This came to my attention when I read about critics including it as one of the most important films of the 21st century so far. I also found the premise of a long documentary about post-industrial decline in China very interesting. Tracking down a watchable copy was a real chore however and that’s not surprising as not many people would likely want to watch a documentary film with a total running time that exceeds nine hours. My wife and I spread out the experience over many days, treating it essentially as if we were watching a television series.
It’s been quite a few months but I’ve finally played through both of the Dark Souls 3 DLC Ashes of Ariandel and The Ringed City. One thing I don’t understand is how the lore of the new worlds introduced here relate to the plot of the main game at all. In both cases, the player seems to be unwanted invader into what seems to be pocket dimensions, with Ariandel in particular being the inside of the painting that we already visited in the first game. Well, at least it’s not pretending that we’re there to save anyone or anything.
Right on the heels of The Bridge on the River Kwai, we have another Western film set in Thailand, this one set in modern times and based on the apparently real story of a Briton who was sentenced to prison in the country. It appeared on some lists of best films of the year but apart from being well shot, it doesn’t seem all that special to me.
This is another of those films that are so famous as to be a household name. I remember that I did see it as a kid on television but was far too young to understand it. Watching it properly was long overdue and everything in it is new to me so I don’t remember anything at all except for the iconic marching tune. As with all such famous films, you tend to build up a mental picture of it even if you haven’t seen it due to cultural osmosis and I have to confess that I was shocked as this is nothing at all like what I thought it would be.
I probably got this pick from one of those lists of the best films ever made though I don’t remember which one. I do know that this is so little known outside of South Korea that it doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page. It is however legally available for viewing on YouTube, being a project of the Korean Film Archive.
A relative paucity of science news this month including one excitable announcement that turned out to be much ado over nothing much.
We start with something from the business world, an article about finding empirical evidence of the Peter’s Principle: people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. This particular study examined salespersons who were promoted to managerial positions. They found that outstanding salespersons were indeed much more likely to be promoted to become managers and yet their pre-promotion sales performance is negatively correlated with how much value they contribute as a manager. By contrast, employees with more experience in teamwork make better managers but are less likely to be promoted.
Next is a paper that revisits the claim made in 2001 that helped make Steven Levitt famous. The original claim was that the legalization of abortion contributed to crime rates dropping in the 1990s. However the paper also predicted the effect would be even greater roughly twenty years in the future. Now in 2019, this new paper finds that indeed the prediction held true. No doubt there will be plenty of detractors and rebuttals but it’s cool that it held up as well as it seems to have.
The announcement that was briefly exciting is a claim by someone that he had managed to decrypt the famous Voynich manuscript, a famous document from the 15th century handwritten in an indecipherable alphabet and featuring weird drawings and symbols. But as this article such claims are a veritable cottage industry and this newest attempt doesn’t pass the muster of peer review. The university that made the widely circulated press release has since retracted it.
Finally on a light note, here’s a study that found a correlation between incidences of having pimples in middle and high school and subsequent academic and labor market outcomes. Essentially it confirms the stereotype that nerds have pimples but do well in school and at work.
Like many other people, I read about the unusual twist in the life of this major Hollywood star in various articles. This documentary has a very high Rotten Tomatoes rating so I thought it might be a good way to round out the story. Unfortunately the case for LaMarr being an accomplished inventor and scientist seems weaker than activists may have wished for and though this documentary tries to burnish her credentials, she remains first and foremost a movie star.
