I liked BoJack Horseman enough to watch a couple of seasons of it and I thought this new show by its creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg might be at least a little similar, with less drugs and depression. In fact, this is a different kind of show entirely. While the characters have various kinds of trauma from their childhoods, it’s actually a very wholesome show with a strong focus on Jewish culture. I was a little lost at the beginning due to the very fast paced dialogue but by the end I was thoroughly in love with the characters and their family dynamics.
This has been a fairly explosive month in terms of science news because one particularly talked about paper. But that’s not the only thing we have this month.
That paper presents a massive study of ancient DNA from nearly 16,000 people across more than 10,000 years with a view towards identifying instances of directional selection. That is, a type of natural selection in which a gene confers a trait strongly enough that it makes a difference in survival and reproduction. The obvious example given is lactose intolerance after infancy. The dataset and the methods they developed are itself scientifically valuable but commentators have focused on the results so far. Many have assumed that natural selection has more or less stopped in the modern era as our technology and mastery of the environment has improved. This paper shows that natural selection has accelerated after the introduction of farming. Some seem logical such as immunity to HIV infection. Others seem counterintuitive, such as gluten intolerance spiking after wheat farming became widespread. This is just a starting point as this dataset only covers West Eurasia but it’s understandable why this one paper has led to so such heated discussion and debate.
A more depressing and yet completely predictable finding is the paper claiming that perhaps half of all results published even in reputable journals in the social sciences can’t be replicated by independent analysis. It’s another nail in the coffin of the reproducibility crisis. What’s even more depressing is that they’re not actually redoing entire experiments. Just reanalyzing the supplied data to confirm the results. If they actually start collecting fresh data for themselves, I’d bet even few papers will be replicated.
The next paper is personally fascinating to me. It provides evidence that depressed people have a pessimistic bias against future positive events. I found this result validating because they usually claim that they’re just being realistic and see the world more accurately. The methodology they used is brilliant too. They asked the participants to predict what would happen to them in their personal lives in the near future, then checked back later to see how their predictions held up. Interestingly the depressed could be convinced that they were wrong and adjust their attitudes but this new optimism was fragile and they tended to return to their previous pessimism soon.
Moving beyond human concerns, here’s a cool paper that tries to nail down some details of the communication of sperm whales. It adds to the growing body of knowledge that not only do the codas, or series of clicks that they use to communicate, resemble human vowels acoustically, their patterns also seem to parallel the phonetics and phonology of human languages. We’re not yet at the stage where we can understand what it is that they are saying to each other but that we might be able to one day is scary enough.
We end with a fun bit of science news that is not biology. CERN recently carried out an experiment that involved transporting antiprotons in a truck across their site. The extremely volatile material is stabilized in a portable cryogenic trap and the distance involved is short but it does let them claim to be a world first in achieving such a feat. It’s a bit of news that would excite science-fiction fans as this is after all antimatter that annihilates on contact with ordinary matter which would happen if the trap fails. But as there are only 92 antiprotons involved, the theoretical energy released would only be about that of a small static electricity spark.
I’ve skipped over so many of the Predator and Alien films that I have no idea what’s going on in that cinematic universe any longer. I opted to watch this one because it was directed by Dan Trachtenberg who made the excellent Prey. The twist here is that the protagonist is a Predator for the first time, teaming up with human-made synthetic to survive on an alien planet. It’s okay enough as an action movie but has too jokey a tone to carry any emotional weight and the predictable lesson of protecting each other belongs more in a Disney feature than a Predator movie.
After Jeanne Dielman unexpectedly topped a poll of the greatest films of all time in 2022, I’d bet I’m not the only person slowly working through the body of work of Chantal Akerman. This one is a very loose adaptation of a volume from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and knowing nothing of the novel itself, I am stunned by the intensity and alienness of the protagonist’s mindset. It actually made me want to read the book. I’m not certain that this is better than Jeanne Dielman but it is much less talked about and so I think severely underrated.
I can’t resist drive and deliver type games, so I decided to give this freebie on the Epic platform a shot. It’s something of a Grand Theft Auto-clone with an isometric perspective and set in 1959. Interestingly while you can step outside of your car, there’s no real combat and no one dies. The art and the world it depicts look great and it has solid voice acting throughout. It sounds like it should be good yet unfortunately it very much isn’t. Actual gameplay is frustrating due to the poor control scheme and the deliberate chaos it wants to encourage. Most of all, its makers seem much more interested in telling a story than making this an enjoyable game.
Being one of Ingmar Bergman’s early works, Summer with Monika is noticeably less refined and you won’t have any trouble understanding what it means. For that matter, it’s a familiar story that most will have seen many variations of already. Yet its rawness has its appeal and this can be considered a foundational film that inspired many others. I dislike its moralizing tone against so-called loose women as it seems unworthy of a director of Bergman’s stature so I would consider it a lesser work.
My wife and I are often leery of British comedies as we so often fail to get the humor but this is a sweet and relatively simple one. It seems this was originally a short film made by the two male leads Tim Key and Tom Basden. Now 18 years later, they’ve expanded it into a full feature film and it’s been a hit with the critics. The core idea of an aging musician performing for a single obsessive fan is just so cute. It’s very small in scale which I usually like but it’s not that deep either, so I’d call it a very pleasing distraction.
