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Bob Dylan – Christmas in the Heart
Christmas In the Heart, by Bob Dylan, is at times reverent (Little Drummer Boy, O’ Come All Ye Faithful, O’ Little Town of Bethlehem), fun (Here Comes Santa Claus) and comical in a lounge act, what the hell kind of way (The Christmas Blues, Must be Santa, Christmas Island). Sure, Christmas in the Heart contains a diverse set of songs and arrangements, but… as a whole comes across as a very skilled granpa playing songs for the grandkids.
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iPad a tool to help those with autism
Random, assorted specification lists can’t prepare for possibilities like this. A family in California is finding that their son with severe autism may be benefiting from interactions with an iPad.
So when Leo took it in his small hands as if it were an old friend, and, with almost no training, whizzed through its apps like a technology virtuoso, his mother gasped in amazement.
Scientific studies are still new but promising.
So far, only one study is looking at the newer iPad. “Touch Technologies in the Classroom” is under way at Beverly Junior Public School in Toronto. Rhonda McEwen, an assistant professor at the iSchool at the University of Toronto who is running the study, introduced iPods and iPads into six classrooms of autistic students at the school in February.
McEwen is still gathering data, but she says the feedback from a initial round of teacher interviews has been largely positive. One teacher said students’ attention spans seemed to be lengthening. Another had tears in her eyes when she explained that she had been working with a boy for two years, unsure of whether he understood language. “With the iPod, for the first time, he was able to demonstrate that he did understand,” McEwen says.
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Susan Orlean discusses the iPad
Susan Orlean discusses, at length with Glenn Fleishman, her use of an iPad. She candidly describes her use with the insight of an anthropologist–observant not only on the physical, but the social and much broader social contexts:
And while you can do that with your phone, it is so much more visual, and almost tactile and alive doing through the window, the iPad. And that’s how I feel. I just feel like it’s a window. Literally, it even looks like a window.
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Salt
Salt, with Angelina Jolie, is pretty much a Bourne movie with the main, tortured hero as a female. And to think, Tom Cruise was once considered for the part.
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Netflix and creative destruction
Creative destruction is a concept of capitalism, where the business innovations of today, destroy the innovations of yesterday. Netflix is finding out that those red envelopes aren’t enough to keep the lights on forever and is investing heavily in video streaming technologies, lest they become like Kodak.
Kodak just misjudged how fast consumers would give up on film and start snapping up digital cameras. And it misjudged its ability to outrun both trends.
Plus, they had the foresight to get their company name right:
But Reed Hastings, the founder and chief executive, and early employees, recognized that delivery of movies over the Internet would replace the mail carrier soon. They named the company Netflix, not Mailflix or DVDs by Mail.
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Ones and zeros are free
On the plane this weekend, I watched David Hobby’s photo lighting seminar from his Lighting 102 material for Strobist.com. At one point he’s explaining that you don’t have to get the right exposure, and sometimes it takes some fiddling to get the proper combined flash and ambient exposure. You may need to take more than one shot, he says. With this digital stuff,
Ones and zeros are free.
So true.
Take as many pictures as you can. Often, I see people take a picture, look at it, and not be totally satisfied with what they took and accept mediocrity. If they took a few more shots, they might take one they actually enjoy. Digital photography and cameras these days are limited by two things: the size of the memory card and the person taking the picture. The former is a scarcity of space for those ones and zeroes, and the other is a scarcity of effort.
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Devour
You Tube’s recommended videos a little, meh? Tosh.0’s videos too random or mean-spirited?
Devour is the site to cure your web video ills. Clean design that focuses on the videos. Good videos. Every now and then one will be no longer available. So, have a night with the friends and watch awesome You Tube videos.
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The Passage
Essentially, The Passage is a worthy literary attempt at a post-apocalyptic vampire zombie novel. The premise is solid–mysterious virus developed by the military is tested on random subjects, and then something goes wrong, and the the vampire zombies lay waste to anything with warm blood. Told over the span of a 100 years, Justin Cronin introduces a sprawling cast of characters, some superfluous and forgettable and others quirky and memorable, and heftily takes his literary license on a gleeful Mad Max joy ride through a barren Western United states. There are numerous subplots that divert the story without fulfilling ends or turn into tangents for Cronin to verbosely develop a character to advance a theme he’d like to fit in. Themes of love, hope, redemption, social class, consumerism, military industrial complex, faith vs. science and even a dark twist alluding to Jesus and the 12 disciples, blend together like a bloated science fiction western.  At times you’re left wondering what the point is, and others are engaging scenes of suspense.
This is the beginning of a trilogy and it’s hard to envision the other two books requiring wordy flair. Hopefully, Cronin gets an editor to continue his zombie vampire saga.
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Creativity and divergent thinking as a strategic national asset
Thomas Friedman views immigration and the melting pot that is America as a strategic asset of creation:
…America’s most important competitive advantage: the sheer creative energy that comes when you mix all our diverse people and cultures together. We live in an age when the most valuable asset any economy can have is the ability to be creative — to spark and imagine new ideas, be they Broadway tunes, great books, iPads or new cancer drugs. And where does creativity come from?
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Bookshelf porn
Bookshelves are sexy, like the librarian with trendy glasses:
