So somehow I made it to middle-age without either reading Charles Dickens’ novel or watching any one of the numerous film adaptations even though like most people some of the scenes in it are so iconic that they are seared into my consciousness through cultural osmosis alone. This one is of course the grand-daddy of all the adaptations by David Lean. There have been other film versions before this but only this had any staying power and it influenced all other adaptations that followed.
For this last month of a tumultuous year, the theme is probably that of China’s ascendancy in the domain of the sciences as Chinese researchers churn out groundbreaking discoveries one after another. I don’t even have to include China’s moon mission for this as that has yet to yield any novel science.
We might as well start with those first so here’s the story of it switching on its tokamak for real. This a fusion reactor that has plasma as hot as the temperature as the sun swirling around inside, held in place only the magnetic fields created by supercooled electromagnets. The promise of fusion power forever being just beyond the horizon is an old one and it’s still likelier than not that China’s effort to chase viable fusion energy will amount to nothing. But there’s no denying that they are in the race for real now.
The other one is about China’s photon-based quantum computer it has named Jiuzang. Like Google’s Sycamore, this has been built to perform a single type of computation, the one here being known as boson sampling. This involves sending parallel streams of photons as inputs through a series of beam splitters to obtain a result. Apparently trying to simulate this calculation through conventional means takes so long as to be effectively, thus making this a second clear case of quantum supremacy. I have no idea however if this has any practical use.
Still neither of these can match the significance of the next bit of science news: the announcement that Google’s DeepMind AI has effectively solved the protein folding problem. They proved this at an annual competition that involves predicting what shapes given strings of amino acids will fold into. While DeepMind’s solutions were not perfect, they are still so accurate as to essential invalidate every other approach. Despite the fact this means the careers of many scientists in the field have been upended, pretty much everyone is in agreement that this is a truly revolutionary advance that will change the entire biotech industry.
Next is a paper about restoring sight by inducing the retinal ganglion cells in the eyes to regenerate. Techniques to restore youth to cells and turn back the epigenetic clock have long been the stuff of science-fiction so this is a case of it in reality. They achieved it engineering a virus to induce expression of transcription factors that can trigger mature cells that it infects to revert to an immature state. Tested in mice, this approach succeeded in repairing damage to the RGC axon and restoring sight. Naturally they are very interested to learn if this technique also works on neurons elsewhere in the brain and the spinal cord.
Finally there is this bit of news about progress in developing so-called C4 rice. To cover some basics, different plants have different photosynthetic pathways and rice uses the less efficient C3 pathway. Maize on the other hand uses the more efficient C4 pathway. So C4 rice has been a sort of dream project for some time as the C4 pathway is theoretically up to 50% more efficient, so C4 rice would require less nitrogen and less water. This announcement is just about the early stage of assembling a functioning C4 biochemical pathway for rice and the real thing is still many years off but apparently this is still a pretty major advance.
This is the latest one of the action movies to come out of Indonesia that is good enough to gain favorable attention worldwide. Unlike some of the earlier, this one features a decent budget and extensive CGI. With its near future dystopian setting, high-tech toys and plenty of fighting scenes that takes place in the rain at night, I would count this as a solid cyberpunk film and a viable contender to Hollywood action movies.
I’ve studiously avoided all of the Transformers films since the very first one, and indeed looking it up, that means I haven’t seen one in ten years. I decided to give this prequel a chance as it was not directed by Michael Bay and I quite like the idea of a smaller scale film featuring just Bumblebee. Unfortunately while this is definitely better than Bay’s own work for many reasons, it’s still recognizably the same type of action movie and that means I cannot in good conscience call it a good film.
Pedro Almodóvar directs this film that brings together some of the biggest name performers in the Spanish speaking world. I was dubious about it at first as the story of a renowned film director in decline being addicted to drugs seemed like just another entry in a tired genre. But it opens up to cover many more aspects of the director’s and I found that I quite liked it despite its lack of a singular focus.
It’s been a while since I last wrote one of these broad overviews of the various pieces of online fiction I’ve been reading. The truth is that I spend far more time reading so-called amateur online fiction than published books nowadays and recently I find that I’ve been enjoying them more as well. And of course many of the most successful pieces of online fiction eventually make their way to become published as traditional books. By far, my current favorite of the lot is The Wandering Inn web serial by pirateaba. I’ve been following this for a few years now so I thought I’d already written something about this but it turns out that I hadn’t. So I’m writing this to convince more people to try it out.
Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars is of course his unofficial remake of Yojimbo, being similar enough that the Japanese production sued and Leone eventually settled out of court. Being one of the earliest Spaghetti Westerns, the European crew members were so nervous that they adopted fake American-sounding names. This is why the musical score really is composed by Ennio Morricone as you can tell immediately upon hearing it but it is credited to Dan Savio.
