As part of the busiest week of events in Extropia's history, we're holding a special Sophrosyne's Salon at 10 am SLT Thursday morning, in the Central Nexus in Extropia Core.

Our Salon Spotlight Guest will be Tom Bukowski (Tom Boellstorff).  Tom is the author of the newly-released book, Coming of Age in Second Life.

Tom is Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine and Editor in Chief of American Anthropologist. He hosted the recent atomic-world conference "Cultures of Virtual Worlds," and has been an embedded anthropologist in Second Life since 2004.  His new book is an anthropological study of Second Life's cultures and subcultures. It's challenging, provocative, engaging, and offers much to everyone, casual reader, SL Resident and social scientist alike.

Tom is a delightful, engaging, insightful speaker, and we're delighted to welcome him to Extropia!





Our regular Saturday Salon will feature another very special guest, Universa Vanalten (Erika Vick) of NASA Headquarters. Universa is the coordinator of NASA's extensive activities in Second Life, and will be discussing the space agency's use of virtual technologies for outreach, education, research and exploration. 

Fresh from the coming NASA Future Forum this week in Extropia and other SL venues, Universa will set out the future of NASA's virtuality efforts, and share some exciting movies and slides of present and future space endeavors!

Saturday, May 17, 1-2:30 pm, Central Nexus at Extropia Core.



Meanwhile, last week's Salon has been described by many as the best yet - which is saying a lot!  Ben Duranske, of the virtual worlds legal blog Virtually Blind and author of the new book Virtual Law, joined us for a terrific discussion of legal issues facing residents and merchants in virtual worlds.

Ben has a rare gift for explaining complex matters in an engaging, entertaining and enlightening way, and we were all (33 peak concurrency) treated to a marvelous discussion!

Thanks, Ben, and we hope to have you back in Extropia again!

Join us this Saturday, May 10 from 1-2:30 pm SLT in the Central Nexus at Extropia Core for Sophrosyne's Saturday Salon!  This week, our Salon Spotlight Guest is Benjamin Duranske (Benjamin Noble), author of the authoritative legal blog Virtually Blind and the new book from the American Bar Association Press, Virtual Law: Navigating the Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds.

Ben is a terrific writer, who makes difficult subjects accessible and interesting. I'd been daunted by a 450-page law book with such topics at "Further Identification of Documents in Virtual Worlds," but  it's a smooth, engrossing and enlightening read, and well worth the troubles of navigating the ABA's online store to obtain a copy. If you're doing business in a virtual world, or concerned about your personal rights, this book is an excellent investment.

Ben will be discussing his book as well as a number of controversial legal issues confronting residents and business people in virtual worlds, so if you have questions about the rules and forces increasingly shaping virtual worlds, come on down - this promises to be one of our best sessions ever!

(While we may well use our half hour of scheduled overtime and run till 3pm, if Ben has the energy, I will be leaving promptly to attend the conference in World of Warcraft!)

Hamlet Au, New World Notes blogger, former Linden and author of the outstanding new book The Making of Second Life (seriously - it's maybe the very best book on synthetic worlds out there - it's smart, gripping, sensitive and insightful - go buy a copy!), was our Salon Spotlight Guest today.

We had a terrific crowd - a peak concurrency of 42 - but the Salon room looked strangely empty after seeing 84 people in there last week!

Hamlet dealt well with the outspoken Salon crowd, told some great stories, shared his insights on the Lindens, the state of the industry and the future of synthetic worlds, and stayed into overtime to chat with all of us. 

The transcript is available here.

No Salon next week!  I'll be gone all week.  Back in two with a second try for JoJa Dhara on Virtual Holland, which we had to cancel a few weeks back due to logins being shut off...

David Brin's appearance as Salon Spotlight Guest was the centerpiece of Yuri's Night celebrations in Extropia. Dr. Brin packed them in: we had a peak concurrency of 84, and stayed right around 80 for most of his two-hour appearance.  Thankfully, sim stability was excellent, considering the circumstances.

It was certainly an unusual event!  We got off to a ragged start, with many of the audience trying to talk at once - which works fine for backchat at events like Metanomics, where the speaker is in the Voice channel, but which completely overwhelmed our guest, who was in text chat,  struggling with the interface and the speed of threaded conversations.

After our shakedown, Dr. Brin got into the spirit of the thing in fine form, challenging us to look critically at internet-based communications tools, including those we were using, and led us in a rough-and-tumble exchange that left us all thinking, and hungry for more.

Many thanks to Dr. Brin for his time and engagement with us, and our thanks to Zeroe Auer, who created Dr. Brin's photorealistic skin, and Zada Zenovka, who built his shape.  He was looking fine!

Next week: Hamlet Au (Wagner James Au), founder of the influential blog "New World Notes," and author of the terrific new book, The Making of Second Life.


Photos by Boc Cryotank (Stephen Euin Cobb)

Special thanks to Boc Cryotank (Stephen Euin Cobb) for the photos-  Boc's got an eye for the ladies, doesn't he?  :D

We cancelled the regular Saturday Salon due to SL's long downtime: logins started working right at 1, when the Salon was scheduled to start, and a lot of people hadn't gotten the word.  Plus, our Spotlight Guest, JoJa Dhara, had been sick anyway - we decided to let her rest, and to sav her visit for a time when she's healthy and we can get a full crowd. 

The afternoon turned into an impromptu party, as a good dozen people showed up anyway, and kibitzed while Vidal expanded the seating in the Salon room, in preparation for SF Writer (Robert J. Sawyer)'s visit on Sunday:




And, photos of the Salon itself the following day:

What an incredible event!

SF Writer (Robert J. Sawyer) was so kind as to join us for nearly three hours of intense conversation today! We drew a decent crowd for our unusual timeslot, 33 people, all of whom were talking at once at some points! The crowd enthusiasm was great, and SF jumped right in for a spirited discussion of transhumanism and its discontents. Religion, elitism, uploading, the singularity, American and Canadian cultural differences - we hit it all in a cheerful and vigorous discussion.

A full transcript is available here.

After the Salon, SF stayed to join the Extropia Book Club for a discussion of his Hugo Award-nominated novel Rollback. We had if anything an even better time in this small venue. It was the treat of a lifetime for many of us to sit and chat with such a gifted novelist. It was hard to let him go, and we kept him till the point of exhaustion, I'm afraid.

SF is adorable, generous, terrifically funny, and just a natural fit in Extropia.

While we wish all the other excellent nominees well, if Rollback wins the Hugo at the World Science Fiction Convention this August, we hope SF will come back for the absolute blowout party we'll throw in his honor!


Very special thanks to Boc Cryotank (Stephen Euin Cobb, of the podcast The Future and You) for all his work in arranging SF's visit!

Saturday, April 12 is Yuri's Night, the commemoration of Yuri Gagarin's first flight to space.  All over Earth, parties will celebrate the legacy and hope of spaceflight, from Alaska to Antarctica.  In Second Life, party central is Extropia!

We'll host a full day of events, but the cornerstone will be a special appearance as Spotlight Guest at Sophrosyne's Saturday Salon by novelist, futurist and gadfly David Brin!  Soph will interview David in an open discussion event in the Central Nexus in Extropia Core, from 1 to 2:30 PM Pacific Time.

David Brin is a scientist, speaker, technical consultant and world-known author. His novels have been New York Times Bestsellers, winning multiple Hugo, Nebula and other awards. At least a dozen have been translated into more than twenty languages.

His 1989 ecological thriller, Earth, foreshadowed global warming, cyberwarfare and near-future trends such as the World Wide Web*. A 1998 movie, directed by Kevin Costner, was loosely based on The Postman.

Brin serves on advisory committees dealing with subjects as diverse as national defense and homeland security, astronomy and space exploration, SETI and nanotechnology, future/prediction and philanthropy. His non-fiction book -- The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? -- deals with secrecy in the modern world. It won the Freedom of Speech Prize from the American Library Association.

As a speaker and on television, David Brin shares unique insights -- serious and humorous -- about ways that changing technology may affect our future lives. Brin lives in San Diego County with his wife, three children, and a hundred very demanding trees.

We've had a lot of wonderful guests in Extropia, but next Sunday we're going to have a very special visitor! 

Robert J. Sawyer (SF Writer in SL) will be joining us for a discussion of his novels and his visions of the future, in life extension, robotics, artificial intelligence, SETI, inter-species ethics and many more fascinating topics. And, he'll be sticking around afterwards to join the Extropia Book Club in a discussion of his latest novel, Rollback,  just named as a finalist for the Hugo Award!

Please join us at noon, in the Central Nexus in Extropia Core, Extropia, Second Life!

Robert J. Sawyer — called "the dean of Canadian science fiction" by The Ottawa Citizen and "just about the best science-fiction writer out there these days" by The Denver Rocky Mountain News — is one of only seven writers in history to win all three of the science-fiction field's top honors for best novel of the year:

• the World Science Fiction Society's Hugo Award, which he won in 2003 for his novel Hominids;

• the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's Nebula Award, which he won in 1996 for his novel The Terminal Experiment;

• and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, which he won in 2006 for his novel Mindscan.

Rob is also the only writer in history to win the top SF awards in the United States, China, Japan, France, and Spain. In addition, he's won an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada as well as nine Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards ("Auroras").

Maclean's: Canada's Weekly Newsmagazine says, "By any reckoning, Sawyer is among the most successful Canadian authors ever," and Barnes and Noble calls him "the leader of SF's next-generation pack."

Rob's novels are top-ten national mainstream bestsellers in Canada, appearing on the Globe and Mail and Maclean's bestsellers' lists, and they've hit #1 on the bestsellers' list published by Locus, the U.S. trade journal of the SF field. His seventeen novels include Frameshift, Factoring Humanity, Flashforward, Calculating God, and the popular "Neanderthal Parallax" trilogy consisting of Hominids, Humans, and Hybrids.

Please join us Saturday, March 22 from 1-3pm SLT at the Central Nexus in Extropia Core for Sophrosyne's Saturday Salon!  Our Spotlight Guest will be futurist, community builder and blogger DavidOrban Agnon (David Orban) for an exploration of The New Renaissance.

DavidOrban is:

• Founder of OpenSpime, Inc.: their technology enables individuals and corporations to better understand their environment, through the use of a series of GPS-enabled sensors. They provide a set of open APIs and communication protocols to manage the data collected;

• Founder of Vulcano, an online community in Second Life, whose aim is to explore the rich opportunities that the metaverse offers in new types of social organization, education, entertainment, and business;

• Founder of the Singularity Institute Europe;

• and a founding member of Lunarez - The Metaverse Space Agency, a team competing for the Google Lunar X Prize.

• "What is the question that I should be asking?" is my motto. Meta-analyses, and meta-rules are the tools of the trade when going breadth first is an advantage. The new renaissance is also about cutting across the limits of deep specialization. Tolerating high levels of pressure, and frequent mistakes, accelerating cycles of invention and innovation build the new worlds ahead of us.

Yesterday's Salon, "Religion, Spirituality And The Avatar," with Soren Ferlinghetti (Dr. Robert M. Geraci) was one of the best, and best-attended Salons to date, with a peak concurrency of 45 and a total attendance of over 60. Soren shared his research and insights into religion in SL, while our discussion was wide-ranging, clever, intense and respectful of a diversity of views. Special thanks to SL-Transhumanists and The Al-Andalus Project for inviting their members to join us!

The chatlog is available on the Extropia website.

Next week's Salon kicks off a cycle of several months of absolutely fascinating guests.  On Saturday, March 15, from 1-3pm at the Central Nexus in Extropia Core, our Salon Spotlight Guest will be Soren Ferlinghetti (Robert M Geraci). 

Robert M. Geraci is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College in New York City. He studies the interactions of religion, science and technology with particular emphasis upon robotics, artificial intelligence and (more recently) online gaming. he has conducted fieldwork at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and in Second Life through discussions and interviews. In addition to publishing a number of essays on religion and robotics, he has just finished a book on the subject (tentatively titled _Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality_) and is planning a new book about religion and online games.

Soren and I have spoken occasionally over many months about spirituality and identity in the digital world.  We have profoundly different perspectives, and attitudes towards technology in general, but I've always found him curious, open-minded, warm-hearted and fascinating.

Soren's work was recently covered in New World Notes:

The Soul Of Second Life: In SL Spirituality Survey, 48% Open To Mind Upload, 62% To New SL-Based Religions

Thanks to Hamlet Au, we not only got Soren's remarkable conclusions (more people go to church in SL than have sex, what?!), but the raw data supporting them.

At the Salon we'll discuss Soren's research, the interplay between spirituality and identity in the digital world, the evolution of religion, and many more fascinating topics sparked by his work.  This one's a must-see!