This is a notable early Marlon Brando film that in of itself probably isn’t that important in the annals of cinematic history. Yet the iconic image of the tough biker in a leather jacket that we are so familiar with today probably first got its start here. In its own time, this look was copied by people like James Dean and Elvis Presley while closer to our time, this look helped launched Arnold Schwarzenegger to stardom. The film itself isn’t that good but it is interesting in that it doesn’t completely condemn the motorcycle gang that comes to wreck a small town as one might expect for a film of this era.
So it was three years ago that I played Sunless Sea. I loved it so much that I had been looking forward to sitting down to play this sequel even though I knew that it is a very similar game. It is in fact nearly identical to the previous game in terms of gameplay but it does have a new setting, new stories and quests, better combat, and most of all, everything has been cleaned up and greatly improved with a better interface and much better graphics.
This is another Chinese American film in that the writer and director Alice Wu is Chinese and so too is the female lead and her father. However what is especially fascinating about this film is that it is firmly about American life and the Chinese ethnicity of the main character is treated as just another kind of American-ness. Apart from that it’s among the new crop of current generation coming-of-age film. It pulls its punches too much and is just too plain nice to be truly great but I’m still amazed how far we have come since the toxic teen comedies of the 1980s and 1990s.
I rated director Céline Sciamma last film Girlhood as being well-intentioned but having problems with authenticity. This one is another all women film about women’s lack of power to make choices about their lives, this time taking place in late 18th century France. The story was written by Sciamma herself and isn’t based on anyone’s life but it’s the more poignant, powerful film for me.
So somehow I made it to middle-age without either reading Charles Dickens’ novel or watching any one of the numerous film adaptations even though like most people some of the scenes in it are so iconic that they are seared into my consciousness through cultural osmosis alone. This one is of course the grand-daddy of all the adaptations by David Lean. There have been other film versions before this but only this had any staying power and it influenced all other adaptations that followed.
For this last month of a tumultuous year, the theme is probably that of China’s ascendancy in the domain of the sciences as Chinese researchers churn out groundbreaking discoveries one after another. I don’t even have to include China’s moon mission for this as that has yet to yield any novel science.
We might as well start with those first so here’s the story of it switching on its tokamak for real. This a fusion reactor that has plasma as hot as the temperature as the sun swirling around inside, held in place only the magnetic fields created by supercooled electromagnets. The promise of fusion power forever being just beyond the horizon is an old one and it’s still likelier than not that China’s effort to chase viable fusion energy will amount to nothing. But there’s no denying that they are in the race for real now.
The other one is about China’s photon-based quantum computer it has named Jiuzang. Like Google’s Sycamore, this has been built to perform a single type of computation, the one here being known as boson sampling. This involves sending parallel streams of photons as inputs through a series of beam splitters to obtain a result. Apparently trying to simulate this calculation through conventional means takes so long as to be effectively, thus making this a second clear case of quantum supremacy. I have no idea however if this has any practical use.
Still neither of these can match the significance of the next bit of science news: the announcement that Google’s DeepMind AI has effectively solved the protein folding problem. They proved this at an annual competition that involves predicting what shapes given strings of amino acids will fold into. While DeepMind’s solutions were not perfect, they are still so accurate as to essential invalidate every other approach. Despite the fact this means the careers of many scientists in the field have been upended, pretty much everyone is in agreement that this is a truly revolutionary advance that will change the entire biotech industry.
Next is a paper about restoring sight by inducing the retinal ganglion cells in the eyes to regenerate. Techniques to restore youth to cells and turn back the epigenetic clock have long been the stuff of science-fiction so this is a case of it in reality. They achieved it engineering a virus to induce expression of transcription factors that can trigger mature cells that it infects to revert to an immature state. Tested in mice, this approach succeeded in repairing damage to the RGC axon and restoring sight. Naturally they are very interested to learn if this technique also works on neurons elsewhere in the brain and the spinal cord.
Finally there is this bit of news about progress in developing so-called C4 rice. To cover some basics, different plants have different photosynthetic pathways and rice uses the less efficient C3 pathway. Maize on the other hand uses the more efficient C4 pathway. So C4 rice has been a sort of dream project for some time as the C4 pathway is theoretically up to 50% more efficient, so C4 rice would require less nitrogen and less water. This announcement is just about the early stage of assembling a functioning C4 biochemical pathway for rice and the real thing is still many years off but apparently this is still a pretty major advance.
This is the latest one of the action movies to come out of Indonesia that is good enough to gain favorable attention worldwide. Unlike some of the earlier, this one features a decent budget and extensive CGI. With its near future dystopian setting, high-tech toys and plenty of fighting scenes that takes place in the rain at night, I would count this as a solid cyberpunk film and a viable contender to Hollywood action movies.
