Films & Television

The Tree of Life

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Back when I started my series of “Favorite Films” posts in 2007, I took extra pains to define what that title meant. It isn’t sufficient for a film to be merely entertaining and likeable. A film must pass that test, I thought, but more than that it must also aspire to be a work of art. Either by conveying a profound meaning or by expanding the vocabulary of cinema through innovation.

However I failed to consider that it might be possible for a film to fail the first test but completely blow the competition out of the water on the second. For this reason, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is in a class of its own. I do not find it entertaining. Yes, it is utterly captivating to watch but it is also so intense that it is too mentally exhausting to be considered entertaining.

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News & Politics, Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (June ‘2012)

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It’s time for our monthly round-up of the coolest, most fascinating science articles of the previous month and June 2012 has been an especially bountiful month in that regard. So here goes:

  •  How exactly does mainstream pop music evolve over time? This article from the Pacific Standard summarizes research demonstrating that on general pop music has been getting sadder and sadder over time. This is reflected not only in increasingly negative lyrics but also in the slower tempo and music with mixed emotional cues.
  • The next article belongs in economics which many dispute is really a science at all, though I tend to disagree. This one is from the Library of Economics and Liberty and talks about how employers in different countries are averse to firing workers in different ways. The survey finds that there are two extremes, reflecting the different values of the countries involved. The Anglo-American business world likes being efficient, even if that means ruthlessness. They are more likely to fire expensive, middle-aged workers with middling performance. The Germans are more sympathetic towards middle-aged workers, preferring to fire a younger worker with comparable performance even if his wages are cheaper.
  • The Economist has an article on a subject that Thomas Kuhn would no doubt heartily approve of: it is dangerous to generalize findings in experimental psychology too widely. This is because a lot of such research uses test subjects that fall into the same demographic category which the authors of the paper being cited have summed up in a media-savvy acronym: WEIRD. This stands for White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. To solve this, the authors have tried to use crowdsourcing to open surveys to a wider group of participants and since there seems to be an infinite supply of people willing to work for next to nothing on services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, it’s dirt cheap too.
  • Normally the articles I like to select about new scientific discoveries rather than the latest technological gizmos. Gadgets are cool and all, but the years and years of research behind the principles that make them work are the really intellectually interesting part in my opinion. But I make an exception when it’s something that could open up cybernetics in a big way as this article from ExtremeTech explains. It’s an implantable fuel cell that generates electricity from the glucose in the human body. Once installed it can generate electricity indefinitely to power any other cybernetic implants you might have. Heck, there’s no reason why you couldn’t have an external port built into your body to charge your mobile phone or similar device with it. The only cost being that you might feel the need to eat a bit more than usual.
  • The Turing Test is a well known test to determine the quality of an AI by engaging it in conversation. This article, again from the Pacific Standard, can be thought of as a variation of that. Can sophisticated, specially trained music aficionados tell the difference between a composition that is written by a human and one written by a computer program? It turns out that they can’t as a blind survey of musically knowledgeable listeners revealed that they found computer-composed works just as appealing as those written by real humans.
  • Finally just for fun, this article from the Mail Online covers one of the greatest scientific achievements of humanity: the Voyager 1 space probe that was launched in 1977 is now leaving the solar system. Incredibly it is still in contact with NASA, despite a communications delay of 16 hours. We probably shouldn’t expect it to be able to keep that up for long once it enters interstellar space.
Personal Life

Assorted links

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Every month I read tons of articles online and save the science ones for my monthly features. I happen to have found too many cool articles this month and since some of these aren’t science-article, I thought I’d throw in an assorted links posts for them. Here goes:

  •  Google gets involved in a lot of odd projects that on the face of it have little to do with their primary online search business. Well, this one may just be the oddest of them all. This article from The New York Times talks about how a Google laboratory cobbled together a machine-learning neural network from 16,000 processors and set it to the task of watching cat videos on YouTube. Result: a neural network that is really, really good at recognizing cats no matter what their size, shape or color and no matter what the cats are doing. Cue jokes about why Skynet wants to kill all humans.
  • The next article is notably mostly because of how well it lends itself to jokes. It’s America’s hottest new export and it’s man-made! Talk about gross national product! Erect a new future today! America is in good hands! Follow the link to this The Daily article to find out what it is.
  • Okay, so everyone know the Japanese are crazy about giant mecha but this post on the Anime News Network shows just how crazy that can be. Some quarters in the Japanese government are looking into the feasibility of building piloted walking combat robots and two members of the Liberal Democratic Party claim that they working to include realization of a Gundam Development Project into their manifesto.
  • This last one isn’t a joke and will likely be of interest only to Malaysians. The listing of Felda Global Ventures Holdings Bhd. (FGVH), effectively the third largest oil palm company in the world, has hit headlines due to being the second biggest IPO this year, after Facebook. This investor’s report from a Netherlands-based analyst makes for an eye-opening read since it goes far beyond FGVH’s financials into the history of the Felda project, its links with key government officials and why the settlers are so opposed to the IPO. It basically tells global investors to stay away because it’s a gigantic scam due to poor expected returns and undisclosed political risks and further argues that investing in it would be unethical as the IPO directly undermines Malaysia’s fledgling democracy.
Films & Television

You Are The Apple of My Eye

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If you’re Chinese, you can’t help but be inundated by posts about how innumerable Facebook friends were moved by You Are The Apple of My Eye and how it left them teary-eyed. Clearly it does something right. It’s been a chart-topper in every Chinese-language market it has been released in and made instant stars of its two leads. So my wife was understandably insistent that we watch it, which we did this weekend.

I think it’s won’t be a surprise to readers of this blog that I don’t think very highly of this film. Teen love movies are a well-worn genre after all and unfortunately this film does nothing to break new ground. In fact, all too often director Giddens Ko falls back on familiar, overworn tropes. In fact, he explicitly lampshades it, ‘this is the fat friend, this is the joker friend, this is the plain girl who is the heroine’s constant companion’ because, you know, every teen love movie needs one of each.

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Science Fiction

Midnight Riot

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Midnight Riot is a book that I picked up as light reading from book recommendation threads on QT3 and Broken Forum. I had some trouble finding information about it on the net and later discovered that this is because it was originally published as Rivers of London is the UK but its US publishers chose the title Midnight Riot, probably because the original name sounded like a boring treatise on British geography. The Americans also changed its cover, creating controversy by choosing to depict the lead character in silhouette. The critics claimed that this was to hide the fact that the protagonist is of mixed race, which would supposedly turn off would-be buyers.

Anyway the book’s back blurb describes it accurately as what would happen if Harry Potter grew up and became a policeman in the UK. Peter Grant, a young constable who has just completed his probation, seems set on a boring career of pushing paper at the Case Progression Unit, when a chance event alters the course of his life. He is standing guard at the scene of a seemingly random act of murder when an eyewitness comes up to him with critical information. The witness turns out to be a ghost, the uncanny nature of the case gets it referred to Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, who is the sole member of the London’s Metropolitan Police to specialize in magical crimes, and Grant becomes the first officially sanctioned wizard’s apprentice in Britain in 50 years.

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Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (May ‘2012)

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I’m getting an early start on this month’s installment of this regular feature. I’m really digging how this new abbreviated format allows me to burn through more articles in a succinct fashion. Here goes:

  • The first article is actually a post on Robin Hanson’s blog Overcoming Bias who points out that stories, both the telling and enjoyment of them, has interesting and unexpected effects on a person’s outlook on life. In particular, enjoying fiction seems to, in a sense, cause us to buy into the fictional world with its sense of poetic justice and ethical norms. So we believe the world to be more just and less impersonal than it actually is and behave accordingly. Hanson further speculate that this is a benefit that religions also share, regardless of the underlying truth of that belief.
  • Next we have a real-life, honest-to-goodness version of Robocop. This Phys.org article talks about how South Korea is testing robotic guards in one of its prisons. The robots are equipped with a wide variety of sensor devices and software that helps determine the behavioral characteristics of inmates. They are capable of autonomously patrolling the halls of the prison and are supposed to alert human operators if they detect anything out of the ordinary. They’re not armed yet but it seems the next plan would be to get the robots to perform body searches, looking for hidden and improvised weapons in particular.
  • Next we have an article about a study confirming something that all dog owners already suspect to be true: just as people yawn when they see and hear other people yawn, so do dogs. This article from The Washington Post covers research which shows that not only do dogs yawn when they hear humans yawning, they are more likely to do it when they hear a person whose voice they recognize yawning.
  • Online learning is all the rage these days and I’m currently taking free courses for fun from coursera.org myself but the effectiveness of such computer assisted learning is understandably a big point of contention within educational circles. This article from Inside Higher Ed looks at an experiment that compared the results of students who studied in the traditional way with lectures from a live instructor and students who studied using a hybrid format devised by Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative. This involved a mere one hour of live instruction per week with the rest of the time spent on an artificially intelligent learning platform working through lessons and exercises. The results were pretty shocking: the students using the hybrid format needed only about one quarter of the time to obtain the same results as those using the traditional format.
  • Modern animal researchers are very careful about anthropomorphism, that is explaining animal behaviors through the lens of human experience but as this article from the BBC indicates, for some animals this is actually warranted because they really are so alike to humans. Chimpanzees and orangutans it seems are so similar to humans, due to our shared evolutionary history, that not only can each animal be said to have a distinct personality but their personality types are similar to those of humans. This is after carefully controlling that human observers aren’t projecting human biases into their observations.
Science

Driverless cars

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For a while now, I’ve been talking about how public transport should work ideally in private conversations with my wife. This is because I think privately owned motor vehicles are terribly inefficient. They’re idle the vast majority of the time, they transport too few people for the road area they occupy and consequently waste too much energy. I for one was shocked when I first learned than more than 50% of the area of a typical city is devoted solely to roads. But in practice, privately owned vehicles are so convenient compared to the alternative of public transport that, except for the very densest of cities, they’re the method of transportation of choice despite their inefficiencies.

So all this has remained my personal pet peeve. (I guess I’m also personally biased against cars because I dislike driving.) Until now, at least, because with the advent of Google’s driverless cars, suddenly my vision of an efficient public transport system now seems almost like the inevitable future. Some relevant links to consider:

  • This news item about Google being granted a license to operate driverless cars in the state of Nevada early this month kicked off a lot of articles and blog posts about the effects this development will eventually have.
  • This article about a reporter’s account of being transported in one of Google’s cars reveals that a lot of work remains to be done. Google’s engineers wouldn’t allow the car to be driven away from the fixed routes it was trained on and the computer handed back control to the humans at a few moments when it was unsure about what to do.
  • Still, it does seem that the kinks will be worked out eventually and this blog post points out how the widespread deployment of driverless cars could drastically reshape our urban geography.

Of course, driverless cars would also alter our lifestyles. Freed of the need to pay attention to the road, time spent in transit would be extra time to spend as you wish, whether working, reading, watching videos or even sleeping. I predict that with transport becoming vastly more efficient, this would drive down transport costs and raise effective standards of living. And of course, cities would be more beautiful and more pleasant to live. This truly would be the next revolution to look out for.

 

The unexamined life is a life not worth living