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September 20, 2021 Archives

Monday, September 20, 2021

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Fourmilab Pumpkin Head for Second Life Released

Fourmilab Pumpkin Head for Second Life

You've come to expect nothing but the most serious, professional software from Fourmilab, so I'm proud to announce the release of Fourmilab Pumpkin Head for Second Life, a jack-o'lantern (pumpkin carved with a face, lit from within) which may be worn as a head with both mesh and classic avatars, or used as a static decoration for Halloween and other occasions. It includes a script that allows you to configure its behaviour via chat commands, and provides features such as brightening the glow of the light when you're typing in chat.

The product is free, full (copy, modify, and transfer) permissions, including the ability to view and modify its script, able to be customised by commands in a notecard, and includes a development kit including textures, documents, and development log. Complete source code is maintained on and may be downloaded from GitHub.

Don't let Halloween sneak up on you. Sneak up on Halloween in the metaverse and say “Boo!” with Fourmilab Pumpkin Head.

Other Fourmilab products for Second Life

Posted at 14:15 Permalink

CONTEXT: Major Languages of the World

Although more than 7,300 languages are spoken by people in the world today, just 23 languages are the mother tongue of 4.1 billion people, around half the global population. Chinese is the largest language group, with more than a billion native speakers, but English is spoken in the most countries and is, by far, the most widely studied language by non-native learners.

Posted at 12:50 Permalink

CONTINUITY: Tour of the International Space Station Columbus Module

Our tour of the International Space Station continues with the European Space Agency's Columbus module, launched to the station in February 2008 by space shuttle Atlantis on the STS-122 mission. This tour, presented in 360° immersive video (hold down your mouse button within the image and move the pointer to pan and tilt your viewpoint), is led by European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The audio is in French, with English subtitles. (For some screwball reason, the code to automatically turn on the subtitles on YouTube may not work with this video. Click the “CC” box at the bottom to enable them.)

Posted at 11:43 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: Making Matter from Light—Demonstrating the Breit-Wheeler Process

The Breit-Wheeler process is one of the most fundamental manifestations of quantum mechanics and a direct demonstration of Einstein's mass-energy equivalence (E=mc2), but is extraordinarily difficult to demonstrate due to the large energy required and low probability of interaction. In the process, two energetic photons interact and are replaced by a particle and its antiparticle, an electron and positron in the simplest case. In a paper published in July 2021 in Physical Review Letters, “Measurement of e+e− Momentum and Angular Distributions from Linearly Polarized Photon Collisions” (full text at ArXiv [PDF]) researchers at the STAR Collaboration reported observing the process in collisions of gold nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

Posted at 10:47 Permalink