So obviously the whole world is facing what looks like the crisis of a lifetime and the science there is moving far too quickly for a mere blog like this to keep up with. I’ll only post a link to a single good overview of the coronavirus and stick with some other interesting science stuff still going on this month even if some of them feel a bit out of place given the current situation.
So far the best broad overview of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is this one which covers the history of coronaviruses, their anatomy and how they work as well as the most promising treatments currently in development and which mechanisms they target. Note that while everyone is most excited about vaccines, those are still at least over a year away while effective medication might be deployed in a matter of months.
We’ve all had anecdotal evidence that people who drive expensive cars are more likely to be jerks on the road, and now here’s a study confirming that hunch. This particular study used pedestrians wanting to cross a street to check to see which cars were willing to give way, concluding that the most expensive cars were the least likely to do so.
Are young people or middle-aged people most responsible for founding successful fast growing firms? Popular culture suggests the former but this study indicates that the mean age for a successful entrepreneur is 45.
As everyone knows, physical beauty matters and numerous studies have proven that attractiveness impacts lifetime earnings. This study examines college admissions and finds that there is a correlation between beauty and admission rates of white men to highly ranked colleges. However there does not seem to be a beauty premium for women, minorities of either gender or for colleges in China in general. Draw your own conclusions.
Finally, an amusing bit of news that made the rounds recently is the discovery of a tree in Sabah, Malaysia that is able to soak up nickel from the soil and accumulate it within itself. This raises the possibility of mining such trees for the metal, which is apparently done by collecting its sap every once in a while, hence why it’s now known as the metal-bleeding tree. I have doubts over how feasible this is on a commercial scale but the news itself seems real enough.
This probably isn’t that well known a film but I’d had it on my list for a while now and it is considered as being inspired by the original Hong Kong Umbrella Movement of 2014. This isn’t exactly evident from the plot itself, which is incredibly convoluted, but can be in the motivations and ideals of the main antagonist.
Over the past few years, we’ve watched almost the entirety of David Lean’s filmography. All that is left are his Charles Dickens adaptations and Doctor Zhivago. After a long pause, I thought I’d get back to it, so here is Great Expectations. I’ve neither watched any version of this nor read the original novel, so the entire thing was new to me.
I planned to watch this earlier film by director Nuri Bilge Ceylan long before our trip to Turkey, but actually visiting it seemed to give me a much better appreciation of the place and its people. This one was made before even Winter Sleep and so we were somewhat surprised to note that it has much less dialogue than we expected. Also, while we were both disappointed by The Wild Pear Tree, this one is simply excellent.
Finally we come to the third and last book of George Alec Effinger’s Budayeen series featuring protagonist Marîd Audran. Everyone who has reviewed this talks about how the title is lifted from Shakespeare but I was delighted to discover that its opening quote is a Malay proverb even if I’ve never heard of it before. I think it’s a good sign of how widely this American writer roamed in search of inspiration.
Though I quite like Queen, I ultimately skipped out on watching Bohemian Rhapsody because I read that it’s a very straightforward and conventional biopic. I have much less affection for Elton John but I heard that this is very stylistic musical and so here I am. Ironically though the directorial credit for Bohemian Rhapsody goes to Bryan Singer, it seems that he left before finishing the film and it was completed by Dexter Fletcher who is the director of Rocketman.
It occurs to me that even though Kevin Bacon is well known for the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, I’ve actually watched very few films starring him. This one is that not that well known a film but I was intrigued by it being one of the very rare ones that takes a sympathetic view of pedophiles. It seems to me that it took a remarkable amount of courage from every involved to participate in this project at all.
