Once again this film stars the ubiquitous Song Kang-ho but at least this time the director Jang Hoon is a newcomer. Though the film’s innocuous title and poster doesn’t drop any hints, this is really about a historical event, the so-called Gwangju Uprising that took place in 1980. I haven’t known about this event beforehand so learning about it was good. However a cursory reading up on it reveals that this version involves substantial artistic license.
The last time I wrote about a Wes Anderson film was for The Grand Budapest Hotel when I said that his films are essentially cartoons for adults. This is doubly true for Isle of Dogs. It features Anderson’s usual regulars plus one or two new names like Bryan Cranston all in service of a film that is well made and delightful but amounts to nothing more than pure entertainment.
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.
Once again we’re going at this from the opposite direction, having first seen and liked Frances Ha and only now going back to the film that first made director Noah Baumbach famous. Baumbach’s frequent collaborator Greta Gerwig is absent for this one but there are plenty of other recognizable faces even if you might not be able to name some of them.
This is an older Taiwanese anthology film from our usual cinephile friend. As a collection of four short films, each made by a different director and cast of performers, it would be pretty unremarkable, except that one of the directors is Edward Yang and a couple of the stories feature highly recognizable stars, a very young Sylvia Chang and child actress Shi An Ni.
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.
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.
