Author Archives: Steve Mays

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (movie)

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You’re reading a novel with a particularly good character and you think, “They’ll never find an actor who can bring this fictional person to life.” That happens to me frequently and I’m usually right.

But the Swedish producers of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo did a wonderful job of casting Noomi Rapace in the role of Lisbeth Salander.

This is one of the better movies I’ve seen in a long time and watching with sub-titles didn’t detract in the least. After the first few minutes I forgot I was reading the actors words at the bottom of the screen. (I should mention, however, that Barb and I had read Stieg Larsson’s novel, so that probably made it easier to keep up.)

We’re fortunate to have a theater nearby that shows foreign language films. I supose it’s possible the U.S. remake of this film could be a winner but I encourage you to see the original.

Clay Shirky: The Collapse of Complex Business Models

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I won’t attempt to summarize this post by Clay Shirky. The best I can do is pull a couple of quotes. If you’re in the media business, you’ll want to skip this one.

“…most TV is made by for-profit companies, and there are two ways to generate a profit: raise revenues above expenses, or cut expenses below revenues. The other is that, for many media business, that second option is unreachable.”

“When the value of complexity turns negative, a society plagued by an inability to react remains as complex as ever, right up to the moment where it becomes suddenly and dramatically simpler, which is to say right up to the moment of collapse. Collapse is simply the last remaining method of simplification.”

Nothing on my mind

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I’ve been reading about and practicing meditation for a couple of years with the goal of a quiet mind, free from thoughts, for half an hour.

(If you’re an experienced practitioner of meditation, please don’t write to tell me what I’m doing wrong. I will stipulate that.)

I don’t know at what age we have our first thoughts. But once they start, they don’t stop, except when we’re asleep. (Do we think when we’re asleep? Are dreams thoughts?)

Most of us believe we “choose” our thoughts. I can think about a banana… and then switch to a porcupine. If that’s true, it would seem to follow we can choose NOT to think. I have no idea if that is, in fact, possible. But maybe we can reduce the number and “volume” of our thoughts. Sort of like the relative quiet that comes after turning off a blaring television.

Why bother, one might ask. Well, it is restful and pleasant and might have health benefits (But let’s not go there.) I’m also curious about what I might “hear” if I can tune out all of the static.

Back in my radio days, one of the “sign-on” procedures involved warming up the station transmitter. Once it was ready, you punched a button that turned on the carrier (wave). Then I’d walk back into the control room, open the mic, and read the sign-on announcment.

If a listener had their radio tuned to our frequency (830), they would hear a low hum for those few seconds before I began talking.

That’s the “almost silence” I’m shooting for. Who know what signal might be hidden by the noise of our daily thoughts?

Kindel Book Reader for the iPad

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I plut the Kindel book reader on the iPad because I couldn’t find the title I wanted for the iBook. But it works fine and while re-reading William Gibson’s Spook Country, I discovered an interesting feature.

I highlight or underline passages in paper books and the the ebook readers make this nice and easy. In the example below, I highlighted a line in yellow. Curious about the dashed line under the next paragraph I clicked and got the little explanation bubble.

This feature can be turned off but I think I’ll leave it on for now. Obviously I have at least one thing in common with those other readers: this book. Interesting to see what passages they find noteworthy.

The Divine Code of Life

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According to the back flap on his book, Dr. Kazuo Murakami is “one of the top geneticists in the world and Professor Emeritus at the University of Tsukuba, one of Japan’s leading research universities.”

In The Divine Code of Life, he makes his case for the idea that how we think can activate good dormant genes and switch off negative ones. Here are a few factoids that got some high-liter:

  • “For any one child, there are seventy trillion possible combinations of genes.”
  • “As far as we can tell, only about 5 to 10 percent of our genes are actually working; what the rest are doing remains unknown.”
  • “All living things use the same genetic code.”
  • “Imagine that you could collect all the DNA from the world’s population of six billion people. It would weigh only as much as a single grain of rice.”
  • “The information contained in our genes, if printed in book form, would amount to three thousand volumes each a thousand pages long.”

I can’t say that this was a fun read, but I like the idea that we can have some control over something as… basic? … as our genes. I suspect this is where some of the really big medical breakthroughs will happen. Are happening.

TV station gets iPads, saves on paper and looks hip

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Last week, news anchors and producers at Barrington Broadcasting Group’s WFXL Albany, Ga., replaced their paper scripts with electronic versions displayed on the iPad. They project the move will save nearly $10,000 a year in paper costs. From the original story:

“Newscast scripts are composed as usual. But rather than printing to paper, the final version is formatted as a PDF file and transmitted to each iPad via e-mail. The PDF translation is handled by iAnnotate by Aji.LLC, a $7 program sold and downloaded via Apple’s App Store.

Although WFXL doesn’t employ iPads as teleprompters, it could if it chose to. Apple’s App Store already offers two third-party applications for scrolling copy on the iPad: Nairo Techology’s iPrompter for $2.99 and Bombing Brain Interactive’s Teleprompt+ for $9.99, which allows any iPhone to double as a remote controller.

In addition, hardware vendor Bodelin Technologies offers a new version of its through-the-lens ProPrompter HDi display, which mounts the iPad as a prompter monitor on both studio and field cameras. The $850 device includes “professional” display software, which is also controllable through an iPhone or iPod Touch.”

And they look pretty cool. No small thing in the world of TV news.

I predict it will become common practice to cover the Apple logo with the station logo.

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

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Last week I read The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman. I’ve been sorting out my thoughts about the book but I’m not there yet. I think it’s going to take a while. But I want to get something down here while the story (and my impressions) are still fresh in my mind. So, this will be one of those stream-of-consciousness posts (not a real review of the book).

GMJ&TSC is fiction. It is the story (a story) about the life and death of Jesus and his twin brother Christ (hardly a spoiler since it’s the title).

I found the style of the book very different from Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The book read very quickly. The chapters are very short with little or no character development.

To me it felt as though Pullman was trying to condense the stories most Christians grew up with to the bare “facts” (The Childhood of Jesus, Jesus Scandalises the Scribes, The Death of John, etc). Now that I think about it, each chapter read like a Cliffs Note.

Here’s how Pullman describes the book on the back of the dust cover:

“The story I tell comes out of the tension within the dual nature of Jesus Christ, but what I do with it is my responsibility alone. Parts of it read like a novel, parts like a history, and parts like a fairy tale; I wanted it to be like that because it is, among other things, a story about how stories become stories.”

TRUTH and HISTORY –and the relationship between the two– is a common theme throughout GMJ&TSC:

“If the way to the Kingdom of God is to be opened, we who know must be prepared to make history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor. What should have been is a better servant of the Kingdom than what was.” (pg 99)

Deeply “religious” people are often offended when someone takes liberties with their story. (Jesus Christ Superstar, the Dutch cartoonist’s depiction of Mohammed, etc) And if you happen to believe that every word of the King James Bible is literally true and an exact account of the life and death of Jesus, you probably won’t find this book a good read.

If on the other hand, you aren’t ready to stop thinking about such things, you might. I know that I did. Here are some questions it raised for me:

  • If you wanted to start a religion that would last thousands of years, how would you go about it?
  • How would Jesus feel about the religion that is based on his life and death?
  • Could Christianity have taken hold if Jesus had lived at any other time or place?
  • If the story of Jesus’ life/death –as we have known it for 2,000 years– was shown to be inaccurate, would it be better to know the truth, or to allow Christianity to continue to be based on events that never happened?

Continue reading →

Scott eVest (not as nerdy as it sounds)

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I carry a camera, iPhone, keys, reading glasses, ballpoint pen, and sometimes a wallet (I don’t like carrying it in my hip pocket). They fill up a sport coat and then some. So when I saw the Scott eVest, I had to have one.

I’ve had it a couple of days and I’m still finding pockets. This line of clothing is designed for for folks with lots of gadgets. And while the pocket depicted above was not designed for the iPad (as far as I know), it fit perfectly.

Army changing the way it trains soldiers

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The son of a co-worker (not a preacher man) shot this video for a story in the Kansas City Star about the Army’s new approach to basic training:

“A greater emphasis on stretching — then toughening “core” muscles in the torso, back and buttocks — reflects just a portion of the first formal changes to basic training in three decades.”

Long jogs and jumping jacks are out…stretching, reaching and sprinting are in. As in, how fast can you get from one side of a Baghdad steet to the other? Go!