Like most gamers, I have always been fascinated by the Second World War, by far the largest armed conflict in human history. Unfortunately my education on the subject was somewhat scattershot, consisting of random readings here and there and lately enlivened by Wikipedia articles and, most of all, time spent on Paradox’s Hearts of Iron game. So when I heard about this series on Broken Forum and learned that it is one of the most highly acclaimed documentaries ever made, I suggested to my wife that we watch it.
When I first read the second book of the Martian Trilogy, I was immediately struck by the epic sense of history it embodies. Set fifty years after the end of the first novel, it shows how the real Martians are the children of the settlers who have never known Earth. Standing over two meters tall, they move with a grace that those born on Earth can never achieve. Moreover, their profound disinterest of all things Terran and unselfconscious Martianness marked the passing of an era.
Here is yet another entry that was explicitly selected to advance my still pathetic familiarity with the history of cinema. This film was originally made in 1963. The version we watched was digitized and restored in 2013, its 50th anniversary. This was necessary because the original version used vivid and supersaturated colours which were not able to survive for long as physical film stock.
It’s been a while since I last watched a Chinese language film, so this one got put on top of the usual list. Since I watch relatively few Chinese films, I’m not a good judge of them and in particular I’m not familiar with director Jia Zhangke’s body of work even though he appears to be highly regarded by international critics.
Many of my film picks come from various Broken Forum posters. The choice of this particular one came from an offhand comment from a regular about how this film induces discomfort. Since this film also won the Academy Award for Best Picture for 1980 and was Robert Redford’s directorial debut, I decided to include it in my list as an oddball pick from the past.
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.
