Writing this is more a reminder for myself that this is something that I will continue putting some of my time into, even if finding clients is more time consuming than getting the work done for them. In addition to my WordPress development, and hopeful mobile app development this year, I feel that it will be a good way to keep stretching my abilities, and teaching myself new skills. Here’s looking to you 2012, the year that I come into my own on the web!

While running there was a woman near me that had a shirt on showing that she was running for her son, whose birthday was the same as mine, down to the year. I don’t know what he died of, but it got me thinking to the fact that I am 23 years old and healthy and able to do something like this, which I can now mark off as a bucket list item completed. I hope that the run gave her some form of healing, and am glad that I have the chance to do so myself.

Beyond that, I have already accepted my first freelance project of 2012, and it has gone well so far. I hope to complete it before going on a trip later this week to Fort Lauderdale to see Lisa and a short cruise that we were lucky enough to get via Daniel’s boss. While I’m still having general headaches over work and difficulties in school bureaucracy, I’m also hopeful that this portends a good year, and successes that I have been striving towards for some time.

Do any of my readers have things that they want to complete during heir life that they intend to do this year?

Click on Mario!

Here is yet another New Year’s post. It has been a full year since redesigned my website, and I feel another design coming on soon. I have tried to keep busy over the past year, though I haven’t always done as much as I wanted to, as usual. I find it easy to make promises that I do not keep, and plans that I do not follow through with. At risk of doing so again, I am going to post a list this year of a few things that I would like to get done.

• Develop a web application. It doesn’t need to be as grand as some ideas that I’ve had previously, but something that does something useful, is well designed, and works.
• Complete a  rough draft of my non-fiction book. I’ve already begun a good deal of my research, and have started an outline, so as long as I keep myself on task, I should be able to do a good amount of work. I’m setting the high goal of completing a first draft, in an attempt to stay motivated.
• Work on becoming more prolific with my blogging. If I resuscitate the websites that I’ve been working on, I’ll have 3-4 to update, and it would be useful to do so on a regular basis, especially if I’m trying to get more readers for them.

There are several other things that I intend on working on, but I don’t want to overload myself any more than I already am. Judging on how I overextend my actual reserves of motivation, I don’t want to do so quite as much. Maybe by making some proclamations here, some people can help keep me going.

Hermitage of St. Bernadine Library, New South Wales. Photo by Christopher John

I recently read an old New Yorker article, concerning what life would be like if most people stopped reading. I have aspirations of making writing become a career path in some respect, or at least continue on with it personally if I have an audience. I read constantly, in all forms and formats, and often wish that I made even more time to read than I currently do, or could go through more books quicker. I feel guilty if I pick up my 3DS or the television remote in lieu of a book, or if I open Twitter on my iPad instead of iBooks.

Still, I am aware that I read more than the average individual. I keep a large backlog of fiction and nonfiction books by my desk to work through, often working on several at a time depending on my mood. I have several novels on my iPad that I’m working on, and if I get bored of that for a bit, I pull up the newspaper, Flipboard for its articles, or the invaluable Instapaper app (seriously, if you ever read anything online and have a compatible device, buy this app). According to studies quoted in that article, and from my personal observations, the purchase of books has declined, as has their consumption, and reading comprehension in general is moving in a downward trend. The author foresees a return of reading for pleasure or personal information to a niche group, this time not due to a higher rank or elite status, but due to general disinterest and apathy.

Is this a bad thing? As someone who enjoys reading myself, and who would like to find paying customers for things that I write, which would become increasingly difficult with a smaller customer base, I cringe at the thought. Still, different strokes and all, so I can’t take this personally. I just wonder if there will be other side effects that we can’t envision now, or how people will change in general without the more consistent use of the internal conversations that books provide. Watching a movie or television show, even based on a book, is not the same as living that story in your own head, mapping your experiences onto it and letting it shape you as you are shaping it to yourself. Creative thinking results in many of our greatest achievements, and I worry: will a decline in literacy correlate to a decline in creativity?

The film had been on my radar for about a year, and life, as well as only the single art theater in town playing it for a limited run, kept me from seeing it until now. I’ve never particularly paid attention to Terrence Malick before, and did not go into this movie with the history of his work that many critics have. I did watch ’2001: A Space Odyssey’ again recently, and I think that it helped to prime me for the visuals in the film. Indeed, Douglas Trumbull returned to do visual effects for this film, as well as Peter and Chris Parks, who had previously worked on ‘The Fountain’, one of my favorite films that is also concerned with a different tree of life. Their work and Malick’s eye for a great shot made Every scene a bit of eye candy, whether Jessica Chastain tending to her children, or a volcanic eruption on early Earth.

‘Tree’ is about the universe, all encompassing. Beginning with the news of a son’s deaths, the movie jumps back through the creation of the Earth and life on the planet, including the rise of dinosaurs and their fall to a meteor strike. We are then returned to one of the other sons re-visitation of childhood, in Waco, Texas in the 1950′s. There is love and beauty on behalf of his mother, raising him and two other brothers with a tender hand. There is hardness also, from the firm embraces of his father, a stiffly paternal Brad Pitt. He is conflicted both at home and at work. He loves his sons but cannot express it in the same way as his wife. During a scene where he is teaching his sons to fight you can feel the tension, the play punching bordering on real fighting. His struggles in reconciling his love of music with his need to earn a living for his family fuel his inner turmoil, which most of us can attest to being stressors in our dealings with others in our own lives. A good portion of this pain resonated with me personally, which I imagine is what many of the positive reviewers of the film felt as well.

I’m not going to say that I fully felt Malick’s entire vision. I do agree with some of the detractors that there is a bit of pretension in the movie, and not enough of the substance is stated outright” I gathered it to be about the contention and duality of the different ways of being, whether tender or firm. When young Jack confides that he feels that he has become more his father than mother, it puts his scenes as an adult making a living as an architect into perspective, as memories of his childhood flood him while at work. Sean Penn, as an adult Jack, had far too little screen time, and I was yearning to feel more of how his childhood shaped him as a person. While ostensibly being about the formation and destruction of the planet, the film is really his story, and one that was entirely human.

Emotional, overwrought, beautiful and melancholy; ‘The Tree of Life’ is one of those films that can have tremendous impact on an individual, but if they do not feel it, then it can falloff and fall flat.

Kurzweil has made many predictions on the future over time, with many coming to pass, and proving personal successes for his businesses and ideas. Extrapolating forward, he has pegged dates of mere decades in the future as to when humanity will irrevocably merge with machines. For instance, based on the progression of computer capabilities, he imagines that in the year 2029, a computer will have the processing capability of all of the brans in the human race. Only shortly thereafter he envisions the rate of technological growth to become too fast for any one mind to keep up with. It is at this point, or prior, that we will merge with machines and in effect become immortal.

It is clear, in his words and actions, that Ray Kurzweil refuses death. The case could be made that he fears death, and his diet and exercise regimen in addition to the reportedly 200 separate pills and supplements that he takes a day could be his attempt to live long enough to see his visions come to pass. His belief is that soon the life expectancy of the average person will increase more than a year every year, thereby indefinitely stretching lifespan. Included in this vision is the merging of the human brain with computers, so that we can back up our minds, enhance cognition, add extra memory, and even use the DNA of dead people to bring them back to life. Possibly tongue-in-cheek, but he states that he now sees something useful in cemeteries, which were previously pointless to him, as they are a stockpile of genetic matter for those that we miss.

His feelings toward our merging with computers, and what that means for the future of humanity, definitely make Kurzweil more transcendent than the average person. Most people, myself included, have a knee-jerk reaction when it comes to this future pace of advancement, and the inability to know what it means for us, or how much change can be made while we are still defined as human. The point can be made, however, that we will all be experiencing it together, and that it won’t be a matter of the computers taking over or anything, as we will in essence be the computers. Still, I’m trying to wrap my mind around it a bit, and finding it difficult to relate to how we live currently and what this future vision promises. As the idea of singularity implies, no one can really know what will happen when it strikes, as a fundamental paradigm shift in the universe will occur, and a new form of evolution will begin.

The apple is believed to be one of the first fruits that was cultivated; with over 7,500 cultivars all stemming from a common ancestor of Malus sieversii. Most are created through grafting, as the apple plant is extremely heterozygous, meaning that it doesn’t just inherit DNA from its parent plants, but can differ dramatically. Combine that with the large genetic sequence (an apple tree has almost twice the number of genes as a human), and the fact that they are triploids (3 sets of chromosomes, which don’t divide evenly), and wild variations are hard to come by. Were humans to stop grafting and cultivating apples, they would eventually return to a state more like the wild ancestor that they are derived from. Throughout all of our meddling though, some amazing varieties in shape, size, color, russeting, and flavor, along with factors important beyond taste, such as habitable climates and ability to store and travel well.

The bible does not state what kind of fruit grew on the Tree of Knowledge, but it was not always represented as an apple. The type of fruit most likely envisioned by the writers would have been the contemporary pomegranate or some similar fruit, but popular culture holds that an apple is what Eve was tempted with. Renaissance painters would draw from Greek mythology in their Christian interpretations, and golden apples have a sordid history in Ancient Greece. Combined with the homophonous nature between the Latin words for apple and evil, and the world’s most popular fruit is branded as a thing of sin. Indeed, the popularity of the apple exceeds any species, as the word for apple in many languages and cultures is synonymous for the term for “fruit” in general. Try it. Close your eyes and think of the word fruit, and see what comes to mind.

By the way, the pie came out smelling and tasting wonderfully, and is definitely something that I will try again.

Warm Apple Pie and Vanilla Ice Cream with Coffee. Heaven.

I’ll update, but in the meantime enjoy this adorable picture of her.

Soft and cuddly!