The Library comes through

C, G and B came up for dinner and a pleasant evening yesterday. C was grateful for a decent meal as apparently the hostel food isn't great. She doesn't have many more opportunities left! Uni is going well and she had a 10% test today that went OK. She had been studying pretty hard for it and for a lab report, but she has such good work habits that neither should be too much of a worry.

She described some of the assessment policies there at Varsity. Perhaps those who slag NCEA so strongly should turn their spotlights on these! The problems with NCEA seem like nothing compared to the apparently uneven and unmoderated marking done there. And yet there are many critics of NCEA who presumably got degrees under that very system!

It was a beautiful day, in the mid-20s, so we sat and read. Well I did. Judi walked into town with A to buy some fruit, then they did some gardening and then they read. Personally I think mine was the better choice, but some people feel they have to be doing something. I'm with Mark Twain on this one: "Whenever I get the urge to exercise I lie down until it goes away." [I just looked this up to find that it is apocryphal. How disappointing. One can't even rely on Twain these days.]

At last the third volume of John Birmingham's alternative history of WW2 has come on hold. It's not a bad read for those with a military history bent. Not too ra-ra American and quite believeable on the whole. It's a little hard to accept a cease-fire between Germany and Russia in 1942 under any circumstances, but I can suspend belief long enough to get past it.

Another good recent read is Richard Morgan, a Sci-Fi writer who writes a kind of cyber-punk fiction. The world is familiar but also believeably different. In fact some of the kinds of things he writes about have been in the news recently - nanotechnology, virtual worlds, corporatisation, neuro-science and so on. The area that has resonated most deeply with me is that of virtual reality. There have been a few articles recently on a massive multi-user environment called Second Life where real life users are complaining about the commercialisation and criminalisation of the virtual world. Someone even claimed to have exploded a nuke outside the virtual offices of a real world company! (Why nukes were written into the world remains to be answered.) Anyway, you can buy virtual goods and services with real world money, and since this then enables an exchange rate to be calculated, the size of the virtual economy can be tracked. Apparently it compares to some of the real world's largest countries. Will it be long before some people come to spend most of their lives in such a world? Already gamers are dying of dehydration after marathon on-line games sessions. How long until we have virtual helmets and feedback clothing for a fully emersive experience? And then how long until some people hook themselves to life support and never log out?

After a quick Google I find that there is a lot of marketing hype about Second Life. Here's a well written article that popped up near the top of the search.

Ah well, that other virtual world is calling - the book, Final Impact. Funny how it is easily as emersive as a computer game for me.