All posts by Wan Kong Yew

Recent Interesting Science Articles (November 2017)

Lots of stuff this month. Some bits are of more science value than others but all are worth including I believe.

  • First off, I should help debunk the widely circulated announcement about a human head transplant. Pretty much all the respectable science sites have condemned it. Here’s one example. The procedure involved transplanting a head from one corpse to another which proves nothing. Most people in the field consider the surgeon in question Sergio Canavero to be a fraud as he prefers to make big announcements to the popular press instead of publishing papers in the usual scientific publications.
  • An announcement that is just as exciting but is actually real is the discovery that bottom quarks can theoretically fuse together in a powerful flash. The explosive energy this releases has been calculated to be something on the order of eight times that of the usual nuclear fusion. This was so alarming to the researchers that they considered keeping the discovery a secret until they realized that there is no way to create a chain reaction of such bottom quarks and so there probably aren’t any military applications.
  • The next article isn’t about a discovery but about the construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope which when complete will be the world’s largest optical observatory. Lots of impressive details about how they manufacture the seven mirrors that are used in the design, each of which weighs 17 tons, and how they are machined and polished to an absurd degree of precision, removing all irregularities larger than 20 nanometers.
  • Another bit of cool technology is how feeding spiders with graphene and carbon nanotubes resulting in them producing super strong spider silk. This was done by adding the materials to their drinking water and the resulting silk is five times stronger than normal. Of course, the silk went back to normal once they stopped adding the special ingredients to their water but they are now thinking of trying it with other animals to see if it strengthens skin, bones and exoskeletons.
  • A cool paper I read recently is this one about Armillaria, a type of forest fungi. They are a parasite that preys on many types of plant hosts and incredibly individuals of the species can grow to encompass up to 965 hectares and weigh 600 tons. Apparently a whole network of rhizomorphs can be just one individual. Most of the paper is an analysis of its genome which is beyond my comprehension but simply learning about the existence of this species is fascinating.
  • Finally a pleasant article is this one about how getting a dog seems to increase your lifespan, especially if you are single. The result isn’t terribly surprising and perhaps part of it is because owning a dog is correlated with a more physically active lifestyle which is good for general health anyway. But part of it appears to be another affirmation of the importance of having some companionship.

The Right Stuff (1983)

This one was added to my list because of how much I liked just about every film directed by Philip Kaufman that we’ve watched so far. I think this is not very well known today and was a commercial failure but it swept the Oscars at the time. I suppose it should also be considered a historically important film as today almost no one remembers the Mercury Seven or even the program itself though everyone knows about the Apollo program.

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Our Little Sister (2015)

I picked this up from the usual lists of notable films since it was aired at some of the world’s most prestigious film festivals and thought it was fairly serious Japanese family drama. However it turned out to be a very light watch, being an adaptation of a manga. In fact, despite being a live-action film that it feel so much like a Japanese anime that I suspected this was the case.

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Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

Samuel R. Delany is of course one of the giants of science-fiction and I am once again embarrassed to admit that before this I have never read any of his works. I thought it was high time I rectified this hole in my knowledge base with this pick from Jo Walton’s What Makes This Book So Great. The experience however left me torn. On the other hand, I have absolutely no doubt that Delany’s in an incredible writer and this is an amazing novel. On the other hand, what he does here is so far above my reading level that I can only grasp the merest fraction of what he’s going for and so I found it impossible to truly enjoy this book.

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Trivisa (2016)

It feels like it’s been ages since the last time I watched a proper, mainstream Hong Kong film while at the same I’ve had plenty of posts on this blog about Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese films. That is of course a reflection of the territory’s fading prominence. Just as China is becoming an economic center of the world so too is it slowly becoming a cultural center as well just as other superpowers before it have done. So it’s very apropos that this is precisely the theme of Trivisa, a film that was produced by Johnnie To but directed by a trio of first-time directors Frank Hui, Jevons Au and Vicky Wong.

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Chasing Coral (2017)

So we’re now so on top of current releases that we’re watching a prominent 2017 release. It’s so new in fact that it doesn’t even have a proper Wikipedia page yet. This is a documentary by Jeff Orlowski who became known a few years back for Chasing Ice. We didn’t watch that one but we might go back for it in a bit though if this title is anything to go by, it must be a horribly depressing experience.

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Seoul Station (2016)

Despite it being a rather conventional zombie film, I rather liked Train to Busan and so I had high hopes for this animated prequel by the same director Yeon Sang-ho, especially after hearing that it’s better than the better known live-action film. Despite being a prequel, it was made and released after Train to Busan so it was reasonable to expect that it would indeed be better. Unfortunately this was very much not the case.

Continue reading Seoul Station (2016)