SL's Famed Crooked House Saved by Silent Benefactor

[Click here to teleport to the Crooked House's new location in SL]

The Crooked House, the brilliant Second Life creation of Seifert Surface, a Stanford-trained mathematician inspired by Robert Heinlein's classic short story about a house that exists in four dimensions (or a "tesseract"), has been saved from imminent removal. Citing SL's high tier fees, Seifert had planned to remove the sim which housed the House next month, but a benefactor who is an educator in SL quietly stepped in and found a place where it could be moved. Now the House lives on here.

Why did Seifert's anonymous supporter step in?

"As an educator (although not trained as a mathematician), I do strongly believe in doing what I can to help fellow educators who are less familiar with Second Life understand the unique affordances that our world has for education," this academic who I won't name explained to me last night in a very academic fashion, "And Seifert's build illustrates several of these affordances artfully, and in a fun and intriguing way to boot. The fact that the Crooked House is one of the older builds in-world – and therefore a valuable part of the history of our world – did help me make my mind up."

The Crooked House

Visit this recreation of Robert A. Heinlein's "Crooked House" by Seifert Surface. Explore the interconnected rooms of the house, which is modeled on a four-dimensional hypercube. Learn more about the story behind the house's creation at http://pdx.be/efe8.

Visit in Second Life

So some good news amid a rash of sim closings. For the moment at least, the Crooked House is safe. Be sure you visit soon, and follow the instructions posted on the board when you arrive.

Comments

[Jo yardley]

Bravo!
We need more heroes like this in SL.
We need LL to think like this benefactor!

[Graine Macbain]

Great news! Now if only someone would save the Lost Gardens of Apollo, Minos and other soon to be extinct sims.

[Desmond Shang]

Very cool :) Hope they enjoy it.

If they want other objects 'in theme' with the look of it, I've got quite a few of the original items that were used. Just let me know via notecard inworld, I'll drop them to the benefactor or their appointed curator. They don't have Seifert's mathematical magic instilled in them though; that only happens with the Crooked House itself.

[Nexii Malthus]

Is the crooked house opensource? If it is, it would surely find places in many peoples' inventories so that everyone becomes a benefactor of SL history, just needs a little push in distribution.

[Seifert Surface]

The Crooked House isn't open source. It's a bit of a pain to set up (requring editing multiple scripts, depending on the location), and it really needs an entire sim to run around in. I've not tested what would happen if it walked over a property boundary and took up all the remaining prims on a parcel and... yeah, you get the idea. It also uses lots of textures and furniture by Desmond Shang, and he would have to release all of that as well before it could be freely available anyway.