Another month, another one of these entries. They’re pretty good ones too, though almost all are about human psychology.
Let’s start with the bit of news that isn’t about people. This article covers a research team who wants to establish that trees definitively do sleep at night. They did this by using laser scanning techniques to track the movement of the trees and noted that the trees slowly drooped their branches after sunset and returned to their original position a few hours after sunrise. I’m not sure how useful this study is since they don’t offer a mechanism beyond stating that all tree movement is connected with the water balance in the trees but I guess for one definition of the word sleep, it does prove that trees sleep after all.
Next we have an interesting finding that humans tend to be pretty bad at knowing who our friends are. The study works very simply: gather up a group of test subjects and ask them who their friends are. Then ask the ones they name if they also consider the first group to be their friends. It turned out that only about 50 percent of the friendships were bidirectional. They went on to build an algorithm that would collect data on the relationship, number of friends in common and total number of friends for example, that predicts whether or not a friendship is bidirectional and if not the uni-direction of the friendship.
This next one is fairly predictable but it’s good to establish it for sure nonetheless. It’s a series of studies, involving a total of over 2,000 participants, that found that people have unethical amnesia. That is people tend to remember the times that they have acted ethically but forget the times that they acted unethically. Note that this isn’t about lying or something like that. People really do just forget the occasions that they acted in a dishonorable manner, perhaps as a defensive measure.
We already know that physically beautiful people have it better in life in all sorts of ways, perhaps the most easily measurable metric being that they earn more money. This is generally identical for both men and women, that is both men and women earn more in a similar manner according to how attractive they are. This study however adds a measure of how much time and effort people put into grooming themselves into the mix and tried to work out how this changes the dynamics. Surprisingly, they found that grooming explained almost all of the attractiveness gradient in women, that is the link between physical attractiveness and earning power, but only half of it in men.
Finally, I’m not sure how serious this study is, but it’s perfect for the silly season that is the American presidential elections. The researchers created something they call the Bullshit Receptivity Scale, a measure of how people perceive bullshit statements are being profound. They tend searched for correlations between this BRS and favorability ratings for U.S. presidential candidates. Positive correlations were found for all three Republican candidates (Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz) though surprisingly the correlation with Trump was the weakest of the three. Positive correlations were also found for the two Democratic candidates (Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton) but they were deemed to be too low to be statistically significant.
This one was added to our list on the strength of PK, a film that both of us liked immensely. It was made by the same production team, meaning it was directed by Rajkumar Hirani and stars Aamir Khan. Khan’s character here is even similar to the one he would later play in PK and 3 Idiots was also a huge commercial success. It broke box office record in its day though I’m not sure that this means much since it seems that a new record is set every year. Probably this is attributable to the fact that India’s economy is growing so quickly now and so films get bigger and bigger every year. Unfortunately while 3 Idiots is entertaining enough, it’s nowhere as good or even as polished as PK.
As I’ve said before, since I actually speak French, I’m more inclined than usual to add French films to our watch list but Bande de Filles, released as Girlhood in English-speaking markets, shouldn’t need this extra consideration. With its subject of female African-French teenagers living in the outskirts of Paris, it promises to cover some of the same territory as the eye-opening La Haine by Matthieu Kassovitz. As its director Céline Sciamma commented, black women almost never appear in French films so it feels great just to break this informal taboo.
I know, I know, gamers everywhere are playing Dark Souls 3 and I’m only now playing the second one. Given how much I liked the first game, this might sound a bit odd but I was put off when I heard that the sequel is considered markedly inferior to the first game. Then with the news of all of the DLC, I decided to put off getting it until the inevitable definitive edition for the PC was released with all of the bells and whistles included. I actually got this a while back but have only just gotten around to playing it due to my backlog. Note that this post will only be about the main game which I’ve just finished. I intend to write a follow-up post about the DLC content later.
This one was a pick by my wife. Though we no longer climb regularly, I guess the subject is still fascinating. This one is a small documentary, so small in fact that it seems to have been basically made by the three climbers themselves, about their attempt to climb up Meru Peak along the so-called Shark’s Fin route, said to be one of the hardest mountaineering routes in the world.
Oliver Stone has a reputation of being a polemicist first and an artist second, which is why I’ve never been particularly enthused about watching his films. Given that he’s still a major figure in American cinema, I thought I’d give him a fair shake and Platoon seems like the best place to start as it was what caused him to rise to prominence and is widely considered one of the best films about the Vietnam War.
This marks the first film by Akira Kurosawa to be covered in this blog. Like most people I’ve watched Seven Samurai and was blown away by it but that was before I started writing about every film that I watch. Since then I’ve gained a new appreciation of this director’s skill thanks to the excellent Every Frame a Painting channel on YouTube and thought it was high time I slowly worked through some of this great director’s most successful works. This one was added to the list because it was apparently the direct inspiration for George Lucas when he made the original Star Wars.
