Quite a few articles for this month and a day earlier too! I just wanted to get this done before getting back to writing about movies.
Unless you live under a rock, you’d be aware that the biggest science news this month has been the landing of Philae on a comet 500 million kilometers away from Earth as part of the Rosetta mission. There are many, many articles on this, so this one from The Guardian is just a suggestion. I strongly recommend watching one of the many animations made that describe the incredible 10-year journey. Unfortunately the lander ran of power shortly afterwards due to poor positioning. Hopefully it will wake up again when the comet moves closer to the Sun.
This next article is a more challenging read. Appearing in Quanta Magazine, it discusses the multiverse hypothesis, the idea that there are an infinite number of universes for which the constants are set at different values. This is meant to answer the anthropic question of why is it that the constants in our own universe seem uniquely tuned in such a way that would support our existence in it. I’m doubtful about the scientific value of this line of thought but I can’t deny that it makes for fascinating reading.
On a more practical note, this article from IEEE Spectrum, discusses a plan to install what are in effect powerful servers in privately owned buildings to serve as heating systems. The individual pays for the hardware but the cloud computing firm pays for data connection and maintenance costs. It’s a neat idea but as the comments point out, the homeowner has no control over the server’s computing load and therefore no control over how much heat it generates which makes it unreliable as a heating system.
Next we talk about gravity anomalies, the real kind caused by unusual geological formations, not the fake kind caused by retarded future humans. This article from The Economist covers how pigeons can sense the Earth’s gravitational field and use it to help them navigate even when they are in unfamiliar locations. The experiment used a massive crater which causes unusual variations in gravity. Pigeons were released both inside the crater, and outside of it where there were no gravity anomalies. The pigeons outside all found their way home quickly. The pigeons who started from inside the crater tended to get lost.
Finally just because GamerGate is still ongoing even though activity has died down by quite a bit, here is an article from The Telegraph discussing how girls in the 12-13 year old age group seem to outperform their male peers in using a simplified programming language for making video games. Granted, it’s a study with a very limited scope but it at least suggests that there is no biological reason why women cannot be at least as proficient as men in programming, traditionally a male dominated profession. Just check out the comments section if you don’t believe that there is a gender problem in the technology sector. Lewis’ Law is in full effect here.
Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy is on the recommended list of a Coursera course that my wife is taking on the making of short films, so expect to see me write about all three of them in short order. This post covers the first of them which stars Juliette Binoche and is by most accounts the most accomplished of the three.
My wife and I watched Mad Men for several seasons and were enthralled for a while with its sumptuous portrayal of 1960s America. But we stopped when it became clear that it was turning into just another soap opera with characters that are constantly spinning in place because any actual development would damage the existing dynamic and make them dramatically uninteresting. Looking back, the only character to have any meaningful arc was Peggy Olson and since everyone else, especially Don Draper, is pretty much an asshole, the only character audiences can sympathize with.
One thing’s for sure about this Chinese film, its English title is appalling. Whoever coined it must either have been unaware of the Biblical connotations of this term or believed that it could be meaningfully appropriated for the historical events which are the subject of this film. Either way, it is a mistake made especially egregious because a straightforward Feast at Hong Gate would have been both simpler and better. Fortunately, this is pretty much the worst thing I have to say about this movie because everything else is utterly fantastic.
This starts out promisingly enough. Bradley Cooper plays Pat Solatano, a man who is just about to be released from an involuntary stay in a mental health facility. When he starts tearing a doctor’s office apart to stop a song that he keeps hearing in his head, he goes from being an eccentric weirdo to someone you want to stay as far away from as possible. Then you learn that he nearly beat a man for death for having an affair with his wife, insists on not taking his medication, obsessively keeps trying to meet with his wife in spite of a restraining order and generally makes life hell for the parents he stays with. Sure, you think, it looks like his relationship with his wife is fucked, but at least Silver Linings Playbook is shaping out to be a decent film that takes mental illnesses seriously.
I don’t know what I expected exactly from Wild Strawberries. I certainly loved The Seventh Seal while acknowledging that it fully deserves its reputation for being a cold film of stark contrasts, heavy with symbolism and religious weight. You really do need to bring an understanding and appreciation of Christian imagery and theology to fully appreciate it. Ingmar Bergman made this immediately after completing The Seventh Seal so I certainly did not expect this to be a warm, uplifting and completely approachable.
Way back before I started to regularly write about individual films, I had a little series going about my favourite films that I’d recently watched. It only got updated every couple of years or so. Anyway, in the very first installment of that series, I talked about five films. Out of those five, two were directed by Christopher Nolan. He has since gone on to make far bigger and better known films, most notably the Dark Knight Trilogy. But looking back, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Nolan’s output peaked with The Prestige.
