Tiny things which do amazing things

Technology is very easy to take for granted, and complain about, but just how exactly do these tiny things and lots of others like them play a DVD? My DVD player died today, and I had to take it apart to get one of my all time favourite DVDs out of it - the first disc of the Russian TV adaptation of Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle. If you can find it with subtitles, watch it, it's amazing! I was doing my ironing in front of it today when it refused to open and give me the disc back. It's been a bit dodgy for a while, but it always had problems closing, not opening. What really got me though, when I took the top of, was the fact that someone seems to have done that before, I assume my old flatmate or one of her friends, and in doing so had broken all but one of the plastic catches holding the front on. But no-one thought to tell me. Not impressed at all. Thankfully I have another DVD player, so am watching more of The First Circle as I type.

For those of you who have never heard of The First Circle, it is a largely autobiographical novel about life in a Soviet prison for scientists and engineers. Such places were part of the GULAG system, and were where the Soviet Union got a lot of their scientific research done, as there was none of the competition and striving for glory and prizes that is seen in the normal scientific world, just very clever people quietly inventing things to stave off complete boredom. They were reasonably well treated (hence the First Circle - the reference is to Dante's levels of hell), but Solzhenitsyn uses it to address the moral and ethical issues they faced, as well as the personal and family issues for people arrested and imprisoned under Article 58, which meant you weren't just a criminal, but an enemy of the people. It was published in the Soviet Union, which was surprising, but largely down to the clever decision of the author to disguise the real theme under a story of a diplomat who betrays the Soviet Union and is caught and arrested through one of the inventions (the beginnings of voice recognition technology) under development in the prison at the centre of the story. It is a fascinating book, but not light reading, so don't expect that, and the TV adaptation is beautifully done, and so well acted. Solzhenitsyn himself read the narrator's passages.

Anyway, I thought that while I had the lid off the DVD player, I might as well get a blip out of it at the same time! I used my macro extension tubes and the 50mm lens.