jsclarkdotnet

Where to find me these days

noreply@blogger.com (JS Clark) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 19:33:00 +0000

I seem to have fallen off the blogwagon completely, partly due to a sudden uptick of activity among friends & family on Facebook. Status updates and shared links there have become an easier outlet for my thoughts & rants. I considered redesigning jsclark.net, but just don't yet have the time.

So for now, here's where to keep up, if you so desire. In many of these venues you can friend me, subscribe to an RSS feed, or otherwise pull the info to a page you check regularly.

Facebook: My Twitter updates feed into my Facebook status, so there's no need to list it separately. I also participate in the "more serious" social networking services LinkedIn and Academia.edu.
Flickr: I also have a Slideshare page and a Youtube profile (where I hope to be uploading some more Second Life machinima soon).
Second Life: Look for me as JS Saltwater, or find my nature parcel by searching in-world for "Tallahassee Beach."
Delicious: I'm pretty good at tagging interesting pages that I run across, but be warned it's a motley collection. I also try--with less success--to keep my LibraryThing data current.

That's all I can think of at the moment, but I'll come back and edit this post if anything else occurs to me.

Nature in Virtual Worlds Update

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:20:00 +0000

Depictions of "Nature" in Second Life

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

A busy couple of months. I joined a panel on "Science in Virtual Worlds" at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference in Copenhagen, October 16, where I talked about my research on sites for environmental education in Second Life.

A week later, I delivered a paper on "Representations of 'Nature' in SL" at the Reading and Writing Virtual Worlds conference at the National Institute for Excellence in the Creative Industries, University of Bangor, Wales.

Last Thursday, I delivered a short version of that paper as part of the "Virtual FSU: Learning and Research in Second Life" mini-conference I coordinated at Florida State. (Many thanks to Ken Lim for the plug!)

And this Thursday I am off to San Diego to stage a poster-session version of the enviro-ed material at the National Communication Association convention.

True, true.

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 23:22:00 +0000

Letterman's Top Ten Questions People Want to Ask John McCain

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 16:04:00 +0000

Priceless.

Wanda Sykes sums it up

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:28:00 +0000

Bruce

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 03:42:00 +0000

This is just a sample of some of the lighter works he shared with me. I will post more. He also had a website at http://brucehallstudio.com/.

A great loss to all of us. I miss you, Barce.

Colossal Water Spiders

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:59:00 +0000

600 miles across, ephemeral as a butterfly or galloping ebola, mindless and cruel, sine qua non of our humid subtropics, species scatterer, coast clearer, bringer of floods.

How did the Apalachee, the Timucua, the Caloosa know you? All we have are records of their Taino neighbors, who called them juracán, tools of the wind-deity Guataubá, assistant of the storm-goddess Guabancex.

In Tallahassee the winds have been blowing from the north for two days as Fay drenched the Atlantic coast. When the cyclone comes, find it by facing the wind and turning right.

We need the rain here.

Life is but a Dream

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:54:00 +0000

This is something I don't do nearly often enough: dip a paddle in an eelgrass-filled spring run.

Or in this case a sho-nuff oar, two of which can scut little Wasabi Maru, my wee Larson (1957 "Game Warden" model) around like a water beetle when I want silent propulsion over the luxury of an outboard.

Sunday afternoon Nancy and I took the boat out for the first time in well over a year and it (and we, rusty dockhands) performed well among the weeds and weekend warriors of the mighty Wakulla* River.

I could watch the undulations of these broad green-brown ribbons forever.

Ah but the poor river (and headspring) is so obviously over-nitrated that it's sometimes hard to take. Gorgeous, yes, but not what it was. And to what meaningful end?

Meanwhile, dip the oars and lean back into them, listening to their creak and splash and the keening of fishing ospreys from the cypress along the banks, and let your thoughts follow the schools of mullet as they circle past the lumbering dirigibles of scarified manatees. There is only this.

*Despite the common "mysterious waters" tourist-trade translation of this word, the only thing mysterious is its original meaning. It is a Creek mispronunciation of a Spanish word, Guacara, which was likely itself a corrupted Timucuan word. In fact, the Spanish mission of San Juan de Guacara, well to the east, may be the origin of another Florida river's name: Suwanee.

Shannon Leigh

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:08:00 +0000

I did not know this young Austin poet who died after a diving accident in one of the most beautiful places I know: Devil's Ear Spring in the Santa Fe River. In reading more about the accident I discovered a poem of hers:

Underwater, four hundred feet back
into the earth's graveyard
we turned off our lights and hung
in perfect blackness
swallowed up by the dark stone
the devil's gullet
the catacombs of the reckless

I have never been so happy than surrounded
by crushing depths and old memories
except that first night
when I lay next to you, your hand
across my shoulderblade my lips
in the hollow of your throat
you are that quiet resignation
that joy of nothingness, as close
as I can ever get to peace
as close as I would ever want

give me four hundred feet inside you
the blackness under your skin
and I will rest in you forever
the marrow in your bones is pockmarked with caves
and I have time.

- Shannon Leigh

Years ago I wrote something similar (not nearly as good: "Sink Whole" on this page) and so I doubly mourn the passing of a kindred spirit. A very sad story indeed.

It's bullshit and it's bad for ya!

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:41:00 +0000

Or: it's bad for ya and it's bullshit! Thus the Class Clown's regular refrain during his performance here in Tallahassee at Ruby Diamond back in January, which I got to see thanks to a Christmas present from my wife, Nancy.

And now he's gone. The Hippy Dippy Weatherman, the evil Cardinal, the Fillmore bus--is now finding out for sure when and if Jesus will bring the pork chops.

In the 70s I loved his iconoclasm, his potty and drug humor (which was a cut above his closest competitors Cheech y Chong), his clever wordplay. The quintessential hippie smartass. He was such a close observer of the little, strange things we do. And never afraid to call bullshit on our most hallowed, but empty, cultural practices.

RIP, George. Thanks for all of it.

(And is it not a somewhat obscene sign of our times to see all those Parental Advisory Stickers on his album covers? Not so in my day, Kimosabe!)

Undercephalopods and Anthropohubris

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:23:00 +0000

The talks and videos from TED are almost always astonishing, revelatory, entertaining, and thought-provoking. So far most of the ones I've seen related to technological developments, but now there's this video sent to me by my dear friend and fellow oceanophile Kari Foster. Don't miss the end!

Several things come to mind upon viewing this. First, as the speaker points out, our knowledge of this earth is still quite limited. And yet our hubris is such that we continue to destroy things we're not even aware of--and believe that humanity is the pinnacle of evolution and is thus justified in doing so. We're often quite like apes in the Louvre, aren't we?

Second, what awesome complexities and adaptations arise over time! And how odd that people seem to need to invent a supernatural explanation for something so simple as spontaneous mutation going through the filter of survivability. Again it seems an example of human hubris; it's just not easy to imagine millions upon millions of years shaping short-lived organisms, so a deity must be invented. The Anthropocentric Fallacy strikes again (this time, in the form of a god in whose image we must have been created).

Pointy-Headed Intellectuals

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 14:03:00 +0000

Judith Shapiro posts a good essay on the sad state of intellectual life in America, based in part on a recent book by Susan Jacoby called The Age of American Unreason. (If you get bored in mid-read, well, Q.E.D.)

The reader comments are equally enlightening. I especially liked the one that calls for more emphasis on outreach by academics.

And now, back to American Idol.

Is Web.3D Here?

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:42:00 +0000

Well I'll be. Those Six Dollar Burgers must've been put to good use. There's a new plugin called ExitReality that turns *any* web site into a customizable 3-d social space. Pilot websites include Hardee's and Carl's Jr., as described here.

Before you get all snooty about burger joints and cheesy avatars, think about it. All websites can now be VR grids with this tool. We've smelled this coming for some time, eh?

If you have the plugin installed and click the "Launch in 3D" button on this page, you'll see a view much like this screenshot. Default page extrusions include a scrolling window, images and hyperlinks floating above the floor, and a glossy grey studio look. I modified mine with different textures and of course added a few animated fish.

MySpace users get a default template that looks a lot like a hip club, with the user's profile pic prominently displayed and doors leading to their friends' spaces. Profile owners can change the whole building theme, swap out a different sky, and insert/edit objects like sofas and photo frames.

What's more, it looks like they've created a default view for Flickr sets that resembles an art gallery, as shown in this screenshot.

As of now this thing only runs in Windows, but think of it as a proof of concept. It's based on VRML, the virtual reality modeling language that has been around for over a decade (I initiated the "virtual prison cell" VRML page at Fla. Department of Corrections when I was their webmaster circa 1996).

This is surely the first of many web.3d tools.....

EduPunk

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:44:00 +0000

Well, this is an interesting phenom, and the fact that it's got a wikipedia page and has been written up in the Chronicle may mean it's already been coopted, but I like the concept. Basically reacting to the corporatization and cooptation of Web2.0 tech by companies like Blackboard; reminds me of the way I felt when Microsoft finally "got" the web and then killed half its promise by burying Netscape with MS Aieee.

There are already plenty of counterrevolutionary commentators, some of whom make the good point that Edupunk is not for everyone and will not really appeal to the folks who want a simple package of solutions. And there will no doubt be overextension of the metaphor, along with orthodoxy battles. Brings to mind the value of Queer Theory, which I posted about earlier.

I was not an original punk (though I just saw X play last Friday night and loved them :) but I think I'll be edupunkish, for a while anyway. Fits.

Tag Galaxy

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:39:00 +0000

First there were tag clouds, then the Flickr Related Tag browser, now this: 3-D concept mapping. It's not a sophisticated implementation and it only works with Flickr tags--but consider the possibilities.

Here, browsing a few eco-tags shows an expected visual and anthropocentric bias. Wouldn't it be great to get this kind of output from a tool like Crawdad?

Open Source Virtual

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:52:00 +0000

I've heard a bit about this but it stayed in the background until recent changes in SL TOS/copyright raised some hackles in the blogosphere.

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Grid_List

Of the grids listed, "Open Life" seemed the busiest so I opened an account. Worth a look just to compare with SL.

http://openlifegrid.com/Default.aspx

Fairly decent number of users here already. You use the SL client, just have to modify the command line arguments to point the viewer to a different grid.

I'm trying to get a sense of which direction the herd may start moving next if SL starts to lose its appeal. Only prob is you can't migrate anything (avatar, inventory) over, BUT I am not sure if that limitation applies in OpenSIM. That is, you may be able to migrate content from one open sim to another--by which I mean the way I can move my website from one server to another.

Looks like you can even set up and run your own grid. Once this catches on like running your own webserver, I predict land prices will bottom out and we'll approach the pricing levels for web space. The trick will then be relating grids to each other. Tesseract, anyone?

PS: I have not yet looked to see if/how this hooks in with MediaGrid and Immersive Education projects, which are also looking at open source sims.

"Don't you cramp me style; don't you queer me pitch....

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:26:00 +0000

....don' you walk t'rough my words cause you ain't heard me out yet."

Also sprach 10cc, circa 1974. That white-boy reggae song's been running t'rough my head since reading Annamarie Jagose's Queer Theory: An Introduction for class last week. Yes, I'm a little late on the scene since QT has been around for a decade or so, but that's queer too.

I'd heard the term but (predictably) had no idea of its applicability far beyond the politics of sexual identity. It speaks to my ambivalence towards some aspects of "masculine" identity and yet so much more. Depending on the context, I've been queered as the Hippie or the Brain. You know what I mean. The Queer. The Other. People are strange, when you're a Stranger. Sometimes, it's identifying myself as Southern and hating both the smug, regionalist bigots and the ones whose behaviors continually provide ammunition for them. I'm Queerly Southern. To be a Floridian is to be Queer, unless you compartmentalize your identity on one side or the other of I-4 as many do.

Queer Theory queers categories and identities. Not with the aim of destroying them but to illuminate their construction and open up spaces for change.

(Did I hear you say everything's just dandy?)

We tend to reify, to make binaries, and to assume essentials when it's all maya, construction, convention, performance and reproduction. Queering -- I think the verb works better than the adjective -- even queers identity itself. Are you what you think? What is constant - your molecules, your memories, your values, your cognitions?

All this has obvious application to the queered reality of virtual worlds, with their constructed personas, violations of what our eyes tell us is possible, and the way virtual realities queer the "real" reality.

It's so Queer.

Tallahassee Beach, Extruded

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:04:00 +0000

I've rented a "store" in the Second Life Etopia Prime sim - a frequent hangout - and am hanging my photos on the walls. I'm not yet sure what I will do to it, but one idea is to use it as a jumping off point for regional cultural and natural things. It's called Tallahassee Beach, of course: Etopia Prime 160,43,36.

This Man Gets My Vote (Again)

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:07:00 +0000

This is an absolutely vulgar and dead-on rant that had me in tears, partly because it's the complete antithesis of Carter's trademark benign style and partly because it's SOFA KING TRUE!

I Got What America Needs Right Here

Islamophobofascisticalidocius

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 05:44:00 +0000

I usually get quickly bored by the partisan simplicities engendered by some of the more political posts on Inside Higher Ed, but the exchanges following Scott McLemee's thoughtful (agree with it or not) discussion of violent radicalism in Islam and the reaction thereto are well worth a close read for some reasoned arguments around one of the core problematics of our time. Yes, it will eat 30 minutes of your time--which could have been spent on something more meaningful like Colbert or shopping--but it repays the effort, methinks.

(Less rewarding but good background is McLemee's original piece and the commentary that follows it, and a special treat is one respondent's inclusion of a link to this hilarious snarkfest on Wonkette. The apology for the Bush-Caesar piece on its original website makes a nice coda, too.)

Fundamentalist religious terrorists, anti-intellectuals, proto-fascism in Norman Rockwell guise, hypernationalist capitalism, peak oil, climate change--what's a nice kid like you doing in a place like this, anyway?

Poet Robinson Jeffers wrote the following in 1935; I read it 40 years later and thought it chilling then:

Ave Caesar

No bitterness: our ancestors did it.
They were only ignorant and hopeful, they wanted freedom but wealth too.
Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
Or rather--for we are not aquiline Romans but soft mixed colonists--
Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who'll keep
Poverty and Carthage off until the Romans arrive,
We are easy to manage, a gregarious people,
Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.

Estuary Boy

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 23:44:00 +0000

Had a gorgeous weekend at Dog Island but didn't get as much hiking in as I wanted to, due to a pesky foot injury. But I still managed to visit my favorite tidal estuary on the bay side for a little communing with the fishies. The doomed pine has met its doom, but the rest of the area looks healthy and is resplendent in fall colors.

Adding a layer of meaning to this visit were my recent studies in the Marine Environmental Issues course I'm taking this term. While I've long known much of the mechanics of barrier island movement and beach dynamics, it's always nice to learn more. For example, barrier islands are a feature of "trailing edge margins" -- the lee side of a drifting continent. That's why there are none off the west coast of the Americas.

Something new. Always a treat.

There was some rather alarming erosion on the Gulf side of the island that may have more ephemeral causes but still reminds one that the island itself is fleeting, tumbling shoreward ahead of rising seas like a ship desperately seeking port. Plentiful stumps offshore testify to where the island used to be, if we didn't have the evidence of the Co-op's own history as well.

Which just makes this scenery all the more breathtaking. See more photos.

It Makes 98F Feel Good

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 17:52:00 +0000

Spent Saturday with Lindsay and some of her friends paddling the Santa Fe River (I highly recommend Lars Andersen's Adventure Outpost livery, in lovely new digs on the south side of High Springs). The water has been exceptionally low, which emphasizes the color in many of the springs along the route and actually creates mini-rapids at three points on the run between US27 and FL47.

According to Joe Follman, there are over 30 1st- or 2nd-magnitude springs on the route, and that doesn't count unusual features like Big Awesome Suck, a spooky siphon I saw for the first time this trip.

I can't believe it's been several years since I made this trip. It's gorgeous, even with the crowds at Ginnie Springs. We're very lucky to have so many exceptional aquatic places & spaces within an easy day trip of home.

Laugh While You Can, Monkey Boy

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 14:37:00 +0000

I'm reminded of that line from Buckaroo Banzai every time someone snickers at the notion of a "second life" or the proliferation of acronyms applied to virtual worlds. It's so reminiscent of the reactions I used to hear from people around 1993 or 1994, regarding the "fad" called the Worldwide Web. To some extent, it's not surprising, given the cheeseball depths to which the "virtual reality" meme has sunk in the years since its early helmet-and-glove days.

But there are some pretty good reasons why I'm convinced many (more) of us will be regularly using MUVE's (multiuser virtual environments) within 5 years. I think the following quotes from an essay in TechJournal South capture the compelling nature of this "new" medium:

The whole idea of having this portal into a virtual 3D world where all of the rules of our physical plane can be removed or warped or refined completely fascinates me. It is one of the most compelling media types every created by man. The rapid growth of the video game market is living proof of the power of the medium, but I believe that we will soon see this medium subsume all other media as the best means for educating, socializing and entertaining humans.

The nice thing about interactive 3D as a medium is that it contains all other media as a subset. Sound, video, text, and animated objects and worlds are all embedded in one landscape. When you give humans the ability to add to the content of virtual worlds such as in Second Life, new behavior and opportunities will emerge.

And I think large multiplayer gaming environments will become even more immersive and compelling. We won't be watching the latest James Bond movie; we will be inside the movie, interacting with professional actors playing those movie roles that we once sat on the couch and watched passively. History students will enter the battle of Agincourt and become one of the archers. Science students will fly around inside of molecules and will walk on distant planets. The possibilities are endless.

So these will become common communication media; not only do students benefit from learning through them, they benefit from gaining experience with them. An article in MIT's Technology review captures one exciting possibility: a mashup between virtual worlds, Google Earth, and realtime data:

Remote collaboration, virtual tourism, shopping, education, training, and the like are already common on the Web, a vast resource that grows faster than we can figure out how to use it. Digital globes are gaining in fidelity, as cities are filled out with 3-D models and old satellite imagery is gradually replaced by newer high-resolution shots. And today's island virtual worlds will only get better, with more-realistic avatars and settings and stronger connections to outside reality.

Second Life (SL) is one instantiation of a MUVE that is garnering the most attention recently. The New Media Consortium's "Seriously Engaging" video on YouTube is a good overview of some of the pedagogical affordances of SL. SL Education is a growing resource on the educational uses of SL, while EduMUVE lists sites of interest to educators in SL. And Text100, a public-relations firm, has produced a compelling video showing practical business applications that one can easily map into an educational setting.

Maybe you're just now getting a handle on Web 2.0, but get ready for Web 3-D. It's already here.

P.S.: Lest you think the SL evangelists are all technophiliacs with no sense of humor, I highly recommend two satirical URLs: Get A First Life and DRAFTFCB's SL parody video (both of which are a lot funnier after you've spend some time in SL).

"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings."

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 03:43:00 +0000

"Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."

John Muir, 1838-1914

View more images from my first trip to Colorado.

Too long to sell on a Cafe Press t-shirt, unfortunately.

noreply@blogger.com (J.S. Clark) — Thu, 24 May 2007 22:26:00 +0000

Quote in a recent post from Robert Weissman at Focus on the Corporation:

"Marketing madness has overrun our society. It imposes on our time, debases our culture, poisons community ties and even relations among friends (who may duped into becoming company representatives through 'buzz marketing' arrangements) and threatens our planet with its hyper-consumerist message."

Amen.