Zootopia was a film that came out of the left field for me. It wasn’t on my radar at all. Both my wife and myself were pretty big fans of the last two Kung Fu Panda films so we’d been looking forward to watching it. Unfortunately that one seems to have gotten only middling reviews but while looking at showtimes I couldn’t help but notice that this Disney release just happened to be in cinemas at around the same time but got stellar reviews. In fact even my cinephile friend and the members over on Broken Forum gave it a thumbs-up, making this a must watch for my wife.
Given Fox’s poor track record with the X-Men films, whether or not I should watch this wasn’t exactly a sure bet. It was released while I was distracted by family stuff during the Chinese New Year and seems to have been very well received while I wasn’t paying much attention. That explains why I’ve also just now gone to the cinema to check it out.
So I was just randomly browsing Broken Forum one day when I read a comment about how everyone who loved Portal should play this. My first reaction was naturally: wait? There’s a Portal game that I somehow missed? How could this be possible! This turned out to be a fan-made mod, albeit one that is so well made that it’s even featured as a free game on Steam. It has original art assets, voice acting, a storyline, the works.
Abbas Kiarostami is an Iranian filmmaker of some reknown so it is somewhat regrettable that the first film of his that I watch is also his first film to be made entirely outside of Iran. Certified Copy is set and shot in Tuscany, Italy and its dialogue is a mix of English, French and Italian. The entire film is essentially one long conversation between its two leads over the course of an afternoon.
We’re still taking it relatively easy after our long absence and in most cases, nothing is easier to watch than an animated film. A few minutes in however, I realize that this isn’t your average animated film, which makes this not easy to watch at all. While I recognized the names of actresses like Dakota Fanning and Teri Hatcher, I began to doubt that this could be an American film. That’s because this turned out to be one of the creepiest animated films I’ve ever seen and I doubted that a Hollywood studio would have the courage to make such a scary children’s movie.
Despite the incessant advertisements for Ola Bola on local radio stations, I have still not watched it yet. After all its director was responsible for the execrable The Journey which was the whole reason why I started writing about films in the first place. Meanwhile, I have recently watched this Taiwanese-Japanese film about baseball. I’m not a fan of sports film in general. Unless a given film has some sort of unique twist, the genre tends to conform to predictable tropes so to a certain extent they are all alike. Kano is no exception in this regard.
Due to being away, I’ve had fairly minimal Internet access over the past month. As such, I’d expected to come across fewer science-related news articles. Strangely, this didn’t turn out to be the case as there have been more than enough news to satisfy my curiosity.
The biggest science news this month is obviously the confirmation that scientists have successfully detected gravity waves for the first time. There are many articles about this but I’ve picked this one from one of my favorite science-related websites, Ask a Mathematician, for how comprehensive it is. As this site points out, the interesting part about this isn’t the actual confirmation. Our indirect evidence of the existence of gravity waves was already so strong that direct detection doesn’t really add much to our picture of the universe. Rather, what’s interesting is the astounding technical precision needed for this achievement due to how tiny the effect is. Of course, it helped in this case that the phenomenon that caused these gravity waves were immense: the merging of two black holes about 1.3 billion light years away. The ripples in spacetime caused by this merger even results in a signal that is within the hearing range of human ears and you can listen to it for yourself here.
Due to my family history with the disease, I always pay special attention to research about schizophrenia. That it has a genetic component has always been obvious but so many genes seem to play some part in it that it has always been difficult to pin down exactly what causes it. This article from The Economist highlights a claim that it has something to do with a particular gene known as C4. This gene produces a protein that has a role in the brain’s synaptic pruning, a process in which unnecessary neural connections are eliminated from childhood to early adulthood. Early adulthood is of course when the symptoms of schizophrenia are most commonly identified in patients and it’s easy to imagine that the delusions often experienced by patients may have something to do with having too many synaptic connections. While schizophrenia can currently be controlled using medications, it can’t be cured because researchers have little idea of what causes it. This development however suggests that a pathway to a more permanent cure might one day exist.
Staying on the subject of medical science and especially mental health, here’s an interesting new paper that will no doubt delight my wife. Drawing data from a wide-ranging survey on the cardiovascular risk factors and cognitive functioning of a sample of 968 adults, it found a positive correlation between the consumption of chocolate and cognitive functions. There’s no suggestion of what the mechanics of the effect may be, just a hint that regular consumption of chocolate seems to be good for the brain and may protect against normal age-related cognitive decline.
Finally here’s a cool article on how police in the Netherlands have developed methods to take down trespassing drones. As everyone knows, they’re ubiquitous now and pose a real security threat but there’s currently no consensus on how best to safely take down drones that are flying where they’re not supposed to be. This article describes how Dutch police have trained eagles to chase down and physically grab drones out of the air.
