A few weeks ago a friend emailed me to ask my opinion on his use of movie clips in a series of Bible lessons to young adults. He was privy to certain recent discussions of Christian postmodernism (including some more vigorous ones that went outside this blog), and wanted to know how I felt about using video in Christian education. (Christian Education: that term ought to irk the emergent bloggers.) Here, roughly, is what I said:

You may or may not ever find me doing a multimedia lesson including actual movie clips, but I don’t condemn the practice outright. That is, I’m not nuts about it, but everybody does it, and I don’t think it’s fatal or anything.

Technology, particularly technology used for entertainment purposes, is almost literally ubiquitous in our lives. It is far too pervasive for most of us to have much perspective on it. (As they say, if you want to know what water is, don’t ask a fish–and baby, we’re technological fish.) I can’t say I’ve thought enough about this to be able to prove coercively all of the hidden assumptions and ideas that using PowerPoint to project our lesson outline or Media Player to watch a movie clip brings into a teaching environment, but I fear the unexamined assumptions that entertainment technology probably brings along for the ride when we try to harness it for our purposes. My judgment is that they will usually do some kind of harm–a kind most people are ignoring–so I personally try to avoid them most of the time.

And this from a technology professional!

My bent against the user of movie clips in teaching doesn’t have much to do with Postmodernism qua Postmodernism, although the general postmodern (and postmodernist) preference of Image over Word certainly comes into play. It’s more a matter of setting my goal to be engaging souls with ideas, and being cautious (perhaps overly so) of forcing people back into Entertainment Consumption mode instead. Certainly there are large advantages to using movie clips that should be weighed against this concern, and even more certainly, quality teaching shouldn’t be afraid to make appropriate cultural allusions. The sad fact of our lives is that movies and pop music are going to be pretty much the only cultural artifacts we are going to be able to draw on for almost all of the people to whom we minister. If I don’t like that, I might as well get mad at the wind for blowing, or the NEA for existing. Still, at the end of the day, I try to avoid the use of multimedia in teaching unless it matches the subject matter uniquely. (Like if we were studying film depictions of Christ, as in Philip Yancey’s Sunday School-productized The Jesus I Never Knew.)

I know and respect other people who have considered this question and deliberately decided against my approach and in favor of yours. I don’t do it myself, but it doesn’t bother me all that much when other people do. It is no big deal.

On the heels of this (and this was all in that hazy season of my life the few weeks before I left for Spain), I had the exciting opportunity to adapt an enterprise software architecture diagram to PowerPoint use. Now, you may be thinking that’s a simple matter of selecting the whole diagram in Visio, copying it to the clipboard, and pasting it in PowerPoint, but you’re only thinking that because you’re wrong. It has much more to do with figuring out how to present information PowerPoint-style, which consists chiefly in limiting your minimum text size to 18 points.

If you weren’t wondering why I thought it was so hard to get a block diagram into PowerPoint, you may be wondering what this has to do with using movie clips in Bible lessons. Answer: more than you might think. I’m going to try to give you more on this in the next week. Coming soon: Why PowerPoint Is The Devil.

I documented the original gravity reading of this beer here.

I read about 1.009 on the scale. Again, without any temperature compensation, that gives me an alcohol content of 2.4% by volume, which just doesn’t make sense. Oh well. If I had to pick tasty beer or precisely measured beer, I’d take the arrangement I currently have.

Back at the beginning of February I blogged the brewing of a light lager and an amber lager. After seven weeks in the relative temperature stability of my sister’s crawlspace (usually at a comfortable 45°F, which is just perfect for lagering), I’ve finally got it bottled.

I read about 1.003 on the scale. Without compensating for the slightly different temperatures at the time of the two readings, that gives me about 3.1% alcohol by volume–perfect for this kind of brew. And check that color: I did say light lager, did I not?

As always, it’s good to be home! There is much to say and at least a dozen picture worth publishing. It’ll probably be a week or so before I have things in a publishable state, but I’m on the job.

Blogging will be light for the next few days as I readjust to normal life.

Well, this was unexpected. We nevertheless took the train out of Madrid yesterday morning as planned. All is well. More news to follow.

It’s fuzzy, but there’s the Cassini Division in the rings, and you can see atmospheric banding on the planet itself:

I’m going to call that a successful image for now. I’ve really squandered this year’s Saturn season, and circumstances being what they are, the next two nights are probably my only real chance to make up for it. I may give this planet one more shot this week, but if not, this is as good as it gets until the fall.

Again, a very simple image, but the colors are not out of the question:

You are looking at a body that is a mere 950 miles across. Seen from Earth. In a $50 webcam.

Io? ‘Yeah, whatever,’ you say:

The article last spring in Sky And Telescope that got me thinking about this whole webcam astronomy thing actually featured an image showing surface detail on Io. Surface detail on Io! I couldn’t believe it. The author used an 11″ scope (mine is 8″), and presumably more refined techinique, so it is not surprising that I have fallen shy of the mark. However, I have resolved a disk, and the coloring is approximately correct. I can’t presently explain the distorted shape of the disk, but I did calculate the image scale at something like 300 miles per pixel. (This seems suspiciously good, so I’ll have to sanity-check it at a more decent hour.)

I badly overexposed the planet in an attempt to resolve the surfaces of the Galilean moons; however, the Great Red Spot and detail in the atmospheric belts are clearly visible.

Note pretentious copyright notices on all images, as if anyone would want to use these in this age of Hubble.

A telescope, a laptop, a webcam, some cheesecake, and a cup of coffee. Plus WiFi. How cool is that?

Wait, I forgot to mention clear skies and no other commitments for the evening. Put it all together, and it makes for a night of imaging (or attempting to image) Jupiter and Saturn. In the spirit of blogging, I’ll try to post preliminary images as I have them. Right now I’m waiting on a 600-frame video of Saturn to align and stack in Registax (I described the system last summer), so I dare not start up Paint Shop. The laptop will rebel. Stay tuned for further details…

UPDATE: The criteria for success are the Great Red Spot and the Cassini Division. If I post images with those features, I win. I could post some fuzzy, preliminary images right now, but I choose to wait. Instead here’s a picture my wife took of me hard at work last night, just before the clouds rolled in.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I lied. A few pictures will follow. Some recognizable features, and some lessons learned.

I was about nine years old. We were in J.C. Penny’s at the Aurora Mall. My parents and my sister were off in a different part of the store doing I-don’t-know-what, and I was lingering in the store’s nascent video game department, coveting the wares.

I knew the landscape of the early-80s console industry: there were a few old, pong-only dedicated units (my Uncle Mike had one, I think an extra-cool Heathkit); there was the phenomenally successful but technologically Spartan Atari 2600; and there was the object of my present affection: Mattel’s foray into the market, the IntelliVision.

IntelliVision had a much more sophisticated controller than the Atari, and vastly superior graphics, sound, and game play. (It was powered by a 16-bit processor, which was pretty hip at the time.) I stood there in Penny’s, lusting after this machine, playing the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game in the store’s demo unit, and staring up dejectedly at the $199 price tag. (That’s roughly $400 in 2003 dollars, and was 33% off of the debut price. Times and console business models have changed.)

I knew no way were Mom and Dad going to part with $200 to get me this thing. Dad was just a few years out of graduate school, and while he was eventually a strong beneficiary of 80s upward mobility, he was still earning his spurs as a young exploration geophysicist in 1981. If I remember correctly, Mom worked part time at a clothing store at the mall, presumably to make ends meet. This thing was so out of my range, I thought Why? Why must it cost so much?

Of course there are materials involved in producing the thing. Plastic, and my dad told me something about sand to make the “microchips.” (That word is now more quintessentially early 80s than rad.) Metal for the solder, expensive fake wood paneling laminate for the console’s front surface…you know, raw materials. Somebody had to produce them, and you had to pay people to do that work. And why did they need money? Because they were hungry, that’s why! My nine-year-old mind quickly followed the supply chain from the product I wanted back to the stomachs of hungry workers. If only farmers could be persuaded to grow food for free! I realized in astonishment. Then, free IntelliVisions for all! Especially, well, me.

You laugh, but that year before I reasoned that the entire planet should be under a single, global government. And this, somewhere between the fifth and tenth printings The Late Great Planet Earth! I don’t recall anyone in particular disabusing me of my incipient Marxism; I guess I just sort of grew out of it. Pity some adults haven’t yet.

Anyway, why am I telling you this? Because I got to relive it all a few nights ago with my kids. While shopping at Super Target with my four-year-old, she said, “I wish everything was for free.” I brought this bit of cuteness up a half-hour later at the dinner table, and my nine-year-old took up the challenge. He went through pretty much exactly the same thought process I did. Why not force people to do the work necessary to mine ore? he asked. Because oppression is bad. Why can’t people volunteer to design X-Boxes? Because the have other things to do with their time and money. Maybe you could have a single X-Box free day every year, but charge for them the rest of the time. Then nobody would buy one the rest of the year. Maybe you could try that with things people need to buy more often, like food. (He was giving up on a free X-Box by this point.) Then food prices would just rise to compensate during the rest of the year. We went on like this for ten or fifteen minutes, whereupon his little-boy Marxism died. He was happy to see it go.

Like father, like son.