This one is another of those entries in the list of the most notable films of last year and won a whole bunch of awards as well. It was also at the center of some controversy due to a perceived snub at the Academy Awards due to its LGBT content and that its two leads are both women. The most surprising thing that I learned about it however is that it’s based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, who is best known for her Tom Ripley novels and other thrillers.
Ten Years won the Best Film award at this year’s Hong Kong Film Awards ceremony. Due to this, the Chinese government banned the ceremony from being broadcast on television as the film is fiercely critical of China’s rule of the territory. That makes this a big deal even if it’s just a low budget project conceived by a recent university graduate, Ng Ka-Leung, with no track record and with volunteers doing most of the work. It consists of a series of five short films, each made by a different director and cast.
I’ve long wanted to take a course about electricity since it’s one of the most mysterious parts of physics to me despite it being essential to everyday life. There doesn’t seem to be anything available on it on Coursera. I’ve been aware of the competing edX platform for a while now but hadn’t taken the time to explore it. So when I saw that it does indeed have a course on this topic, I immediately made an account.
This one is taught by Jason Hafner of Rice University and consists of five weeks worth of material. Being part one of a two part course, the coverage only stretches from the concept of charge to circuits, so don’t expect to be fiddling with complex electronics here. I consider the course to be quite difficult, especially because of the mathematics involved. There is plenty of calculus in the later weeks. Due to this, I could only follow along so far and eventually just settled on watching the lecture videos as I had no hope of completing the weekly exercises, let alone the final exam.
Both of us liked Uncle Boonmee quite a bit so when director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest film appeared on the lists of the most notable works of 2015, I made it a top priority. It shares the same lead actress, Jenjira Pongpas, as the previous film and even covers some of the same themes. Unfortunately despite trying hard to find something to like about it, I have to say that this one’s a dud.
Over the years we’ve watched many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films and I believe this marks the last of his most important ones. It’s also the only Hitchcock film I think that is an outright action movie. Partway through it I thought to myself, “Wow, this is Hitchcock’s attempt at a Bond film!” Except that it actually predates the first James Bond film, Dr. No, by three years.
Here’s my annual round-up of the Nobel Prizes awarded for the sciences just because I feel that there isn’t enough coverage of them.
Let’s start with what is probably the coolest of technologies being acknowledged. Nanotechnology is one of those fields that is always talked about but no one can quite point to an actual existing nano-machine. Every application of it so far are merely nano-scale structures which have interesting properties but aren’t machines. This year’s prize in Chemistry goes to the researchers who are starting to make this possible. Jean-Pierre Sauvage created the first simple basis for a nano-structure made up of multiple molecules by realizing that a copper ion could be used to weld molecules together. Fraser Stoddard went one step further and made molecules that could move along an axle and control that movement. Finally Ben Feringa found a way to have the molecules rotate around the axle in a chosen direction, thus creating the first simple molecular motor. No actual nano-robots have yet been made but these three scientists have effectively created the tools and parts that should one day make them possible.
Next, the prize for medicine goes to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his work on understanding the mechanism of autophagy. This is the process whereby parts of a cell is sequestered and digested by the cell itself, allowing for non-essential or damaged parts of a cell to be recycled. Beginning with yeast culture, he narrowed down the genes responsible for the mechanism and moved on to mammalian analogues of those genes. It turns out that the mechanism is far more important than previously thought and sheds light into all manner of diseases and possible avenues to treat them.
As usual the physics prize, awarded to David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz, is the most esoteric and difficult to explain of them all. All three scientists did work on the exotic phase transitions of matter. We’re familiar with phases like solids, liquids and gases but under extreme conditions, more exotic phases can exist. Thouless and Kosterlitz studied such transitions on flat topologies while Haldane studied them on topologies so thin and narrow that they are essentially one-dimensional strings. They showed that matter under such conditions possess unusual properties, such as the quantum Hall effect. The hope is that such research will eventually lead to new types of electronics and superconductors.
Finally the economics prize goes to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström for their work in contract theory. This is a broad field as it can be applied to many types of agreements between parties the most obvious being how to properly design an employment contract that provides the proper incentives to workers. Other types of contracts include insurance policies, incomplete contracts in which not all of the terms can be completely specified in advance, and financial contracts between a manager and investors.
All Quiet on the Western Front was the film about the First World War that was recommended by professor Philip Zelikow of the history course I took on Coursera recently. Of course, with its wonderfully evocative title, this film is famous enough that it shouldn’t need an introduction. As Zelikow noted in his lectures, this film benefited from being made only a short time after the war and so could enlist large numbers of real veterans to act as extras and advisers, giving it a unique touch of authenticity.