Not much of note this month. Hopefully it’ll pick up later.
We start with a social science finding from South Africa about racial and gender biases in student evaluations of teachers. The experiment involved having students watch short video lecture using the same script and slides, varying only the race and gender of the lecturer. After having the students rate the lecturers, they found a positive bias in favor of female lecturers and a negative bias against black lecturers, with the surprising result that black students were even more biased in their assessment.
Next is a paper building off of Jared Diamond’s famous Guns, Germs, and Steel, examining the claim that technology spread more slowly on the north-south axis compared to the west-east axis. This paper tries to track the diffusion of technologies across geographical space and time and finds that the claim is generally true.
Still on the subject of the humanities, this intriguing article talks about the relationship between big gods, that is powerful, omniscient gods who are aware of everything that humans do, and big societies. The proposal is that big societies, large enough that everyone can’t know everyone else, need big gods to enforce order as a sort of supernatural policeman. The researchers found that big gods indeed are a consequence of big societies by first assembling and then querying a database of 400 societies, examining many variables and trying to work out when they moved on to worshipping big gods.
Then we have another biological modification experiment out of China. It involved injecting nanoparticles that are attached to retinal photoreceptors into mice in order to give them the ability to see into the near-infrared wavelengths. The mice were able to distinguish patterns perceptible only in near-infrared which normal mammals are unable to do. Effectively this injection gave the mice a superpower.
Finally here’s an article about a quantum physics experiment that I don’t fully understand but which implies that there is no such thing as an objective reality. This is real attempt to test what was previously only a thought experiment: the Wigner’s Friend. It involved using multiple entangled photons to create two scenarios which are mutually incompatible: in one case, an observer measures the polarization of a photon and stores the result and in the other case, an interference measurement in made to determine if the photons are in a superposition. The two truths are irreconcilable yet that is indeed what both observers see.
Together with Sorry to Bother You, this was the other of the two important black films released last year though characteristically for the of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it was a third film, the less lauded Green Book, that actually won the Best Picture award. This is one of those based on real life stories that is so good that it just had to be made into a film though I understand that most of the later parts are fiction.
The critical consensus is that Roma is the best film of 2018 so watching this is certainly a must. I don’t think that it is the very best even with 2018 not being a very good year for films but it is a very strong contender. It is also easily one of the most technically impressive films I’ve seen all year and I’m amazed that Alfonso Cuarón managed to pull off a project of this scope.
This would be the fourth of Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books I’ve read so far and the second novel of the series. While I’ve liked all three of the previous books I’ve read, I have mixed feelings about this one. I complained about how it feels like nothing much seems to happen in Blood of Elves and it’s doubly true here. The book is decently long but covers only a very short span of time as it covers every scene in excruciating detail.
After working through many of Hollywood’s best known musicals, it’s time we move on to this classic that highlights the dancing ahead of the music. It’s also appropriate that we watch at least one film starring that great dancer of cinema Fred Astaire and he certainly does not disappoint here.
This topped critics’ lists of notable films last year and I did a bit of a double-take when I realized that it’s an entry in the exploitative rape and revenge genre. Still this was made by a woman French director Coralie Fargeat and I knew it wouldn’t have been so lauded had it been merely puerile so here we are.
So Searching turns to be just the perfect little American independent film. It’s the feature film debut of its director Aneesh Chaganty, it was made with a super low budget and it makes use of a clever new gimmick to tell its story. John Cho is of course a pretty recognizable Hollywood star these days but this is apparently still the first time an Asian American actor headlines a Hollywood thriller.
