Ryan Byrd’s Ramblings

Recently I video interviewed a couple dozen people and asked them about their holiday memories and Christmas remembrances. Responses varied from talk of a treasured Christmas oven to Christmas Pajamas to the recognition of blessings and family. You can watch all of those videos (417 viewed so far.) UPDATE: I’ve enabled higher resolution clips for your ease of viewing (now 640×480 instead of 320×240.)

But the question remains– what does Christmas mean to ME?

Well, when I think of Christmas, I think of: watching “The Grinch Stole Christmas” and “Mr Krueger’s Christmas”, snapping together the family’s artificial tree after lugging it from the dark depths of the basement, a crackling wood fire, unwrapping gifts round-robin-style, stuffing myself with turkey and then falling asleep on the carpet, sister Kristen reminding us that since her birthday falls on Christmas she deserves twice the presents, making a large Buddha for Dad’s gift, the annual drama of taking the family photo, the fight for the longest paragraph in the family newsletter, whole pecans from a Southern Aunt, listening to Handel’s Messiah, visiting the crazy relatives, church with the fam, gag gifts from my older brother, singing “the Christmas song” (O Holy Night), having to wait until 8AM before opening presents, failed attempts at present wrapping (some involving masking tape…) and lots of laughing with the family.

What does Christmas mean to YOU?

Previously I wrote about how being outside in the cold doesn’t give you a cold. It’s amazing how patently false ideas get accepted for truth. Recently the BMJ investigated many popular medical beliefs. They concluded that the following have no basis in fact:

• People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day
• We use only 10% of our brains
• Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death
• Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, darker, or coarser
• Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
• Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy
• Mobile phones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals.

Be advised. Read all the debunking details from the British Medical Journal here.

Maybe I went around asking people what Christmas means to them. Maybe I videotaped the responses. Maybe I posted those videos for you to enjoy:

• DO:
  • Spray clothes with Permethrin (bug spray that lasts 2-6 weeks)
  • Wear Drab, non-logo’d clothes
  • Not check luggage– carry-ons only
  • Pack light
  • Visit Travel health clinic
    • Chloroquine (for Malaria)
    • Hep. shots
    • Typhoid shots/pills
    • Rifaximin (for travelers diarrhea)
  • Drink only bottled water or canned soda
  • Eat only hot chicken and rice or American fast food
  • Wear a cheap digital watch
  • Walk fast
  • Purchase maps on arrival
  • Upon arrival, buy a cane, or walking stick (makes a great bat)
  • Avoid fresh water (no swimming in lakes, streams, rivers, etc.)
  • Not walk barefoot
  • Not give money to beggars
• BRING:
  • Decoy wallet (fake credit cards, a few dollars)
  • Money belt
  • Copies of passport and driver’s license at home and with me
  • Digital camera, extra batteries, extra memory cards, waterproof bag
  • Flashlight
  • Guidebook
  • Pocket journal
  • Emergency phone #’s in country
  • Phrase book
  • Passport
  • Visa (if needed)
  • Pepto-Bismol
  • Hand sanitizer (under 3 ounces so that you can carry it on the plane)

This year I’ll be spending Christmas (and the week after) in Belize with my brother and sister. It all started a few months ago when my sister called me and asked if I wanted to go to Belize. “Sure,” I said, quickly Googling Belize, “I’d love to go to that great …. Central American country under Mexico.”

So, maybe you’d like to learn about Belize too? Here’s what I discovered:

• Belize is slightly larger than Massachusetts
• Belize was formerly the British Honduras until the name of the country was changed in 1973
• Bounded on the north and part of the west by Mexico, and on the south and the remainder of the west by Guatemala
• National Bird: The Keel Billed Toucan
• National Animal: The Tapir or Mountain Cow
• More than 500 Mayan ruins dot the country
• Caracol is the largest of Belize’s Mayan ruins. One pyramid is one hundred and forty feet high, the tallest man-made structure in Belize
• Belize also consists of over 200 cayes (islands)
• English is the official language and is widely spoken, as is Spanish. Other languages include Creole, German, Mayan and Garifuna
• Some tourists prefer to fly into Cancun as air fares are cheap. Then from Cancun catch the ADO air conditioned buses to Belize – about a 4 hour ride
• The 2nd smallest country in Central America
• The capital is Belmopan, 35 miles inland from Belize City
• About 1/3 of the country’s population lives in Belize City
• Member of British Commonwealth
• Approximately 30% of all Belizeans live outside the country
• Belize became a British Colony in 1862
• Most (60%) of Belizeans are bilingual (mostly English/Spanish)
• Creole: make up the majority population (60%); generally the offspring of the original English & Scottish settlers who married freed African slaves
• Mestizos: (Latinos): a mixture of Amerindians (often Maya) with Spanish (Mexican) blood; mostly mixed-race slaves who entered from the Yucatan during the War of the Races (ca. 1847-48); approx. 20% of the population
• Garifuna: blacks of mixed African & Carib Indian ancestry; many were forcibly expelled from the West Indes in 1797; approx. 20% of the population
• 70% of Belize is still covered by forest
• Belize has the 2nd largest coastal barrier reef in the world, which runs 10-40 miles offshore along the entire 185-mile length of Belize’s coast
• The region receives over 150 inches of rain/year
• Population of approximately 239,000

src: http://ambergriscaye.com/pages/town/factsbze.html

Mitt, you might have heard, is running for president of the United States. Whether you should vote for him based on his stance on political matters is one thing, but some have said that “a vote for Mitt Romney is a vote for Satan” (Bill Keller, a televangelist)

The last Mormon to run for president* and also gather considerable media attention was LDS church founder Joseph Smith. Joseph ran during the height of Mormon persecutions, primarily in an effort to call attention to their plight. Critics of Joseph Smith, many of them religious leaders, flooded the press with lies to further poison the public perception of the Saints. Not much has changed in that regard in the last 164 years; protestant ministers, especially evangelicals, still spew out venomous denunciations of Mormons. Why they feel so threatened, I can’t say, but their rabid vituperations clearly attest to a deeply-seated terror.

Mormons, they ignorantly/deceitfully warn, have multiple wives, reject electricity, eat children, desecrate the Bible and worship Brigham Young; Mormons are demons to fear. Except for the six million American Mormons who lead the pack in annual volunteer hours. Except for during disasters when LDS churches open their doors to the displaced, and who arrive in coordinated droves with food and supplies and equipment. Except for the educated, hard-working, family-oriented, cheerful, patriotic members which comprise her ranks. Mormons might be easy to hate in the abstract, but in the particular, it has to be difficult.

Are Mormons Christian? Jesus gave a good litmus test for this, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:16)

* Mormons running for president include Joseph Smith (1844), Parley Christensen (1920), George Romney (1968), Mo Udall (1976), Orrin Hatch (2000), Mitt Romney (2008). Sort-of Mormon candidates include: Eldredge Cleaver (1968), Bo Gritz (1992)

“Sixty years ago, on Dec. 16, 1947, three physicists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., built the world’s first transistor. William Shockley, John Bardeen and [Walter] Brattain had been looking for a semiconductor amplifier to take the place of the vacuum tubes that made radios and other electronics so impossibly bulky, hot and power hungry. They were so instantly certain they’d found their answer that they didn’t speak a word of it to anyone for six months, until they could experiment further and apply for patents.”(1)

“The invention got little attention at the time, either in the popular press or in industry. But Shockley saw its potential. He left Bell Labs to found Shockley Semiconductor in Palo Alto, California. He hired superb engineers and physicists, but, according to physical chemist Harry Sello, Shockley’s personality drove out eight of his best and brightest. Those “traitorous eight” founded a new company called Fairchild Semiconductor. Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, two of the eight, went on to form Intel Corporation. They (and others at Texas Instruments) co-invented the integrated circuit. Today, Intel produces billions of transistors daily on its integrated circuits, yet Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley earned very little money from their research. Nonetheless, Shockley’s company was the beginning of Silicon Valley. Bardeen left Bell Labs for the University of Illinois, where he won a second Nobel Prize. Brattain stayed on for several years, and then left to teach. Shockley lost his company and taught at Stanford for a while, and then got involved in a notorious controversy over race, genetics and intelligence that destroyed his reputation.”(2)

“Shockley believed that the higher rate of reproduction among the less intelligent was having what he called a “dysgenic” effect, causing a lowering of worldwide human quality. Although Shockley was concerned about both Black and White dysgenic effects, he found the situation among Blacks more disastrous. … Shockley reasoned that because intelligence (like most traits) is inherited, the Black population would, over time become much less intelligent countering all the gains that had been made by the Civil Rights movement. … Shockley also proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization.” (3)

John Bardeen is the only person to have won two Nobel Prizes in Physics:(4)

Read More about transistors at PBS

I remember receiving a Radio Shack electronic kit for Christmas when I was 12 or 13. It had 101 experiments, many involving the 2n2222 transistor. The experiment manual pages quickly became dog-eared as I wired and rewired those fascinating labs (radios, sound generators, security systems,etc.) It was the magic of that kit, coupled with encouragement from my junior high school teachers which led me to pursue my degree in electrical and computer engineering at BYU. Thanks for that kit, Mom and Dad!

The other day I was listening to a podcast of the latest Snide Remarks humor column, You Panhandle the Truth. At the end, author Eric Snider gives a melodramatic rendition of a donate-to-good-causes PSA (public service announcement.) I thought to myself, “I bet I could make that into a video clip.” I rewrote Eric’s PSA text slightly and got out my camera.

When thinking of PSAs, I remembered the Fake PSAs from the Office DVD. To understand the critical elements of a typical PSA, I re-watched a few of them, and then drove out to get some supplies. I got

• three king-sized bedsheets: a light brown, black and white
• three cans of spray paint (black, silver and gray)
• two halogen flood lights

When I returned, I dried the brown sheet with a wet towel to remove the fold lines. Then I laid a tarp on the ground, placed the sheet on top and used spray paint to create a faux marble texture. An hour later it was dry, so I pinned it to the wall. On either side of the backdrop, I attached part of a black sheet to form a three sided filming area. I plugged one floodlight into a light socket mounted on a small step ladder and pointed it at the center of the backdrop. The other floodlight was placed in a box and covered with a white sheet for ambient lighting.

The script was divided into four scenes and each scene was taken zoomed out and zoomed in. I had considered filming with two cameras simultaneously, but the difference in color balance between two different digital cameras I found was significant. Consequently, it was all filmed from one camera, my trusty Canon PowerShot SD800 IS. Once we had the clips, it was time to put it all together. I re-recorded the voice segments, found some royalty-free piano music and began to edit. Since I wasn’t doing anything fancy, I decided to use Windows Movie Maker. Sadly, WMM only makes wmv files (but I converted that wmv to an AVI with Visicom’s video edit converter.) I mixed in the dubbed audio (recorded with Goldwave) and the sound track with Audacity. I stripped out the old audio and reinserted the new track with VirtualDub and finally I converted to flv with Macromedia’s Flash Video Encoder. The hardest part was the filming; getting the lighting right and the shots (and remembering the lines) was time-intensive. Once that was done, the rest was comparably easier.

What would have made things smoother? Two matching video cameras (for the two shots), a teleprompter (or cue cards), recording the final sound on site with a good microphone, better lighting, and composed music.

Said Eric Snider after watching the clip, “Very nice! And what an odd thing to do with your time!”

If you’re interested in photo backdrops you can buy them, or make them with directions here, here and here.

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