Is SL a Flat World or a Round World?

Okay..I've figured it out..

we live on a giant potato chip/crisp..which is being held by this naked Greek guy (yes..yes..disturbing image I realise..stay calm)..who's balancing on one toe on the back of this big turtle..which has managed to climb this tree (nobody move..)..whatever you're doing..selling..buying..building..anything..just do it slowly....

Har..did you find those asprin..Har..Har...

Okay, the Greek guy I can handle. It's the potato chip/crisp/cringle I have a hard time with. Oh, is it a toga he has on or one of those skimpy thongy thingys? Also, is he oiled?? With creams and unguents?
I like the Tron idea. And the holodeck unreality. But, I'll take the healthy Greek guy also. He doesnt have to speak English ...

Steady Jiq steady..if the Greek guy gets over excited we've all had it...for God's sake don't mention 'unguents'...

muffled 'crash' in background....

Unguents, Perre. Lucious oozy unguents, squirting in all directions, dripping down the edges of the oozy thickly chocklaty cake we call "our world". Steamy and all rich with the very milk of human lushness ...

I'm sorry...I'm really not sure how to reply to that last response....Har did you ever find those asprins.....

help..somebody.....please help....

I LOVED that book. I'm taking this opportunity to plug a suggestion in JIRA that LL start an entirely new grid, based on another planet, like Mars or the Moon...that maybe we could teleport to? Dunno if it's possible, but how cool would that be?

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-564

Wow, so if we offer to oil this guy's shoulders, can we get earthquakes to happen in sims that we dont' like?

Is the giant Greek dude wearing gloves? Potato chips/crisps usually are coated with a bit of salt, which could get painful after years of exposure to ungloved hands. We don't have to worry about the salt because we have a layer of "soil" protecting us on the chip's upper surfaces. I think there is no soil on the bottom of the chip because gravity don't play that way. If I'm right, we can expect tremors, then The Big One sometime in the future. Lets just hope he puts us down gently...

Go see Seifert's Crooked House, or look up the short story of the same name

lee

I think there is evidence that SL is NOT one world. It is more like a large collection of small, 256x256 meter worlds.

There seems to be some sort of illusion that the small worlds are adjacent to one another, but consider the strange physical anomolies that occur when one moves from one to the next. These anomolies suggest that there is some sort of barrier or discontinuity in the fabric of space at those borders.

Also, I do not think we can reject the possibility that there are many more collections of these small square worlds out there far beyond the edge of the explored regions.

mmmmm...potato chips and naked Greek guys........

Um, what was the question again?

Oh man, I was thinking more along the lines of : Horton Hears A Who....*chants* We are here,* This post has gone sooo wrong I love it...

I think SL is flat

What would really suck is if the big Greek dude turned out to be a discus thrower in the Olympics, and we're his practice discus. We'll all go spinning madly out into the ether... creating a whole new set of gravity problems.

It would be worse if it weren't a Greek guy. It's Philip Linden, and we aren't on his shoulders, we're on his belly. As soon as he wakes up from his nap and rolls over, we'll all be crushed to death.

Actually, LL is an actual lab. The grid is an illusion. There's actually an ant farm in the LL headquarters that we all live in, like some sort of bio-sociology project. They sit around and examine how we react to different stressors, such a Wednesday's "Grid is down" messages, late stipends, borked tp and search, Ruthieness, etc. The bad news is that we are all test subjects. The good news is that no actual bunny rabbits or cute chimpanzees were harmed in this test, and everyone at LL gets an A on their thesis when they finish with it.

LOL I skipped straight to the last page and this is the first thing I saw. Nice distraction.... mmmmmm....

the ancient greeks knew the world was round. eratosthenes even measured the earth's circumference.

the only argument during columbus' time was how large the earth was.

only in mark twain's novel do people at that time think the earth is flat.

Neither round nor flat...

It is a 3D world ...XYZ, and a 2D world ...UV

XYZ are 3d coordinates
UV are 2D coordinates

Any questions?

BTW... Claire seems to be preocupied by nakid guys...I wonder why that is....Claire?

I don't believe people still think the world is round. It isn't. And mankind has never gone to the moon either. It's all a hoax.

'I like my world flat!' (quoted from Linden-survey on Windlight-washout)

SL? I believe it is a hyperbole, and definitely a flawed and random event. i like the snowman`s description, quote:
"
1. As a truly massive array of micro-transistor devices with varying levels of potential that operate in concert according to logical rules.
2. As an even bigger array of potential voltages and chemical reactions in the brains of the people who use SL, broadly operating to illogical rules. "

except i believe 1 and 2 are inextricably mixed and confused together in concept at least, such that the existence of 1., depends upon the existence of 2., that itself makes it part of the world and the universe we can see. Many believe the universe to be a random event, and i follow that cause too..

if that idea of the universe we can see holds true as we continue to discover it, then SL has a curvature somewhere in its construction, because its fabric sits on the earth, but while the electronic signals follow that curvature and link the parts, (us and the fabric of SL), they also radiate into the universe., so,for example.. about a hundred years from now,somewhere out there in space, someone with the right reciever, a hundred light years from us, could watch the beginning of secondlfe... that makes anything those signals reach, part of the event.. like anything is part of the universal event.. random, and right now we know of no edge or limitation to ALL those random events, since we cannot see it all.. so cannot predict with absolute certainty, the limits. When we can.. we become gods ... perhaps..

like us and the universe, SL is in flux i think..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux

of course.. just posting here, changes something .. so i could be totally wrong..

One day SL will be so huge it will need a city sized planet like Coruscant just to physically hold the servers. All the avatars will be operated by formless entities floating through space time.... or maybe it is already and we don't realize it, or maybe it isn't. Who knows for sure?

It's a hollowed out Torus.

This can be settled very easily. Measure the distances between points in many different sims. If the cosine law doesn't hold, then the grid has curvature. If it does hold, the grid is flat. In principle, one could also calculate components of the Riemann curvature tensor using this info. I, however, don't care enough to actually perform this test.

If it does 'wrap' then I am fairly confidant it uses the same system as Ultima Online and every other MMORPG style game. It is a flat map the 'wraps' around once you reach the edge to simulate a round world. a simple example is this

01.02.03.04.05
06.07.08.09.10
11.12.13.14.15
16.17.18.19.20
21.22.23.24.25

As above the world is borken up into areas or regions with the edges connected so the s/w knows where the world 'wraps'. Thus, a person in area 14 walks east to area 15, the server s/w then looks to the 'edge' of the world where it should be technically 'connected' in this case area 11 and renders it on screen. While the map on a mathmatical level is 2D it uses this programming trick to emulate a 3D world. Same as if the person in question in area 07 traveled north. once he reached area 02 the s/w would look at the connection point and see s/he should be going to area 22 if they continue north.

And so on. If I was to guess (having not looked at the source code for the server) I'd say this is the kind of way they emulate a round world. Its the easiest and most standard way in programming.

I will say with the cavet this is my educated guess, I may certainly be wrong.

SL is neither round nor flat. The hypercube comes closest I guess, since no one excactly knows what a hypercube is.
Our AV's live in a better place. One you have to believe in to live there. Kind of like heaven but less heavenly. Not flat. Not round. Not understandable. At least not for us poor mortal souls. Ask a mighty Linden, and the answer will be 42. Because we are not worthy to understand even the question, let alone the answer. Reading back, probably not even this posting we can understand.

SL is not flat, not round, SL IS.

Happy friday, Marcel

Surely, since only so many regions exist per server, it is lumpy, like an eggbox.