Excited to see after a lot of work and patient waiting that Chinese film by Canadian director Neysan Sobhani ‘GUIDANCE’ which was another project we worked on that kept us going during the 2020 pandemic territories is available worldwide on all major platforms: Apple TV/iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, & more.

Even better, it has been getting fantastic reviews both in China and overseas, even by the elusive New York Times which voted it one of the top 5 sci fi movies to stream! And 88% on Rotten Tomatoes (which is based on reviews by professional film critics)

As supervising sound editor for this sci fi drama, I was involved in the sound design, foley, audio editing, ADR, music score coordination and 5.1 mixing.

One of the reasons I enjoyed working on this film is it’s unique story that asks the question, what if you could turn your body into a quantum computer that could tell if someone was lying how would it affect your relationships? Would it make truthfulness pervasive?

Based on the key Baha’i principle that Truthfulness is the foundation of all human virtues, It’s unique these days to see a film based on the idea of virtue, even more so how we can use technology that is real and actually being developed to help humans more easily be ‘encouraged’ to live by virtues such as in this case truthfulness. We always want to know if there is a way to ‘cheat’ to allow us to become better. The interesting question this film asks is ‘would it work’? Once someone could tell you were lying, you would probably feel obliged to acquire the same ability to level the playing field. What is even more interesting is that this is a Chinese film from a Canadian director. As someone who has lived in China long enough to experience how white lies are a very pervasive and acceptable part of the culture, it poses an even more interesting question to an audience that may be most intrigued by this idea. However, when you ignore the language of the film, it could really be set anywhere and it still provides thought provoking ideas. That being said, this is after all a ‘relationship drama’ set in the future, so if your curious about the idea of acquiring virtue by turning your body into a quantum computer aka ‘NIS’ and running an app called ‘Guidance’ to give you an advantage in negotiations / relationships you may be let down by the fact that this is a film about conflicted characters in flawed relationships. But maybe even if that is not really your thing you will appreciate the film for its unique scenery of China, a glimpse into a possible near future, and an unpredictable ending that is sure to catch most off guard.

Get more info and see the trailer on the Pro Soul website here or the official website here. Full reviews on IMDB page

I keep saying to myself I should write something about my work and my creative pursuits on this blog but it always ends up being personal or spiritual things… Ahhh well, I promise the next post will be more music related! Exciting things are happening!

As I watch how children are being raised, raise 2 sons of my own, and work with young students in the studio, this topic of being accustomed to hardship keeps weighing on my mind.

Baha’is believe in becoming accustomed to hardship at a young age.

“Let them share in every new and rare and wondrous craft and art. Bring them up to work and strive, and accustom them to hardship. Teach them to dedicate their lives to matters of great import, and inspire them to undertake studies that will benefit mankind.” – Abdu’l-Baha, Selections from the Writings of Abdu’l-Baha, p. 129.

Evidence for the importance and benefit of this is all around us. We live on a planet in an environment where new land is born as a result of tectonic plates that when colliding with each other erupt in fire!

The strongest, most successful and capable people are rarely those who have had an easy life. Humans were designed to become stronger and more capable as a result of tests and difficultes. But what I see especially in China is children who are catered to and pampered every hour of the day by multiple people and are given whatever they want when they demand it. The results are young adults who have a very difficult time doing anything on their own without having their hand held all the time, speaking from my personal experience working with interns and university or college graduates in my studio. But this is definitely not a China problem, this is been going on for decades in Western countries as well. 

This was not a big deal in the past, When we were simply competing with each other, but now, human beings are not only entering maturity, they are competing against machines that can learn 100 times faster than they can, and are far more capable because they don’t get tired, have a bad day, get emotional or sick, feel brain fog because of that huge gluten and meat heavy lunch, or were fed too much canned food or breathed in toxic pollution as a child. Machines are essentially perfect and we are far from it.

If you’re one of the many who think reaction to progress and the latest development of AI is exaggerated do a bit of research online and take a look at what it can do already. Just as an example in my own industry, Google wave net audio can analyse a persons voice and in less than 10 hours perfectly emulate their speech. 

Beyond just having to think about competing with these incredibly capable and quickly adapting machines, don’t you think it’s about time human beings elevate their capabilities and resilience to a much higher level than that of an adult baby?

Or maybe you prefer someone having to hold your child’s hand when they’re a fully grown adult long after your dead and gone? How many educated people do you know these days that would want to and have time to do this in addition to managing their own lives?
Maybe a machine will do it for you, but what kind of world will that be?

Don’t get me wrong, I believe we are here to assist and serve others, but not at the expense of much necessary human progress and evolution.

Check out this highly interactive book:

How cool that it’s a follow up to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth!
If only the education of children in our society was important enough to do this for schools….

An interesting article in the Globe And Mail recently discussed how technology and the digital revolution has created a corresponding scarcity of attention. In becoming information-rich, we have become attention-poor.

Quite extraordinary how fast the technology has accelerated actually as this amazing video I posted illustrates… It is as if a house that cost half a million dollars in 1964 could be bought today for a nickel, or if life expectancy had been reduced from 75 years to four minutes.

And with almost all of the world’s codified knowledge at your fingertips, why should you spend increasingly scarce attention loading up your own mind just in case you may some day need this particular fact or concept? Far better, one might argue, to access efficiently what you need, when you need it.

The concern is that for now, the just-in-time approach seems to be narrowing peripheral intellectual vision and thus reducing the serendipity that has been the source of most radical innovation of the past, when brilliant minds studied concepts for hours before gaining their important insights.

The article suggest that our challenge is to adapt, and then to evolve, in a world where there continues to be an exponential increase in the supply of information relative to the supply of human attention.

I have certainly found this to be a challenge as an instructor for material that is ever changing.
More in depth discussion regarding this can be found after the article:

www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/information-rich-and-attention-poor/article1285001

I love it when technology changes people’s lives! And even better when good like this can come from war… The future is here!

From CBS Video Online

Check out this amazing video about human progress and change through technology:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o9nmUB2qls

The Obama historical event is nice and all, but if you want to see something REALLY cool, check this out:

60 Minutes – Brain Power

Love the part where they jack in the Matrix like plug into the womans head…
Science fiction is reality in the new world era!

Ever wonder what happens to your electronic devices when your done with them, and they no longer work, and it costs too much to fix them? Well, I did, and was excited that someone finally did a documentary about it to expose the secret life of dead electronics!

Michael Zhao is a graduate from the Berkley school of journalism, and for his thesis did a documentary about what happens to all our computers, mobile phones, audio visual components, and gadgets,when they either break down, or become obsolete, and we replace them with the latest hottest technology. It’s called ‘eDump’, and it’s pretty shocking. Here is a preview, watch the full 20 min. version from his website.

Here’s an article about it as well:
Time Magazine: Your laptop’s dirty little secret

I love technology and the latest gadgets, because I love the future, and progress, and efficiency, in fact, in my field of audio visual work, ideally computers should be upgraded every two years. But when materialism and excess leads to environmental disaster, and illness and suffering for human beings, something has to change. I always imagined the ton of electronic components we get rid of, and wondered what happened to them, I didn’t realise how neglegent and serious the situation was.

I remember the time I could finally unload my pockets from a phone, a PDA, and a music player by combining them with one Treo Palm phone! Awesome! I got such a mobile phone that was working fine and meeting my needs a couple years ago, I figured I would get another few more years out of it, then upgrade, and I could wait until then for the latest greatest technology. But it started malfunctioning years before it should have, becoming useless last year, and now i have had it in a bag, waiting to somehow recycle it.
After seeing the movie, I looked into it and found that enCorp now recycles a lot more than bottles in Canada and may be able to do something with it. There are also other companies that recycle electronics, fixing them so others worldwide who don’t need the latest technology can use them.

The eDump documentary really illustrated strongly for me how everything we do affects others, and how we should be responsible for our every action and understand the implications and consequences.
I encourage you to make some effort to sell, use, or recycle your electronic components as much as possible because there are literally tons of this stuff out there, and companies keep making more!

the future of eWaste? From the awesome Speilberg/Kubrick movie, ‘A.I.‘

Something incredible happened yesterday that barely made news (cause no one died…), A new $10 billion Particle Accelerator near Geneva on the Swiss/Franch border went live, firing it’s first protons.

Here’s a bit more about it:

Large Hadron Collidor – Wikipedia

It’s the largest particle accelerator ever built and took 3 decades to create. By colliding opposing beams of protons with very high kinetic energy at the speed of light, scientists intend to amongst other things, prove how the universe was created, and the existence of God!
And as if that isn’t cool enough, many scientists and the media believe that the LHC is so powerful that it is too dangerous because it’s experiments have the potential to create low velocity micro black holes that could grow in mass or release dangerous radiation leading to doomsday scenarios, such as the destruction of the Earth!

Now that is what I call exciting news.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/10/2361197.htm

Felisha was watching the MTV Video Music Awards yesterday, broadcast in Canada by Much Music, who censored a lot of dumb things, like the song ‘I kissed a girl‘, and the word ‘balls’. She called me for help because she was getting some weird audio problems…

I avoid awards shows and other such drivel like the plauge, and the VMA’s are no exception, it’s just one big ad for the dying MTV channel, and artists with a ton of money behind them to compensate for their minimal talent. Do you know that they don’t show a single video during the ‘Video Music Awards’? What a joke.

Anyway, I went to investigate and found there were two audio tracks playing when Felisha was watching the show. She had recorded it with our PVR, a digital video recorder that is also a DVD player with an optical 6 channel cable feeding into a surround amplifier. Boring technical mumbo jumbo aside, I found out that when the Amp dvd input was in auto rather than analog, it was getting TWO audio feeds from the TV station, and one of them wasn’t supposed to be broadcast, and had nothing to do with the show we were watching!
Here’s a sample of what we heard in the left speaker:

[Audio:Much_Music_secret_broadcast.mp3]

We found out that this was a behind the scenes feed from a video shoot in progress at the Much Music studios during the airing of the VMA’s for a show called ‘Fashion File’, according to Felisha. It was complete with personal comments of the event film crew, cussing and all, and this was being broadcast with the regular cable signal! We have also had the same thing happen with other TV stations like CTV. Seems kind of careless and unprofessional that this stuff gets broadcast to the public, but not so surprising  from a slowly dying medium, a lot like the blunders we’re seeing in the music industry…