This marks the last of the great films by David Lean that we’ve watched and with more than three hours of running time it is certainly qualifies as an epic. I’m not sure how it is in the original novel but this film itself is framed as a romance that takes place amidst the tumult of the Russian Revolution. I don’t really care for the romance aspect but the film is effective at showing the massive changes that took place in Russia and how families are torn apart and people change in unpredictable ways during all this.
Taking up yet another Zachtronics game to play makes me feel like a glutton for punishment. Years after I said I would probably never play this title yet here I am. Not only did I hugely enjoy this, much more so than I ever did with TIS-100, I’m also shocked that I managed to complete just about all of the puzzles in it on my own, at least those in the main campaign. Those in the bonus campaign are another order of difficulty entirely. I’m pretty stoked that I managed the feat even if some of my solutions rate rather poorly against the average.
Made by director Andrew Ahn, I believe that this counts among the recent crop of films made by Asian American filmmakers. This one doesn’t lean into the Asian identity of its characters, which I suppose is another way of moving past the barrier. It is a very modest film about personal connections and I think as it was released online during the pandemic instead of in theatres, it resonated especially to people starved of ordinary social contact.
It’s pretty crazy how many films Robert De Niro has appeared in over the decades. This one was a comedic role that he himself pursued back in the day, apparently just in order to change things up from his usual gangster roles. It was a major success back in the day but its reputation has also improved over time. As my wife observes, it evokes a sense of nostalgia for the style of humor of the 1980s but I also note that it isn’t a retrospectively offensive film in the way so many other films of the period are and that’s another reason why it holds up so well today.
Having visited and loved the city of Istanbul, I naturally drawn to this documentary about Ara Güler, the celebrated photographer. He was nicknamed the Eye of Istanbul for his photographs that captured the city across decades beginning from the 1950s and much other work besides. Unfortunately while the man and his work are worthy subjects, this documentary itself is unremarkable, amounting to being little more than a straightforward hagiography that feels almost like a commercial for his legacy orchestrated by Güler himself.
This first came to my attention when it was featured in an episode of The Americans but of course we’ve already Night and the City before this. This one is now known as one of the greatest heist films of all time, featuring a heist scene so detailed and realistic that it was copied by real criminals to perform real crimes. I also didn’t realize until afterwards that director Jules Dassin was in this as the Italian safecracker. Unfortunately while the heist scene is indeed amazing, the extended denouement afterwards is nothing special.
Light on anything noteworthy that I’ve seen this month. Perhaps I’ve just missed things.
One thing that did grab my attention is this paper is this one that tries to test what is well known as Bergman’s rule: the hypothesis that animals in colder regions adapt by becoming larger in size while those in warmer place become smaller. This paper examines human fossils to determine if this holds in humans and determines that it is indeed broadly true. They were however unable to find correlations between temperature and brain sizes.
Next is a paper giving us even more reason to care about clean air, as if it weren’t enough that we all need clean air to breathe. It argues that cleaner air has contributed to improved yield gains of maize and soybean in the US. This is based on measurements of four different pollutants, ozone, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.
Then we have a paper that combines economics with biology. It’s about the nematode worm which biologists love to study because of how simple it is, with a nervous system of just 302 neurons. Yet that is enough complexity for it to seek out food, and the researchers have found that it does so according to the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference, a classical measure of utility maximization in economics.
Finally the last paper is hardly a surprising result but it doesn’t bode well either. Basically they had groups of people put together to solve some tasks represented by a game and then later interviewed them to ask who they would consider the leaders of the group. The result was those who spent the most time talking were considered the leaders. Even the person designated by the organizers to be the one to operate the user interface of the game were not more likely to be considered the leaders, nor those who have more experience from prior sessions of the game, nor those who scored more highly at cognitive tasks. The factor that matters most of all is simply being eager and willing to speak up the most.
