Category: Knowledge

Cosma’s Golden Jubilee!

~ mehopper ~ 1 Comment

It’s Cosma’s Birthday!

Cosma came into being through an accident of confluence fifty years ago.

I happened to be working in a library, and I got deeply enamored with the power of using the Dewey Decimal System to navigate it.

Then I was also exposed to the spatial game Empire on the PLATO system.

Viola!

It struck me that it would be SO cool to make a game where “knowledge is a place” that you can navigate with addresses like you can in “planned cities” like Indianapolis where I grew up.

It would be a fictional city using Dewey Decimal for addresses so that everyone could navigate knowledge as naturally as they do planned cities.

Making knowledge a place would democratize it!

I’ve been working on making “knowledge a place” ever since. The concept has evolved a LOT over the years, but this was the original spark. Of course, I also found out along the way that I am not the only one with an idea like this — there’s a very, very long history of such things.

I noticed that the anniversary of my “big idea” was approaching while I was working on Cosma’s new Welcome Area that I dubbed Knowledge Lobby.

I got nostalgic and played around with what a “real life” exhibit about Cosma might look like. Then that thought experiment snowballed into an exercise in visualization.

Note that most objects are visual links to the Web!


You can also explore it on Kuula.

This week I got even more nostalgic and decided to write a post to share a bit more information about the history and evolution of Cosma.

Oooops, I did it, again — it snowballed, too 🙂

Check out the results on the new Timeline page!

So, how will we celebrate this Jubilee?

Take a short break and get back to expanding and posting on Cosma!

Happy Birthday to Cosma & Cheers to You!

Cosma is not a funded project — money is neither requested nor accepted, so there is no budget for publicity.

The only request is that you please tell other people about it.

Thank you!

Visit     About | Worlds | Adventures | Contents | Index

© M. E. Hopper

Athena’s Chamber & Muses’ Tea Party

~ mehopper

You are cordially invited to explore the two newest additions to the pantheon of Cosma’s Web Worlds.

They are both reimaginings of earlier Toy Worlds.

Just touch the 360° images to explore them!

Athena’s Chamber is a reimagining of Athena’s Office.

Muses’ Tea Party is a reimagining of Muses’ Playroom.

Enjoy!

You can also (re)visit Cosma’s Knowledge Navigation Center!

Touch posters and objects to find out about them or visit other worlds.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

About | Worlds | Adventures | Contents | Index

Cosma is not a funded project — money is neither requested nor accepted, so there is no budget for publicity.

The only request is that you please tell other people about it.

Thank you!

© M. E. Hopper

Cosma’s Knowledge Lobby!

~ mehopper

Check out Cosma’s brand new Knowledge Lobby!


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Here’s a quick backstory about it.

I’ve been “making knowledge a place” for a long time, so at this point Cosma features MANY 3D worlds that enable spatial navigation of the Cosma site and other content on the Web.

Recently I’ve been upgrading my old Toy Worlds to somewhat parallel Web Worlds.

For example, here’s the “Walk in Art” Toy World.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

It was cute for what it was, but limited.

Here is the newer, expanded “Walk in Art & Museums” Web World.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

You get the idea.

This Welcome Area is one of the few Toy Worlds that I hadn’t upgraded to a Web World.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

It is essentially a 3D version of Cosma’s 2D Showcase page that has links to sample pages, and it has been the primary interface to Cosma since 2018. It was overdue for an overhaul.

Again, here’s the same new Web World as above for comparison.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Notice that there is a (not very well hidden) trap door that leads to another new Web World.

Next year marks a major milestone in Cosma’s development, so I was playing around with what a real life exhibit about it would look like. Then my simple thought experiment snowballed into this elaborate exercise in visualization.


You can also explore it on Kuula.

Of course, every object is a visual link to something on the Web.

What better place to put such a thing than below the new Welcome Area, right?

It serves as an extended, visual “About” page.

So that’s the story behind Cosma’s new “Knowledge Lobby” and the cellar beneath it.

Now the majority of my Toy Worlds have been upgraded to Web Worlds.

Although, there are still a few more to go …

Stay Tuned!

Hike, Wander & Walk-in the Web!

~ mehopper

Welcome to Web Worlds@Cosma!

The pages of Cosma have links to many thousands of the best resources on the Web.

Immersive 3D and 360° experiences are among the most valuable types of resources, and so there are links to thousands of them distributed across the hundreds of pages on the Web site.

The Web Worlds@Cosma are thematic 360° images with visual links to a sample of ten to twenty of the best Immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the Web for a specific subject.

There are many Web Worlds distributed across the pages on the Cosma Web site.

The Web World below is a special one with links to many of the others.

There are hundreds of immersive 3D and 360° experiences to explore!

Click on objects to see 3D and 360° experiences, and click doorways to go to other Web Worlds.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

If you’ve been following Cosma, then you know that Web Worlds have been evolving over the course of the last year. Continue reading below to learn the story behind them.

———————–
New Worlds, Old Ways@MEHopper

The story of Web Worlds began while I was updating my MEHopper Web site last summer.

I had been playing around with virtual home staging software and noticed that some of the spaces looked as if they were generated in the virtual world SecondLife. It was neat to see that “nearly” photorealistic 360° images could be generated and exported from that system.

I’ve used SecondLife to create Knowledge Places for decades, and I knew that it was now possible to take and download 360° photos, but I hadn’t gotten around to trying it yet.

I finally got inspired to do it and started with (re)creating my MEHopper Gallery Toy World. Toy Worlds are dioramas created with dollhouse furniture and other miniature objects that are photographed with a RICOH THETA S 360° Camera. The resulting 360° photos are posted on Kuula to overlay links to the Web.

Sure enough, I was able to take a 360° picture in SecondLife and upload it to Kuula to add links in the same way that I had for the Toy World. The result was this new MEHopper Gallery.

Click on the pictures to read posts about when and where they were taken.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
Web Worlds@New Media Museum

The experiment was successful enough that I decided to try my hand at another one.

This time it was for a space for my New Media Museum Web site. I had experimented with making virtual museums using my own museum’s content, but this time the goal was to create an interface to other computer museums.

This goal also inspired me to resurect my idea of “Magic Doors” from my work in SecondLife. You can read about the history of them on the Knowledge Objects page.

M.E.Hopper's Magic Window in SecondLife 2006
M.E.Hopper's Magic Window Farm in SecondLife 2006

The result of this experiment was the Computer Museums Lobby below, and you can read the story about why this came about in this post on my New Media Museum Web site.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, objects to learn about them, “i”s to learn about the museums, and doors to enter the virtual museums.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

It was around this time that it dawned on me that Web Worlds was a good term for describing the 3D interfaces that I was creating in SecondLife and Kuula to make visual links to other immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the Web. I did some research and found that the term had been used to describe virtual worlds on the Web before, and so I decided that it was the right term to use for what I was doing.

———————–
Web Worlds@Cosma

It wasn’t long after the term Web Worlds stuck that I decided Cosma needed some of them.

One major goal of Cosma is to have 3D interfaces for spatial Knowledge Navigation of the resources on Cosma and other Web sites. The history of this work is on the Worlds page.

There are currently a series of Toy Worlds that serve as 360° visual interfaces for the major content areas of Cosma. There is also a Cosma Welcome Area Toy World on the front page of Cosma that has links to the others.

However, there are some content areas that don’t have Toy Worlds. That’s because I never got around to making them, and this has bugged me for awhile. Web Worlds struck me as a way to remedy the situation.

The idea of “Magic Doors” as links to other immersive 3D and 360° experiences came in handy, too. I’ve been adding links to immersive 3D and 360° experiences on the pages of Cosma for about five years, and there are thousands of them distributed across the Web site. Unfortunately, few people notice them because the links to amazing experiences blend in with more mundane links (Wikipedia, Library of Congress, Open Courseware, JSTOR etc.). I decided that Web Worlds with visual links could be a way to bring more attention the links to immersive 3D and 360° experiences.

I happened to be updating the Transportation pages, and it was one of the content areas with no Toy World. I also happened to have tons of cool objects in SecondLife to use for the job (Cars, Trains, Boats, Planes etc.). It wasn’t long before Transit Paradise was born.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

One limitation of my approach to making Web Worlds reared it’s ugly head, though.

You can only cram so many doors and objects into a single 360° photo.

This result was that there wasn’t enough room for all of the Transportation content, and I decided that Space Transportation needed to go into a separate Web World.

I was also updating the Space pages at the time and decided to address another weakness. While the existing Solar Extremes Toy World was a fine interface for the Solar System pages, there were some pages related to Astronomy that weren’t included in it.

Ultimately Space Transportation and Astronomy were combined into Space Depot.

Touch the 360° image to begin exploring, touch the objects and doors to enter virtual 360° experiences, and touch “i”s to learn about the experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

Soon after that I was working on the Library page and saw experiences there begging for attention. The Great Libraries Antechamber resulted, and the post Little, Big, Old, Spooky Libraries explains more about it.

———————–
Hike the Web!

November 17th is National Take a Hike Day, and I planned a post to highlight some virtual hikes on the Web. A Web World with doors to those and some parks seemed like a nice idea, and so Hiking Trails Hall came into being.

I was also updating the pages in the Nature section of Cosma around that time, and I thought it would be good to make Web Worlds to emphasize the links to experiences quietly lurking about on those pages.

For example, there were links to 3D tours of Natural History Museums on the Dinosaur page, and so a Web World for accessing Natural History Museums seemed like a “should do.”

The Plant, Flower and Tree pages had links to some lovely Botanical Gardens, so Botanical Gardens Orangery was an obvious choice for another Web World.

There were many links to fun experiences on the Animal pages that needed attention. I also happened to already have some very cute animals in my inventory in SecondLife, so Critter’s Hollow was a no-brainer.

Finally, I created this Nature Center to integrate and access the four separate Web Worlds and introduced it in the Hike the Web post.

Touch doors and objects to enter 360° virtual experiences, touch “i”s to learn more, and touch arrows to go to other areas of the Nature Center.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
Beach Bum Break

Then came January, in New England, and this year was worse than usual! 🙁

I’m a hopeless “beach person.” That’s why there’s even a Beach page on Cosma.

I couldn’t go visit beaches with warm weather, so making Enchanted Beach Hut, Enchanted Beach Shack and the Enchanted Beach House below were therapy. You can read about it in My Enchanted Beach Houses post.

Touch doorways to visit 360° experiences, and touch posters and objects to find out more.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

It turned out that my beach adventures weren’t just therapy — they also inspire the design of the largest Web Worlds creation so far …

———————–
Wander the Web@Wanderlust!

Later in January I got busy slogging through updating and expanding the “World” pages (Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, Antarctica and their many children).

Years ago I made an arm-chair Travel Lounge Toy World. It was okay, but it didn’t showcase many immersive experiences.

In fact, there were so many links to fantastic experiences on the pages that I was updating, a single Web World wasn’t going to be enough. There ended up being six Web Worlds (Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania and Antarctica).

Notice that I loved my Enchanted Beach House so much, I repurposed it for all of them. Then, as with the Nature Center, I made a central Web World to access the others. Voila! The result was Wanderlust Travel Villa!

Touch doorways to visit 360° experiences, and touch posters to find out more.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
Walk-in-Web

Earlier in February, after the extravaganza that was Wanderlust, I wasn’t sure that I would be up to making more Web Worlds any time soon. Then I was updating the Arts & Entertainment pages and realized a few things.

First, I don’t spend nearly enough time on them, and I don’t add that content to the other pages as much as I should either. I need to fix that.

Second, my earlier Walk-in-Art Toy World was kind of pathetic, and it didn’t have links to great art museums that you can visit on the Web.

Of course, that just wouldn’t do at all, so welcome to Walk-in-Art & Museums.

Touch the art and doorways to visit 360° experiences.

You can also explore it on Kuula.

———————–
One World to Rule Them All

After reading the story above, I hope you can see why I needed to make a single Web World to access the others. It became too unwieldy to find all of the Web Worlds distributed across the Cosma Web site, and old fashioned text links to them would be too boring and not in the spirit of why I made them.

I hope you enjoy using Web Worlds@Cosma to Hike, Wander and Walk-in the hundreds of 3D and 360° experiences that you can find through Cosma Web Worlds Welcome Area!

Enjoy!
— M. E. Hopper

Little, Big, Old & Spooky Libraries

~ mehopper

I take a lot of walks in the towns along the coast north of Boston, and along the way I take pictures of things that catch my eye. Lately, those things have included Little Free Libraries.

They are the sort of thing that, once you’ve noticed them, they seem to be everywhere.

One of the neat things about them is that they are all decorated in different, fun ways.

For example, here is one of the first ones that I noticed in Marblehead.

Some of them are in beautiful, eye catching locations like this one in Swampscott.
Little Library, Swampscott Fisherman's Beach

They often reflect their surroundings, sometimes literally.

Little Library, Swampscott Commons

I also walk in Salem from time to time, and there are quite a few there. Here is one that is particularly appropriate for this season.

Little Library, Salem

After a while, I realized that Little Free Libraries was rapidly becoming one of my art projects.

That’s when I decided to check out their site.

Litle Free Library: Take a Book. Share a Book.

It was great to see how vast the movement has become — it’s truly a world-wide phenomenon!

It also turns out that the site has a map of all of the locations, and the descriptions often include pictures. I encourage you to take a look at what’s near you and participate.

It was fun to explore them, but I realized that taking tons of pictures and posting them would be unnecessarily duplicative. I abandoned my little, rapidly burgeoning art project.

On the other hand, I decided to add Little Free Libraries to Cosma’s library page.

I did that, and then I got wrapped up in adding more links to the page.

One detour I took was watching a YouTube video about the World’s Most Beautiful Libraries.

That led to trying to find 3D “virtual field trips” to each of them.

Sure enough, there were some. Best of all, I even found a 360° video tour of the spooky library that was used for filming scenes in the Harry Potter movies.

After I finished adding links to all of the “virtual tours” of libraries that I could find, I realized it would be even better to go a step further.

I’ve been making 3D spaces with “doors” to virtual field trips on the Web, posting them on the 3D image sharing site Kuula, and then embedding them on the pages on Cosma.

The first one I made was the Computer Museum Lobby, and then I made one that I dubbed Transit Paradise and then another one called Space Depot.

Why not do one for big, old, spooky libraries?

Voilà – here it is!

Welcome to The Great Libraries Antechamber.

Touch doors to enter the virtual tours, and touch the bookshelves to open Web sites.

You can also see the Great Libraries Antechamber on Kuula.

Finally, here’s a tiny “scavenger hunt” to get you started on exploring the libraries.

These are arranged “roughly” in order of difficulty.

1. Which library has a famous Long Room with two floors?
3. Which library was used for filming in the Harry Potter films?
2. Which library has 1,348 miles of bookshelves?
4. Which library houses the Book of Kells?
5. Which library has murals that illustrate the Evolution of the Book?

I hope you enjoy exploring the libraries, and thank you for joining me on this journey through little, big, old and, most importantly, spooky libraries.

Have a great Halloween!

Strange Stays

~ mehopper

I concluded my last post about Sand Art with highlighting how Booking.com offered the chance to stay in a sandcastle as a promotion for Coney Island’s Sand Sculpting Competition. Here’s a link with more on that unusual “opportunity.”

Giant Coney Island Sandcastle Offers Sleepovers (Summer Delaney, WPIX)

That may have sounded like a one-off type of oddity, but in truth, it wasn’t.

Booking.com is known for cooking up some “unique” promotions. For example, here’s a silly clip on what they did for that illustrious holiday, National Avocado Day.

Buzz60 (YouTube Channel)
Buzz60 (Facebook)

The aren’t alone in promoting atypical places to stay. In fact, far from it!

There are also a bevy of travel articles about a broad array of places to stay.

17 Weird and Wacky Hotels Across the United States (Violet Kim, CNN Travel)
22 Weird, Wonderful and Unique Hotels in the World (Stine Gjevnøe Sørensen, momondo)

No matter what your passion happens to be, there’s bound to be a place to stay for it.

The reason that I’m so aware of this is because awhile ago, with amusement, I realized that there’s some sort of lodging related to almost every subject on Cosma. Sometimes those experiences end up as adventures like Sand Art. That’s why I have a huge stash of links to “thematic” lodging that range from mildly amusing to pretty wild.

For example, there’s some kind of place to visit for what ever kind of transportation.

If you like trains, then you might enjoy a say at the Featherbed Railroad (Upper Lake, California). If you’re into cars, then you might want to book a night at V8 Hotel Motorworld (Stuttgart, Germany).

DIRS21 by TourOnline AG (YouTube Channel)

Are planes more your thing? There’s quite a few adventures ranging from sleeping in a Plane Airbnb (St Michel Chef Chef, France) to a 727 Airplane Fuselage (Costa Verde, Costa Rica).

If you’re into boats, then try a stay at The Queen Mary Hotel (Long Beach, California).

If you prefer an even more aquatic experience, then there are undersea hotels like these.

Atlantis – The Palm (Dubai, United Arab Emirates)
The Manata Resort (Psv-zanzibar, Tanzania)
Jules’ Undersea Loadge (Key Largo, Florida)
The Muraka (Rangali Island, Maldives)

Let’s say you are into trees, then how about staying in a tree house? There are many places to consider. Here are links to a few of them.

Out’n’About Treehouses Treesort (Takilma, Oregon)
Azulik Resort (Tulum, Mexico)
Treehouse Lodge Resort (Iquitos, Peru)

Less run-of-the-mill tree houses include Freespirit Spheres (Vancouver Island). Here’s a link to a video about them.

Free Spirit Spheres Ultimate Treehouses (Animal Planet, YouTube)

Trees are nice, but what if you prefer animals?

Dog lovers might get a kick out of cuddling up inside a beagle at Dog Bark Park Inn (Cottonwood Inn, Idaho).

KTVB (YouTube CHannel)
KTVB (Official Website)

If you love giraffes, there’s Giraffe Manor (Nairobi, Kenya). Here’s a virtual 360° visit.

Watch the video below in 360° on YouTube here!

Photos of Africa (YouTube Channel)
Photos of Africa (Official Website)

Do you long to see polar bears in the wild? Then climb on the Tundra Buggy Lodge (Churchill, Manitoba).

Amanda Williams (YouTube Channel)

There are some places where you can take shelter in ice. The two most famous are Hôtel de Glace (Quebec City, Canada) and Icehotel, Sweden (Jukkasjärvi, Sweden).

There’s also a place called Kakslauttanen Arctic Resort in Saariselka, Finland where you can have all sorts of winter fun and then chill in glass igloos and watch the northern lights.

Goway Travel (YouTube Channel)
Goway Travel (Official Website)

So there you have it — there really is a place for about any interest that you can imagine, and also some that you might not expect.

For example, there are places where dyed in the wool Tolkien fans can live like hobbits!

5 Places Where You Can Vacation Like a Hobbit on Hobbit Day (A. Pawlowski, USA Today)

You might think that nobody would want to stay in a jail, voluntarily, but that’s not so.

While people do pay to stay in an ex-jail here in Boston called The Liberty Hotel, that’s a tame example. A far more extreme and bizarre experience can be found at the Karostas Cietums aka Karosta Prison (Liepāja, Latvia)!

Monta Krafte (YouTube Channel)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this adventure in strange places to stay around the world.

Now you know that whatever your passion, there’s bound to be some lodging where you can revel in it.

Here are still more sites where you can find unusual lodging organized into handy categories.

Unusual Places to Stay and Unique Holiday Accommodation (CoolStays)
The Most Unique and Unusual Places to Stay (Host Unusual)

If something isn’t covered in this post or those sites, then you can probably find something with a search for “Your+Interest+Hotel 🙂

That’s how I found a place for my inner librarian called the Library Hotel. It’s on Madison Avenue in New York City, and the rooms are organized by Dewey Decimal! Here’s a link to a video about it.

Library Hotel New York (NY) (HotelReviews, YouTube Channel)

So, next time you are booking lodging, I hope you will consider looking for something a bit less “traditional” that will fit your interests and maybe even become an adventure in its own right!

Find out more about travel, adventure, the World and knowledge in general…

Bookstore’s Re-Emergence!

~ mehopper

Over the last few weeks I’ve come across two stories about how the rumors of the death of independent bookstores have been greatly exaggerated.

Bookstores Escape from Jaws of Irrelevance (James Sullivan, Boston Globe)
How Independent Bookstores Thrived in Spite of Amazon (Carmen Nobel, Quartz)

Upon further investigation, it turns out that some of the story behind the new wave of publicity is local. Here’s a video about Porter Square Books, one of my local bookstores, and it includes an interview with Harvard Business School faculty Ryan Raffaelli. He is responsible for some well publicized research about the recent resurgence of independent bookstores, and he explains how they are examples of how industries facing shifting business models can adapt by focusing on the “3 C’s” of community, curation, and convening.

Harvard Business School (YouTube Channel)
Harvard Business School (Official Website)

Here’s a link to an older article about Raffaelli’s research on independent bookstores and how they serve as excellent examples of “Technology Re-Emergence.”

Technology Re-Emergence: Creating New Value for Old Innovations (Carmen Nobel, Harvard Business School)

There are also many stories on YouTube about how other specific independent bookstores are doing well. For example, here’s one about The Last Bookstore in LA.

CGTN America (YouTube Channel)
CGTN America (Official Website)

During my (de)tour into independent bookstores, I tripped over this 360° video of Livaria Lello in Portugal. It was frequented by J.K. Rowling when she taught English in Porto and is rumored to be the inspiration for the Flourish and Blotts bookstore in Harry Potter.

Room for Books (and Magic) (The New York Times, YouTube)

So hooray for independent bookstores, and don’t forget to support your local bookstore!

Find out more about books and business in general…

Sexagesimal

~ mehopper

If you don’t happen to know the definition of Sexagesimal (Wolfram, Wikipedia), you might think it could be some strange kind of activity that goes on at festivals like Burning Man (Wired, Wikipedia). If you happen to be a computer geek, you might have guessed it has something to do with numbers (as in binary, hex, etc.), and you would be right. If you’re a numbers geek or a mathematician, then you probably already know the cool research that this post is going to be describing.

But first, here’s a bit of review for those who are neither numbers geeks nor mathematicians. You were probably taught in school that there are different ways of counting. We use “base 10”, but there are other number systems. For example, computers are based on binary (base 2), and there is a group of people who would like to revolutionize the world by using duodecimal (base 12). Here’s a nice video that explains all about “Base Number Systems.”

Macmatics (YouTube Channel)

Well, the ancient Babylonian’s used sexagesimal (base 60), and some new research suggests that they not only beat the ancient Greeks at inventing Trigonometry (Wikipedia), they also may have been able to do it better. Here’s a video and story about the research that was conducted by Daniel F. Mansfield and N.J. Wildberger from the University of New South Wales and published in Historia Mathematica.

University of New South Wales (YouTube Channel)
University of New South Wales (Official Website)

Plimpton 322 is Babylonian Exact Sexagesimal Trigonometry (Daniel F. Mansfield & N.J. Wildberger, Historia Mathematica)

Here are more videos and articles about the research.

Science Magazine (YouTube Channel)
Science Magazine (Official Website)

This 3,700-Year-Old Babylonian Clay Tablet Just Changed The History of Maths (David Sield, Science Alert)
Math Whizzes of Ancient Babylon Figured Out Forerunner of Calculus (Ron Cowen, AAAS Science Magazine)
Ancient Babylonian Astronomers Calculated Jupiter’s Position from the Area Under a Time-Velocity Graph (Mathieu Ossendrijver, AAAS Science)

So, there you have it, sexagesimal is neat stuff!

Find out more about math …