This is a film that really deserves to be watched on the big screen and I regret not making an effort to watch it in the cinema. I’d paid some attention to it when its marketing campaign was going on and I knew that this would be a film with some amazing visuals, but on some level, I dismissed it as just another action film.
Quite a few articles this month though there’s no single big piece of news that dominates everything.
This fascinating article in the New York Times talks about how an entirely new language is observed to be in the process of being born in a spontaneous manner in an isolated community in Australia. Apparently it began as baby-talk from parents in a mixture of three languages but the children then took the proto-language and added innovations to it that were not present in the original language and it was then used as well by older members of the community.
Here’s a link to a paper on PubMed that reveals how people seem to be able to accurately gauge a man’s intelligence from a photograph of his face, but are unable to do so for women.
For fun, the next piece talks about how many people would we need to start a sustainable colony in another star system. The idea is that we need to have enough people to maintain sufficient genetic diversity to deal with unknown conditions while too few people would result in in-breeding and vulnerabilities to diseases. It appears that the minimum number seems to be about 10,000 people.
This article from NewScientist talks about a mathematical proof that appears to be correct but since it is approximately as long as the entirety of Wikipedia is far too long for human mathematicians to check by hand. The proof was generated by a computer and can only be verified by computer using a completely different method.
In tech news, this article from the HuffingtonPost covers how the U.S. Navy is experimenting with a process that converts seawater to a hydrocarbon-based liquid fuel. There’s no magic in this however as the process is lossy, energy-wise. Electrical energy is required to produce hydrogen and extract carbon dioxide from seawater and convert the gasses into usable fuel. The idea is not to generate energy but to have a reliable source of fuel while in the field. But it could also be a very handy way of storing excess electrical energy for later use.
Finally this last one is probably the most significant of the findings here with many implications for other studies, past or future. Appearing in Science, the article covers the startling finding that mice actually feel different levels of pain in response to stimulants depending on the gender of the experimenter handling them. Apparently the mice were able to detect male odours, which boosted their stress levels and decreased their sensitivity to pain. The worry is that humans may respond similarly, such that a male or female doctor administering a treatment would have different effects. This may invalidate large parts of a lot of research.
So here we are at the end. I’ve finally gotten around to reading the final book of the Wheel of Time saga. That’s more than 20 years since I read the first book. The whole series amounts to fourteen books and over four million words. So it’s with relief that I can bring this chapter of my life to a close.
It wasn’t until after I’d finished watching Nebraska and looked up information on it on Wikipedia that I realized who director Alexander Payne is. This is the same person who directed Sideways, one of the most memorable road-trip films I’ve ever watched. Duh – I went. That’s because this is another road-trip film and it is once again an excellent one.
I’m someone who has only the vaguest of ideas of what the Mission: Impossible franchise entails. I’ve never watched any of the films starring Tom Cruise and was never a fan of any iteration of the television shows. In fact, when a character in the movie talks about disavowing the IMF, my first thought was to wonder how it had anything to do with the International Monetary Fund.
In between films of more obvious artistic merit, I like to throw into the mix some movies that are selected just for the fun factor. Think of it as a palette cleanser. Hollywood action movies are obvious choices for this role for many people. But I also have a soft spot for ultra-nerdy movies and This is the End is a great example of that.
Mother is another one of the Korean cinema recommendations from my cinephile friend. This was directed by Bong Joon-ho who also made Memories of Murder which I really liked, though he is probably best known internationally for The Host. It also shares a number of superficial similarities with the former film.
