Tag Archives: Steve Jobs

Satur-deja Vu

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The guy on the bike was Steve Jobs. When he was photographed by National Geographic in 1982 he didn’t want to pose standing with his arms cross in front of rows of computer terminals. Props for that, my opinion of him may have just gone up slightly. I tell you what though, the thing about those BMW motorcycles is they have horizontally opposed cylinders. Most American and Japanese motorcycles have two cylinder engines in what’s called a V-twin formation. The engines are pretty well oriented inside the frame. What you see next to Jobs left foot is a cylinder head sticking out farther than anything on the bike, which is just find unless you were to drop the bike and go for a slide. Since he wants to look cool for this picture he is not wearing a jacket, helmet or gloves so the damage done to that cylinder head is probably the least of his worries. The picture was probably taken at a very low shutter speed so he is probably not going as fast as the blurry background wire wheel spokes suggest. Hey kids, remember film? No, probably not. Replace shutter speed with frame rate for comparison.

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Christian Tech

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How Steve Jobs Accidentally Changed the Persecuted Church appeared at Don’t Eat the Fruit .com back in April.  I read the article, copied the link, and then filed it away.  Read the full article here.

In a nutshell, Jobs never set out to change the way the Gospel is spread.  In Steve Jobs own words the iPod “changed everything.”  The biggest change was storage space; we now measure mp3 capacity in gigabytes.  How does that affect the church?  Countries that stop Bibles at the border usually don’t care about mp3 players.  People groups that do not even have a written language can listen to the Word, and recharge the device with solar power anywhere on earth.

Next the iPhone set the standard for video formatting.  You can record video in mp4 and be pretty sure any device can render it.  Now it’s the iPad.  With the widespread acceptance of ePub (also used by Nook) instead of just a digital Bible a user can basically carry an entire seminary worth of information.

Steve Jobs never set out to enable the Christian church.  I’m not saying Christians around the world use Apple technology to spread the Gospel.  Jobs drove the state of the art forward, and created industry standards that the church can use to everyone’s advantage.