Dr Snow and the Water

 Long before "You know nothing, Jon Snow" became a meme, there was another John Snow, a doctor, whose battle against ignorance and mere lore has changed the way we see the world.

Throughout history, the predominating belief has been that sickness and plague were either sent from God as a punishment, or caused by something in the atmosphere. 'Malaria' is Italian for 'bad air' and the same term in Greek 'miasma' was the explanation given to contagious disease by Galen around the year 200 AD. 

Keep reading, we get to Opensim if you're patient.

It may seem unbelievable, but for almost 2000 years, right up into the Victorian era, people continued to put their faith in the miasma theory of how sickness spreads. Not everyone thought so, of course; pioneering physicians and early scientists  propounded 'germ theory' (germ is the the Greek word for seed or spore) first in the 1500s and later in the 1700s, but it never got much traction. 'Miasma' made more sense as the explanation for the diseases that hit hard in places where the poor lived in stuffy, stinky, cramped conditions. It was just bad air that was at fault.

NPC John Snow on Epidemiology, Avacon grid, and a couple of RL photos of the man.

John Snow set out to prove this wrong. In 1844, when he was 31 years old, Dr. Snow set up practice in London's Soho district, a melting pot of breweries, brothels, slaughterhouses, theater people, refugees, and penurious local tradesmen and women. Most people got water in buckets and bottles from the nearest public pump, which served for drinking, washing, and any other uses.  A few could afford to have fresh water piped to into their homes by a private firm, but everyone almost certainly had a cess pit for sewage and other household waste.

More SGT

 SGT? That would be Self Guided Tours, or Trails, in Opensim.  But kind of fun a challenge too. Each of these self-guided tours is a collection of 6 HG addresses/LMs that will take you all over the hyperverse to see things linked  by a common theme like 'art destinations' (there are loads of separate tours for that, each one has the name of a color), or builds that are inspired by movies, or real places, and so on. It's not all of the builds that are out there, of course, just a sampling of the treats out there. 

Avacon portals

Lots of people set up HG hubs, a particularly good example was the one that late Rudy Backerly set up on Soul Grid some time ago, continuing the hard work of Spike Sols Weltraumbahnhof. 

HG Safari has a rather different approach. Instead of offering lots of portals to specific places, the idea is to make grid jumping even more portable - you can grab a pack of LMs and a notecard listing the destinations, use them at a later date, pass them to a friend and so on. 

Conference Call Ten

 This year is the tenth annual OSCC, and you're invited. Great! But what is that?  Who's behind it? What's happening? How much do I have to pay to go to this thing? Where is it held, and when?

Conference Hall, OSCC

Let's start with when and where. The OpenSim Community Conference is held on a dedicated grid with the snappy address cc.opensimulator.org:8002. The grid is online all year round but it is most

Safari gets Tangled and (almost) Terminated

This week we got some answers to questions like 'What's going on with this year's opensim convention?' 'How many times do you have to crash before you get to TanGle grid?' and finally, 'What's it like to have your own personal Terminator?'
Of course, there were other, perennial questions, such as 'Where's my hair?' 'Am I naked?' and 'Who is UMMA?' - all things that anyone who's been on Safari has heard - and said - many times before.

Joyce Bettencourt

Joyce Bettencourt, co-owner of AvaCon grid, and local residents Sun,Tzu and Frans Charming welcomed us to the main plaza decorated with Ruben Haan artwork. After the usual - lovely - flurry of meeting, greeting and friending, we got right down to business.
Jessie Campbell: so I beg the question...what IS Avacon?

Joyce.Bettencourt: hi all, so AvaCon is a 501c3 nonprofit org... we have organized a lot of virtual worlds, things like the Second Life Community Convention that took place in real life in Boston in 2011 and Oakland CA in 2012, and also this past year's Federal Consortium of virtual worlds conference
Selby.Evans: 501c3 is non-profit
George Equus: Tax exempt non profit right 501?
Joyce Bettencourt: which means any money donated would be tax exempt and able to be deducted if you are in the United States. It also means we can't make a profit, all funds raised go towards programs, and the resources and staff needed to support them.
Thirza Ember: this grid is made for conferences that's why it's so robust.
Jeff Kelley: How do you make it robust?
George Equus: lots of titanium probably
Thirza Ember: underpinned by a giant dev who never moves

Joyce Bettencourt: we have also helped organize with the OpenSimulator core developers the OpenSimulator Community Conferences. This grid functions a lot like our virtual office and event space, along with hosting others like the Virtual World Best Practices conference presence in OpenSimulator, and several unique projects from other AvaCon folks like Fleep Tuque's Primland build that is a colorful, game-like how to build in OpenSim walk through... influenced by the game Candy Land if you remember that, and also Nebadon Izumi has a region here that has a lot of his work in progress and interactive objects in his studio - that is the Oni Kenkon Creations region.