I should have watched this ages ago but so many newer American films run to significantly longer than two hours and that makes it harder to schedule the time needed. Then there’s the fact that once you know its premise and you’re on the side of the scientists, it’s almost unnecessary to watch this as it plays out almost exactly as you predict. The film has such a large cast and is so-on-nose with its character archetypes and situations that I can’t rank it very highly in terms of artistic merit. But even if it does nothing but preach to the converted, I am of course one of them and it is so cathartic to watch the truth-denying Trumpists crash headlong into reality even if the rest of the world ends up paying the price along with them.
I bought this a while back after hearing about it being one of the better clones of Dark Souls while also featuring some unique mechanics of its own. I thought that the anime aesthetics might be appealing too. Unfortunately while it’s decent enough as an action game, it copies Dark Souls so apishly without consideration for why the legendary games did things that way that its very existence offends me. Plus I realized that the anime aesthetics come with anime story sensibilities that are so rote and full of the usual tropes.
The story behind this project is almost as incredible as the film itself with director Domee Shi being asked to pitch ideas after the success of her short film Bao. The result is a resounding success of a debut feature that boldly grapples with the anxieties of a teenage girl growing up better than almost anything else I can think of. Some critics have noted how this is targeted at such a specific audience that it lacks universal appeal. As always, for me it is because of its specificity in being set in a particular place, cultural milieu, and even era with the characteristic Tamagotchi-like toy that it feels so authentic as it recognizably draws on the director’s own life experiences.
Without intending to, it seems like we’ve watched two older films about psychologically dysfunctional characters back to back this week. I’ve liked pretty every John Huston film I’ve seen so far but this one is by far the most subversive, most subtle one of the lot. In fact, given that it was roundly panned by critics at the time, I believe that audiences of the time either did not understand the film or were unprepared to accept what it had to say. It essentially accuses the US military of churning out personnel who are sexually repressed and therefore all somewhat crazy, making it an incredibly bold and ahead of its time film.
This is one of Luis Buñuel’s least surrealist films and it’s straightforward to understand every one of the side-plots going on, yet it leaves me confused as to what is the point of it all. I believe that it’s necessary to view this from the perspective of the time it is set in, with France embroiled by the Dreyfus Affair and antisemitism on the rise. That it condemns the perversions of the bourgeoisie is obvious too but then it doesn’t exactly portray the servant class in a kindly light either. I suppose that too is one of the contradictions of the original novel this was based on.
In addition to the Nobel Prize announcements this month and the reactions and commentary that always follows, there’s been plenty of cool news science, enough that I’ve had to pick and curate.
We might as well start with the image that has captured everyone’s imaginations this month. It’s an update to the iconic Pillars of Creation image originally taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995. The new image was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope using its Near-Infrared Camera to view that region of space about 6,500 light-years away. The breathtaking visual captures proto-stars being formed amidst clouds of dust and gas, the powerful gravitic forces involved propelling the clouds of materials around to form these distinctive shapes.
As amazing as that image was, the one article that captured my imagination this month is this one about implanting corticoid organelles into rats’ brains. I’ve covered the subject of these organelles before, but briefly these are small agglomerations of human nerve cells, cultivated from pluripotent stem cells. The idea is to study simplified versions of complex organs, this one being a simplified model of the brain. This particular experiment involved implanting the organelles into the part of the rat’s brains responsible for the sense of touch. After the human and rat nerve cells had connected up properly, they tested if the organelles could properly respond to sensory input, blowing air on the rats’ whiskers, and if it could direct the rat’s behavior. Both proved true and though the ethical issues with such work are worrying, it makes the important point that such artificial, simplified brains can in principle be made to integrate with live animals.
Another great article is this one about how pandemics that happened far in the past continue to affect us today. Analyzing the DNA extracted from victims of the Black Death in the 14th century plus those who died many decades after the plague, the team pinpointed a variant of one particular gene that seems to confer some protection and showed how it became more pervasive in those who survived the plague. Experiments with cultured cells further showed that the variant version have macrophages better able to kill the bacterium that causes the plague. Yet there is a downside as this variant is also linked to a greater susceptibility to autoimmune disorders which essentially means that the immune system has been tuned to be overactive against all kinds of threats.
I don’t like to put too much weight on socioeconomics studies so consider this as just one data point among many. This paper studying how participation in markets affect moral behavior uses data from experiments done in some villages in Greenland. After controlling for other factors, it finds that increased market participation leads to more universalism in moral decision-making, meaning that the villagers saw themselves as part of a wider community instead of valorizing their own co-villagers above outsiders. It’s the kind of finding that is intuitive and perhaps a little too good to be true but I certainly would like it to be.
Next is another paper that is sure to be politicized. It summarizes the current state of knowledge regarding vegan and vegetarian diets to argue that strict adherence to a purely vegan diet results in too many nutrient deficiencies. In any case, our ancestors consumed plenty of meat, eggs and seafood so our bodies are adapted to it. The paper recommends a diet of mostly unprocessed plant-based foods balanced with modest amounts of wholesome animal foods.
Finally here is a long article from Google about using AI techniques to discover novel algorithms. It uses the example of matrix multiplication that most people who have some mathematics education should know how to do. In 1969 the German mathematician Volker Strassen showed a way to do the calculation more efficiently at least on 2 x 2 matrices yet until now no one knows how to extend this to larger matrices or if even better algorithms are possible. The article talks about Google using a system they call AlphaTensor to gamify the process of searching for better algorithms and actually succeeds in finding novel solutions though it take a far mathematician than myself to understand how to use the new algorithm. Since matrix multiplication is used in many, many fields of computing even the slightest optimization makes a huge difference. But this also raises the old fear that AI-led discoveries will soon lead us into territory that human minds will struggle to understand.
The English title of this film by Shōhei Imamura is somewhat misleading. Its full Japanese title An introduction to anthropology through pornographers is far better at describing what it is about, a view of the human condition through the eyes of its main character. We’ve already seen Imamura’s fascination with the dark side of human nature in Vengeance is Mine. This one is similar though of course the focus this time around is around sexuality and its perversions. Without ever being truly graphic, this film nevertheless challenges and breaks just about every moral boundary to an extent that is shocking even today. I like this one a little less as I’m not confident that I understood everything but the statement that the director seems to be making through it is really something else.
