Cinephiles sometimes say that they don’t make love stories any more and that’s somewhat true. The issue is that no one really believes in the idealistic romances of the past and so many of the classic romantic films are now judged to be problematic. So along comes this Korean-American film which on the face of it seems to be about two star-crossed lovers who are destined to be together since they were children. Thankfully, this film is wiser and more mature than that as it recognizes how the decisions that we make in our lives change who we are. I dislike how it makes the world feel so small with its laser focus on the two main characters but I have to admit that it’s a great update on the traditional love story that fits with our times.
This was yet another free game on Epic and they even let you have the Spacer’s Choice edition with better graphics and all DLCs included. This was released years ago of course and it can be thought of doing a science-fiction game in Bethesda’s style before Starfield using original IP. Unfortunately this is definitely a B-team effort as the game is unbelievably mediocre. I was already on the fence about eventually getting around to Starfield due to its poor reviews, but I’m definitely all knackered out of the space cowboy RPG after this.
With this, we finally close out Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, having first started it more than two years ago. It’s truly been an epic journey and Ray is undeniably a grandmaster that brings life in early 20th century India to life on the silver screen. Pretty every frame of it is so perfectly composed. That said, it’s disheartening how Apu’s life is a seemingly endless litany of miseries. After having lost everyone in his family, Apu finds happiness here only have it snatched away again. I get it, it’s a testament about the fragility of the lives of the poor but give the guy a break already!
I was pleased to see that this made it to Netflix. It’s a Malaysian-Singaporean film that challenged some boundaries, yet never caught serious flack for it. It bothered me that so many of the recent local films we’ve caught were directed and written by ethnic Chinese even when they featured Malay characters. So here’s a film written and directed by M. Raihan Halim and directly addresses the issue of sexual repression in a very conservative Malay village. Honestly this is a rather standard film and anyone will have already seen variations of the format from other countries. But this one is Malaysian and that’s enough to make it fascinating to me.
There’s been so much in the way of interesting science-related announcements this month that I decided to cut some out as they are either too speculative or perhaps political. What’s left are all still fairly major announcements.
The first bit of news really comes from Sabine Hossenfelder whose YouTube channel I’ve taken to following and I wouldn’t have understood its significance without her laying it clearly. This paper describes success at using a laser to excite the nucleus of the Thorium isotope Th-229. Th-229 is a particular target as its excitation energy 8.4 eV is considered quite low, making it accessible to tabletop laser systems. I won’t go into the technical details of how the team achieved this but the upshot is that this opens the pathway towards optical nuclear clocks that are more precise than anything currently possible. As Hossenfelder points out, this is definitely a Nobel Prize-level achievement as last year’s award was for attosecond physics.
The news about a male orangutan in Indonesia being observed intentionally using a medicinal plant to treat a wound on his face has since gone viral. What is particularly impressive is that it was a multi-step, deliberative process. First, the orangutan chewed leaves from a climbing plant and then smeared the resulting juice on his wound. Then he finished by covering the wound with the chewed up leaves. This plant is known to be used in traditional medicine for treating illnesses like dysentery, diabetes and malaria. The scientists say that the wound was likely from a fight with another orangutan and they currently do not know how this orangutan learned to use the plants in this way.
Many of the pyramids in Egypt are located on a narrow strip of desert, yet researchers today don’t know why they were concentrated on this specific area. In this paper, a team describes how they used satellite imagery, geophysical data and soil coring to show that a now extinct branch of the Nile River used to run at the foothills of the Western Desert plateau. The waterway then would have been critical to transport building materials and workers for the massive construction projects.
Next we have a large release of data that surely yield many, many more papers and theories for years and years to come. The team took a 1mm cubic volume of human brain tissue, sliced it very finely and imaged everything with an electron microscope. The result is about 1.4 petabyes of data covering 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses. It is the largest connectomics study of human brain tissue so far. It will take a lot of time for other researchers to sift through this treasure trove and mine novel insights but already there has been a lot of excitement over previously unseen structures.
Finally, here’s a paper that is sure to be highly controversial. The team used food-liking data from participants in the UK to find associations between dietary habits and mental health. Notable is that instead of deciding what the different food groups are themselves, they look at the data to find natural patterns. From there, they found that dietary choices fell into four types: reduced-starch or starch-free, vegetarian, high protein and low fiber, and balanced. They also found that those on a balanced diet had better mental health and cognitive functions compared to those on other diets. More controversially, they state that those on a vegetarian diet exhibited more mental health issues including anxiety, depression, mental distress and so on. The team is cautious in saying that they cannot draw a causal conclusion but this paper is sure to lead to a firestorm of protests all the same.
A new high-concept science-fiction series is always something that I have to watch even if I feared it might be more of a thriller or a drama. The central conceit is original enough but really grabbed my attention is that this is kind of an office dystopia setting in the vein of The Stanley Parable. The series even cites the game as an influence! Despite some clever ideas, the plot develops in a very predictable direction and slows down in the middle of the first season. Fortunately the last two episodes drastically ramp up the tension, all but guaranteeing that we’ll be there for the next season.
This is only the second film by Mikio Naruse and it goes all the way back to the silent era. It’s probably unnecessary unless you’re being a completionist but I was curious about Japan’s silent film era and this does feature imagery from a very distant in the past Tokyo. I don’t particularly like the story or the characters but I was surprised by how strong the female characters shown here are and how much agency they have. As to be expected from Naruse, the outcome is bittersweet at best and the characters face numerous crises, yet they never break down nor turn against one another. Quite remarkable for a work from that era.
