My wife had been bugging me for ages to read this book, arguably China’s best known science-fiction work for the moment. Written by Liu Cixin, it was first serialized in a magazine some years back. Of course I had to first wait for it to be translated to English and for it to be released at affordable paperback prices. In the meantime, the book went on to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel last year, though it was amidst the chaos created by the Raid Puppies and the Sad Puppies. The version that I eventually got was on Google Play Books. Note that this write-up will be full of spoilers as it will difficult to say much about it otherwise.
This one was a recommendation from our cinephile while we were in the middle of talking about unusual animated films and it’s obscure enough that I doubt that I would have heard of it in any other way. It’s a Danish film made by director Anders Morgenthaler who apparently made his reputation from a newspaper-published comic strip. It’s also very much an adult film as it has explicit sex scenes and very unusually includes a significant amount of real-life footage.
Margin Call was one of my favorite films in the year of its release and to this day it’s one of the first things that come to my mind whenever I think of good examples of cinema that try to cover current events. It helps as well that the subject of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2008 is personally very fascinating to me as a key challenge to modern capitalism. Arguably we can even detect the seeds of the rise of illiberalism that we see everywhere today in that crisis as the economic damage that it did to the working classes was never fully repaired. So it makes sense that I was highly interested in this adaptation of the famous book by Michael Lewis about what is known as the worst recession since the Great Depression.
This post covers the mini-campaign that was included in the Extended Edition of Shadowrun: Hong Kong. This was released for free to all owners of the original game and was one of the KickStarter campaign’s bonus goals. In the event, the release passed almost without notice. Even now, there doesn’t seem to be any walkthrough or guide for it on the net, which is pretty remarkable given that there’s a guide for every little game out there. Still, it’s free and there are Steam achievements for it so I had to play it.
I loved each and every one of the Federico Fellini films I’ve watched so far so it’s not surprising that I had a high level of anticipation for this one. La Dolce Vita is one of the great director’s major works, coming in at three hours long. It’s also highly rated by critics. Roger Ebert notably considered it Fellini’s best film and wrote first ever review for it. Unfortunately I liked it the least of his films that I’ve seen so far. I find it great in parts but it just doesn’t add up to enough of a coherent whole for me.
This film has been on our watch list for a while as it is considered one of the most notable releases of 2014 so watching it now is a complete coincidence. Still, seeing it just after the Brexit referendum makes for a particularly poignant reminder not to take the national unity of Britain for granted. It’s the debut work of its director Yann Demange and as you should guess by now it’s a take on the Northern Ireland conflict, focusing on one particular night in 1971.
A solid mix of lighter articles for this month with an emphasis on history:
The news of the discovery of the remains of a Hobbit-like hominid species on the island of Flores made waves around the world some years back. Newer discoveries not only confirm this but even reveal that the species may go back much further than previously suspected. It is now thought that they must have arrived on the island more than a million years ago, enough time for them to have evolved along a separate branch and to have shrunk down in size from the prevalent Homo erectus. This also ties in to recent research which suggests that all animals tend to develop dwarfism if they are forced to live on an island with limited space.
Next is this announcement that rice farming goes back much further than previously known. This article talks about how the discovery of rice plant material that have been domesticated dating from over 9,000 years ago have been found in the Lower Yangtze Valley in China.
Then there’s this article about new excavations at the port of Piraeus in Greece. It provides fresh information about the size of the Athenian navy some 2,500 years ago which seems to be larger than previously thought. Apparently the sheds housing the fleets have an area of more than 110,000 square meters.
Moving on from ancient Greece to ancient Egypt, this article describes the application of modern metallurgical analysis techniques to the iron dagger found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. They confirm earlier suspicions that the dagger is made of iron of meteoritic origin and that the ancient Egyptians placed great value on iron recovered from fallen meteors.
Finally here’s an article that explains the concept of the gene drive. It’s a new genetic editing tool that all but ensures that the changes that are made to an organism will be passed on to all subsequent offspring. This effectively ensures that virtually all members of the altered species will eventually have the edited genes. This is understandably very powerful and one use that has been mooted is to use to eradicate all mosquitoes.
