After a lot of searching, I finally managed to find this film that my wife wanted so long ago. By now this is the third film we’ve watched by director Jia Zhangke but it’s the oldest one yet. Once again, it stars Zhao Tao who I have since learned is married to the director himself. I note that the English title for this is very inappropriate. Not only does it bear no relation with the Chinese title but the usual meaning of the phrase seems different from what the director intends here.
I’ve played pretty much all of Maxis’ games back in the day but one game I missed out on was SimTower and I never forgot that. I guess it was because I was busy with the school when it came out and it was actually made by a Japanese developer and not a Will Wright design. So when I saw this pop up on Steam I was immediately intrigued. Since I never played SimTower I had to look up information on it but I believe that while the games are visually and thematically similar, they are rather different in substance.
I added this to the list entirely due to how much I liked most of director Denis Villeneueve’s work and of course Sicario is highly regarded in its own right. I know that the posters on Broken Forum mention it often with mixed feelings and I’d vaguely heard that there is going to be a sequel later this year.
This is a Tibetan film that I first read about in The Economist but I would have heard of it nevertheless due to how it has been making waves in film festivals all over the world. It was made by Chinese director Zhang Yang but judging from its credits and title cards which are in English, this seemed to have been made mostly for an international audience.
This one I’m pretty sure I heard about on the popular Lowyat forums, normally a cesspit of dumb opinions but there is enough of a critical mass of people there to discover interesting bits of news. It helps that this Thai film is very popular, being currently the most internationally successful Thai film after having done especially well in China. Plus of course its high Rotten Tomatoes rating means that it likely isn’t commercial crap.
More cool stuff this month after a slow February. Pretty all of it is biology though.
Possibly the coolest bit of news I’ve read this month is this one about the massive scale of China’s experiments in agriculture though it isn’t about any novel discoveries. The individual innovations are seemingly minor ones like determining how densely rice should be packed and they apply only to smallholders, but the sheer scale of the experiments involving up to 21 million farmers means that an incredible wealth of scientific data and massive gains. Of course, this was possible only due to China’s command and control bureaucracy and isn’t something that other countries can easily replicate.
Also in agriculture is this article about how herbicides can indeed change both the taste and the nutritional content of crops. This sounds like bad news but it appears that they caused the kernels of sweetcorn being studied to store more protein and minerals. Of course we still need to be wary of them affecting crops in adverse ways but it’s intriguing to think that the nutritional profile of crops can be shaped in this manner.
Next there’s this paper studying how genetics and the environment affect human lifespans. Delving into records of birth dates, death dates and crowdsourced data from very large family trees, the researchers wanted to know if closely related people have similar lifespans. They found however that heredity only explained about 16% of the differences in lifespans meaning that the environment might have more influence than genes on how long a person lives.
In space news, this article talks about NASA’s twin astronauts Scott Kelly and Mark Kelly. NASA deliberately had Scott spend 340 days in space aboard the International Space Station while Mark remained on Earth in order to observe how the extended stay in space would change an astronaut’s body. Some changes like increased height and decreased mass soon reverted after Scott’s return to Earth, genes that were activated during the trip stayed changed, meaning that Scott is no longer genetically identical to his twin brother. They apparently affect his immune system, bone formation, eyesight, other processes and it isn’t yet known what the long term consequences are.
Finally, to end with a bit of lighthearted fluff, here’s an article about how dogs seem to be more responsive to so-called dog baby talk. This is the simple, dog-directed speech that dog owners instinctively know and is similar to baby talk. The study found that dogs do pay more attention when you talk to them in this manner and this helps strengthen their bond with their owners.
I’m pretty sure I got this pick from The Economist and since I try not to spoil myself, I thought that this was an Indian film. As it turned out, even though about half of it is set in India, it’s really an Australian film, being based on a real-life event that was apparently quite a big deal in the country. I believe it’s the feature film debut of its Australian director Garth Davis.
