Hulleye Comes By!

In a world where people are trying to blow up airplanes using tampons and KY jelly; where donkeys and elephants continue to dance on the head of a pin; and where every crackpot dictator wants his own personal ‘nucular’ device, it’s becoming almost pro forma to call Battlestar Galactica the most topical series on television.

It remains unabashedly unafraid of wading waste deep into the often depraved psyche of our collective humanity.
And the wading continues. Eight episodes into Season Three it’s clear that there’s no let-up in sight. The constant assault on one’s sensibilities; the bombardment of the senses by way of situations few humans can imagine, nor would wish to; the oppressive relentlessness of the Cylon pursuit—it all adds up to nine hours of riveting, yet often exhausting, television. It’s difficult not to tune in to see exactly who will be dropped in the meat-grinder next, and how.

This is not intended as a flippant remark, for the results almost always yield unexpected consequences—unexpected for the audience, anyway. For the series doesn’t just put us behind the camera using its well-publicized cinema vérité style, it often swings that camera towards the mirror, so to speak, and forces us to take a an unvarnished look at ourselves, too, challenging the audience to confront its own convictions and dogmas. It’s a task that the news, no matter how gruesome, is often bereft of accomplishing. With our own beliefs often mercilessly sacrificed on the alter of forced introspection, Battlestar Galactica doesn’t take sides or preach philosophies, rather it shatters preconceptions and leaves a slack-jawed audience to pick up the pieces. Very clever, those Galactica writers.

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Meet Anshe Chung, a real-estate tycoon in the online game Second Life, and the first virtual millionaire (her holdings in the game are legally convertible into $1 million in real US currency!)

In Second Life, subscribers get a tool kit that enables them to build and create an avatar (a character in the world). They also get a small quantity of Linden dollars to start out with, enabling the participant to buy additional tools and objects within the world itself. Linden Lab converts currency at a floating rate that, at the moment, is about 257 Linden dollars per U.S. dollar.

Though you can buy additional Linden dollars from Linden Lab by paying U.S. currency, Chung says she has made all her additional Linden dollars via in-world buying, building, trading, and selling. The lion’s share of it, she says, has been made by buying, developing, and then renting or reselling “land”–i.e., control over the virtual real estate simulated by Linden’s servers. Each of Linden Lab’s servers simulates about 16 acres of in-world property. At the time I wrote my article in November 2005, Chung was developing private islands and setting up communities restricted to, for instance, East Asian, Victorian, or Gothic architecture, or to French-speakers, or to gays and lesbians, or to fuzzy avatars known as “furries.” Because Linden Lab has added simulation servers more slowly than it has accumulated subscribers, virtual property values have soared.

From The National Geographic:

With its conspicuous blue eyes and shiny orange claws, this colorful crab seems hard to miss. But it’s one of many species that had likely never been seen until scientists went exploring in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument this fall.

An international team of biologists made the discoveries in October during a three-week survey of a remote coral atoll called French Frigate Shoals.

More here.