Recent Interesting Science Articles (July 2018)

A whole boatload of stuff this month plus they’re from a nice range of domains too. I’ll try to be brief with each of them.

  • The big economics article of the lot is the much talked about one about how secularisation appears to precede economic development but only when it is accompanied by increased respect for individual rights. As the authors note, this doesn’t prove causation but you can see why it’s been a hot topic.
  • Here’s another that touches on the topic of sunk costs which has long been known to affect human judgments of value. According to new research, this sensitivity affects mice and rats as well, leading them to continue performing an apparently unproductive activity after they have already invested time and effort in it.
  • If you’ve paid attention to the news, you’d have already heard about the discovery of a large body of liquid water beneath the surface of Mars, sparking the usual excitement about finding life on the planet.
  • A corollary to that might be this announcement about how roundworms that have been frozen for 40,000 years in the Arctic permafrost have revived after being dug up by Russian scientists and simply placed into Petri dishes with a nutrient medium. There’s still a chance that they came from contamination and not the samples but if it pans out, it’s by far the longest period organisms have been revived from cryogenic preservation.
  • The next article presents a real time view of natural selection based on a population of anole lizards in the Caribbean after a devastating hurricane season. Examining the population before and after the hurricanes, the researchers found that the average measurements of the lizards’ toe pads and lengths of their front and back legs had changed simply because the storms had killed off the lizards with legs and feet less adapted to surviving those conditions. Going forward it can be presumed that breeding will lead to a lasting change of this type in future generations.
  • Moving on to computer science, this difficult to read paper talks about how quantum computers may be less in thrall to the arrow of time than traditional computers. By this, it is meant that certain computation operations have a natural order in which it is easier to perform the operations in one direction but much more difficult or impossible to do it in the reverse direction. Ths paper claims that switching the same computation to a quantum mechanics model and performing them with a quantum computer eliminates or at least reduces the overhead of going in the opposite direction.
  • My favorite paper of the lot however is this one which takes direct aim at all of the excitement around machine learning and AI. It argues that neural net models directly correspond to the polynomial regression models already well known in mathematics and that solving the same problems with the latter is both easier and more precise.

Dirt 4

About a year after gushing about Dirt Rally, I’m back playing the newer Dirt 4. As its title indicates this is a more mainstream title meant as the newest entry in the franchise and is therefore more accessible. However it does allow you to opt for either simulation or gamer levels of realism. Major improvements were made with the weather system, the damage model and a more complete career mode. In addition to rallying there are the rally cross and land rush events which will also be familiar to those who played the earlier titles of the series.

Continue reading Dirt 4

Paris, Texas (1984)

We’ve watched a few films by director Wim Wenders but this one is arguably his most celebrated work so it’s about time we got around to it. This film has a loudly American, specifically Texan, look with its shots of the desert landscapes, rolling highways and dusty towns but its essence feels very European. Indeed it was by French and German companies and apparently Wenders has an entire series of road trip films made in this manner.

Continue reading Paris, Texas (1984)

White God (2014)

Since I started watching films more seriously, there is a temptation to eagerly latch on to anything exotic and treat it as if it were an artistic work. I read about this on Broken Forum, noted that it was shown the the Cannes Film Festival and has a suitably high Rotten Tomatoes. I knew nothing else about it other than that it was about dogs but it seemed like a respectably artistic film. Of course, the truth is that just because it was made in what is to us exotic Hungary doesn’t automatically mean that it’s good.

Continue reading White God (2014)

More Blender renders

I’ve been playing around with Blender so much it’s been cutting away at my videogaming time. It seems to me that modelling is still the task that takes up the most time even if Andrew Price of Blender Guru is correct that materials and textures is what makes renders look realistic. Meanwhile I’ve been having a hard time getting colors and such to look right. Especially after you throw in stuff like volume absorption, subsurface color, the color of the lighting, the background etc., the final result that you get seems really iffy.

As I’ve been playing with water effects and caustics, render times are also becoming a significant issue. Even bumping up sampling numbers to truly ludicrous values doesn’t entirely eliminate fireflies. I was so delighted to learn about the denoising tool in Blender. Anyway here’s some of the stuff I’ve been working on though they are still very flawed and it’s been slow going.

The unexamined life is a life not worth living