out of the body. The diseases being injected go through rigorous trials to insure they don't start killing children (if nothing else, then to prevent the company's and lab's loss of face and the resulting law suits). Getting a vaccine is safer nowadays then eating improperly prepared meat.

But again, we must remember that anti-vaccinationists are fervent in their beliefs. No amount of studies will sway them from their original assertion, and so we get tragedies like a Pittsburgh boy who died when his parents, scared at having learned of the trace mercury in vaccines and hoping to cure his autism, killed him with a chemical that strips metals from one's body. The problem is, this chelation treatment also removes calcium from your body. Calcium not only provides bones, but it also interestingly enough enables nerves to do their nerve thing and send messages around the body. And the most calcium greedy nerves, the ones that need a constant supply, happen to be the ones that keep the heart pumping. So, children die from cardiac arrest (among other things) while their parents keep dosing them with chelation like fools.

In that same article, other couples continue to send their children for these treatments, despite the fact that it has killed and injured several others! The truly sad part of all this is that if this becomes increasingly common, the morons who kill their children with this will lobby to have it banned from the US, and patients who really need chelation, like acute poisonings from lead paint or mercury thermometers, won't be able to get it because Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum went off and injected little Johnny without doing any kind of research on their own. "Oh, this website says it's vaccines? Guess the internet is always right!".

What is also tragic is that by wasting time looking into vaccines, we waste time and energy from actual autism and developmental research on things that have been proven nine times over.

And this, in a nutshell, is why I cannot stand people who lobby against vaccines. They fuel useless research on methods that have been tested relentlessly, they feed unwarranted fears from parents who truly don't know any better and in addition they fool these parents into treating their children with methods and chemicals that, if it doesn't kill them, will harm them physically and possibly emotionally.

If they weren't so blind, I'd call them evil.

Second Grade Sense

No sooner does Ginsu belittle a study as "not in touch with reality", than he apologises for overlooking the fact that the Lab itself is about as accurate as a blind archer.



Even this new post is confusing in tone. As Malachi Petunia (comment # 36) says, is this post an apology for blasting the previous study? Is it a boast about how honest and transparent they are about Second Life? Look at us, we're apologising for blasting someone else blasting second life, that's how you know we're a-okay and transparent?


Leaving aside the fact that the "Second Grade Math" post is riddled with errors and out-right falsehoods (which I will get into later in this post), it's a joy to notice that after a post admitting they often have no clue what they're doing (or pretending they don't know), we see calls from across the SLscape with people praising them for their transparency.


What transparency? Where? Am I not looking somewhere? I check JIRA and the Blog and my emails, and yet every time the grid absurdly crashes, usually the only reason given is "payment issues" or just plain "issues". What issues? It was never stated in the post itself, and I don't feel like digging through the 100+ comments that are laced with 'wah wah where is my land' to 'awesome!!!11!~ keep be awesome linden lab!!' as a few examples.



As some other commentators in the recent SL blog post noted, the Lindens are confusing sheer volumes of information with actual usable data. Posting post after post on grid restarts and updates on every little sneeze that occurs between a massive world failure and the issue being resolved is just belching out tons of meaningless information.



What we really need is a clear concise post on what the issue is, how long it may take (please highball the estimate, for example, if it might take you 3 hours then say it'll take 7), and one and only one update noting that the issue is resolved by whatever you did to resolve it. That's all the information I look for when the grid starts bucking like a rodeo clown impaled on a bull's horns. It would also be pleasant if they could give a least two weeks notice, and a month preferably, on any major grid upsets or major feature insertions. VAT, for example, was kinda just dropped in there, "Today we rolled restarts, Torley's giving a new tip of the week, and oh yeah, we're gonna add VAT to the Euros."



They should cut the fat from their official statements and stop trying to drop hints about future updates that are so far down the line as to be no better than mind experiments. Havok 4 is a good one, a hint dropped about two years ago which is just released as beta the last month or so. In that time span, people whined and moaned and asked when was Havok 4 coming, is it here yet is it here yet is it here yet? Or how about grid stability? How many times has that been alluded to this year already?



The Lindens treat their SL blog like I treat mine: Personal, prone to rants and ravings, and often inaccurate and misinformed. That's par for the course for me, but I'm not running a company now, am I? The Lindens are, and their blog should at least reflect that and do away with gossip and the thousands of meaningless updates that say things along the lines of "2:30 am: the tech team had a pizza while trying to find the fatal software bug in the viewer".



And more to the point, what was with Ginsu flaming out Yankee Group for giving their interpretation of the facts they have on hand? Let's examine Ginsu's calculations that are supposed to be the final word on this matter (and which he so thoughtfully provided on the "Second Grade Math" post as an example of the true figures).



The claim made was that the average user spent 12 minutes a month in Second Life. Ginsu's closest estimate to how they came up with this number is that (his own words):



"Just this past August, users of Second Life spent over 23 million hours in Second Life....



...Maybe they werecounting cumulative total registered accounts through August, 9.3 million users. Uh, but even that is still an average of 2.5 hours.



As near as we can tell, that might be the average time that users spent logged in on the Second Life website in a month."



First, let's dispense with the notion that Yankee counted people logged into the website. That's silly. I don't know many people who log into the website, they all usually just log right into the client itself. I suppose they might have taken the traffic that the site has into consideration, but I highly doubt they used any of that data to compute time spent in Second Life. Notice that. IN Second Life. The website is not Second Life.

Second, Ginsu here is taking an average. The total amount of hours divided by the total number of (in this case) registered accounts through August '07. Averages are great for many many things. But the problem with averages is that there is no weight to them. An example is in order: I could say that the average person drives 12,000 miles per year (totally made up). All well and good. But it doesn't tell me anything except that people in the USA drive a lot. Outside of a school presentation on the 21st century, this average is useless. Taking the total miles driven in the US and dividing by the population of the country is vague at best.

What would make it useful? Break it down by the environment into city, suburb, and rural so we can form an idea of the amount driven in each. Perhaps divide it up by the type of car (perhaps sedans have 7000 miles/year while SUVs go 31000 mi/yr). The key factor here is that we're making categories into our averages, making them specific enough to be useful without making it too detailed to be useful. In our case (Second Life), we might analyse a range of mileages and see how many fall into each category, and weight the average according to that.

So, 2.5 hours per registered account is rather broad. We need a weighted average. If nine million of those 9.3 million spend 3 minutes online and the remaining 300,000 spend five hours, then obviously 2.5 hours/account is flawed. And this is where I think Yankee is coming from. Be generous and assuming 974,000 users are regulars, while 8,326,000 are one day wonders. That is a 1:8 ratio between those who play dedicated and those who day trip. Only 12.5% of the population registered so far is spending any significant time in Second Life itself. The rest is spending at most three hours in Second Life, and usually less than an hour.

Do I think the 12 minutes a month figure is a tad ridiculous? Yes. But 2.5 hours per month is almost as insane. The figure (without any real calculations on my part) is probably in the range of 60-40 minutes per month. I think that balances out the SL diehards with the massive tsunamis of one-and-dones.

In any case, Linden Lab should either polish their figures or lay off third parties publishing their own figures. If they do either, I'll die from shock.

The Book of Nunchuck IV

Now Qeosi was the cleverest of his people, and he knew as well as any the folly of creating a god, as evidenced by his very existance and the great war between Nunchuck and Philip. And he also knew of his people's reputation throughout the land as ruthless, cutthroats, and bloodthirsty savages.


So he came upon an outcrop, and stood upon it, boasting to the avatars and akelhians below: "Behold, you shall soon be relieved of your lives! For we, the Ony, have found the knowledge that you have long lost, and will create a god of our own to counter yours who comes not to your aid!"


It had the desired effect. The akelhians became heavily demoralized and the people despaired, for both believed no good end could come of an Ony possessing a book of such power. They waited for the moment when Qeosi would sweep down the hillsides with his new gods and savage the land. Even Fi-Suu, with the courage of a dozen avatars, felt a heavy load on his heart upon this news.


Next, Qeosi told his hordes to pull back. When the avatars saw this, they said amongst themselves, "Surely, they are getting ready for their own creation, and want not to risk casulties before their victory!" While in their doubt, Qeosi ordered two of his most loyal officers to go and search for the Femur of Nunchuck, and to bring it back so that they may receive the almighty blessings of the Most Holy.



Meanwhile, Ruth continued her search for the Femur, searching the highlands and the low valleys, and the tiniest island and the widest plains, and nowhere was there to be found the Mighty Femur. Every day she harbored doubts that perhaps Frank was wise for abandoning their people and settling beyond the land they had known.



And so she stopped and made rest in a cove fashioned from boulders fallen from the last Great War. While she took her rations, a man walked by and also sat in the cove, and watched the sun setting low in the sky.


And it was Philip.