Biology again predominates this month and they’re really interesting bits of news too.
The excellent Zootopia famously featured a sloth in a scene and this helped make them popular. This feature article details some of the workings of their biology, possible only because their tree-based life cycle means that they are almost completely free of predators. In many ways, they have adapted to be more like reptiles than other mammals, soaking up energy from the sun and moving slowly to conserve energy.
Next is an article featuring cats but isn’t actually about cats. Instead it uses the typical ranges of medical costs for cats and other pets to note how different this market is compared to healthcare for humans, especially in the US. While we all know about inflation in healthcare costs for humans, it notes that medical costs for pets have actually declined modestly. It’s interesting example of how insurance markets and greater consumer choice influence prices.
Moving on to people, we have an article about education. Many universities now allow students to rate the quality of their professors and the quality of the instruction they get. The article differentiates between active learning, using methods that encourage students to get involved, and passive learning which consists mostly of listening to lectures. The data show that active learning is unequivocally superior but require more effort from the students. Yet as a result, students give higher ratings to professors who employ passive learning methods, especially when they are enlivened with amusing stories and anecdotes. The tragedy is that students think they have learned a lot from superstar lecturers but tests actually show the opposite.
Are different languages spoken at different speeds? This article explores this and related questions. The truth is that they do and yet a new study concludes that despite this speed difference, the rate that information is conveyed using different languages is about the same. This is because some languages, such as English, are more efficient in that information can be conveyed in fewer syllables. Others like Japanese need more syllables but speakers speak faster using them and so need the same amount of time to convey the same information.
Finally we end with an article about Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). We all know that AI is all the rage but thus far most ANNs we use rely on blank slates that are then trained using vast reams of data. This article asserts that we ought to take a page from nature in that the brains of most animals don’t start out as blank slates but are highly structured by their genomes. As such the way to get past the bottlenecks of current ANNs is to incorporate innate behavior even in their initial state.
This Swedish film defies convention and expectation on every level. Its genre is billed as fantasy and given that it’s about trolls in modern day Sweden, that’s understandable. Yet it is a deadly serious film, touching on paedophilia and genocide, as well as pride in the characters’, by human standards, very unusual sexuality. It was also made by an Iranian director Ali Abbasi and based on a Swedish short story. It’s easily one of the most original works I’ve seen so far this year.
So yeah this is a film that everyone has watched but I haven’t. In fact I didn’t even know what it’s about, only that it was basically made by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and it was both a critical and a commercial success. Its director is Gus Van Sant but I feel that he was brought in to work on spec on what is very much a project led by Damon and Affleck. My own opinion is that it’s easy to see why people liked it but it’s way overrated.
This isn’t that well known a film and it’s Rotten Tomatoes rating is only average. I heard about it because The Economist cited it as a rare example of the EU being praised in a cultural work during a time when no European country seemingly supports it. The premise about a house full of exchange students from all over Europe rather grabbed me and I also knew that it would likely be an easy watch.
This is somewhere in length between a novella and a novel. Despite being sold as a standalone, it forms part of the so-called Sunflower cycle which I failed to realize for some time and might be difficult to understand on its own. Conveniently one of my favorite stories from the Reach for Infinity anthology that I read only a few months ago is part of this series. The other two are readily available online. Since this book leaves many questions unanswered even at the end, reading those other stories helps quite a bit.
This film adaptation itself is only moderately well known but the short story by Rudyard Kipling is very famous, not least because of the impressive title, and is often referenced in other media. I know that this film is horribly regressive and anachronistic by today’s standard but I thought it might be fun to watch and of course I was looking forward to Sean Connery and Michael Caine in their prime working with each other.
The unrest in Hong Kong has been going on for months now and shows no signs of abating. I’m partial to the opinion that instead of it being about actual freedom, the unrest is mostly being driven by economic anxiety and wealth inequality as more and more Hong Kongers find themselves being priced out of what they see as a decent standard of living. That makes for a pretty good lead-in to this film which is really about mediocre people are who find themselves on the losing end of society in Hong Kong and struggle to come to terms with it.
