Wikipedia’s description of this as a noir misled me as this has nothing to do with private detectives or criminal cases. This is instead Billy Wilder’s treatise on alcoholism, apparently based on Raymond Chandler. As usual with the director’s work, it is well made and must have been quite an eye-opener in its time. But by now it has been superseded by far grimmer and more realistic takes on various types of addiction and to my eyes is actually more fascinating in the choices that it must make to ensure that the main character retains the sympathy of the audience.
Quite a wealth of important science-related announcements this month though as usual I fear many will pass unnoticed as the world grapples with multiple ongoing crises.
The announcement that received the most attention in the mainstream news this month is probably this one, described as a miracle cancer cure with a 100% success rate. I’m linking the original paper here for those interested. The sample size is small though I understand it has since been expanded and it is specifically about rectal cancer. The drug used is dostarlimab which is used to treat cancers due to mismatch repair deficiency (MMR). Effectively this means that the mechanism for repairing mistakes when copying DNA is broken, leading to many mutations. Since many more cancers than just rectal cancer is thought to be caused by MMR, this is understandably an exciting development but of course it isn’t a universal cancer cure.
Next is a paper on an important development in quantum mechanics but I’m not qualified to make any judgments about it. As I understand the team is announcing their success in transmitting for the first time quantum information over a network instead of just between two directly connected nodes. The paper describes in detail the physical processes this involves. This is important for actually using entangled qubits for communications but as always the value here is in encryption and it doesn’t mean that faster than light communications is possible.
Going back to the subject of cancers, here’s an article on a new finding that seems rather scary. Examining tumors from breast cancers, the researchers found that metastasis, when the tumors release cancerous cells into the blood stream is much more active at night. Moving on to doing tests on mice, they found that tumor cells extracted at night and injected into healthy mice leads to metastasis but those extracted during the day do not. In a way this isn’t too surprising since we know the immune system operates differently depending on whether it is day or night but I do find it surprising that no one noticed this phenomenon before this.
Moving on to lighter subjects, here is a paper claiming that chickens were first domesticated in, of all places, Thailand. Their finding is based on a comprehensive analysis of many types of data from more than 600 sites in 89 countries. The earliest site known with unambiguous evidence is at the Ban Non Wat site in central Thailand, dated to between 1650 to 1250 BCE. They further suggest that the spread of rice and millet cultivated helped attract red junglefowl to live alongside humans.
Also in agriculture, here’s a somewhat belated announcement that humanity has actually passed peak agricultural land, that is the amount of land that has been cleared for human agricultural activities. There is a lot of variance in the data but everyone seems to agree on this conclusion. Yet at the same time, our food production continues to increase, meaning that we’re improving yields and working the land more intensively as our knowledge and technology improves. This is good news of course but the caveat is that this conclusion applies on a global scale so in many countries around the world, land is still being cleared for agricultural use, destroying local ecosystems.
Finally I don’t post a lot economics papers, but this one is important enough that it should be more widely known about. Efficient markets mean that anomalies in the pricing of risk versus reward should eventually be arbitrated away. However one anomaly has persisted for a while now and no one understands why. This refers to the phenomenon when certain risky assets held overnight when markets are closed seems to yield a higher return compared to holding them over the course of the trading day. Market participants, except perhaps retail investors, are aware of the effect and exploit it, so the question is why does it still exist? The very existence of this effect represents a substantial challenge to the efficient market hypothesis that economists must address.
If the strange poster which is also the film’s opening shot isn’t enough to clue you in, this is one very odd film, more like an art installation than any kind of narrative film. Apparently director Roy Andersson has made a whole career out of similar projects but this is my first experience of his work. It consists of long series of vignettes shot with a mostly motionless camera, most of which aren’t unconnected to anything else. It reminds me of Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames in that regard but the intent and the effect is completely different.
I don’t believe I’ve ever watched a full episode of one of Anthony Bourdain’s shows but there’s no denying that he is a household name. Even so I wouldn’t have watched this documentary if it weren’t for its sky-high ratings. The first half of this film is largely uninteresting, being about his rise to fame and success and meanders about without coming to a point. But the second half takes a darker turn into Bourdain’s problems with addiction and his depressive personality. As it ends as we all know with his suicide, it is undeniably much more engrossing even if it feels wrong to look so deeply into the private details of the man’s personal life.
Mikio Naruse is a contemporary of Ozu and indeed you can recognize many of the same actors and actresses the more famous director uses in this film. Yet while this is visually very similar to Ozu’s work and it is also a drama about ordinary people in what was then modern Japan, the tone of the film could not be more different. Unlike Ozu’s films which are always pleasant no matter the ignoble motives of some characters, Late Chrysanthemums does not shy away from confronting head-on the ugliness of people and the decrepit conditions under which they sometimes live. This film perhaps lacks the finely-tuned sense of drama of Ozu’s masterpieces but it feels to me like a more realistic portrayal of ordinary life in that era.
It’s been months since I first posted about this game but I’ve since decided to keep this permanently installed on my PC so that I can periodically return to it. It’s the only game that gets such treatment on my PC. I fear that my driving skills will deteriorate too much between games if I don’t keep practicing and I do want to get good at rally games in particular. Even though I’m only playing this once in a while, it still takes up some of my gaming time and reduces my ability to try new stuff and write about them here.
I do so love the black humor in British crime films and this underappreciated gem is a fine example of it. Made by Stephen Frears, another director whose work I should definitely pay more attention to, this was the feature film debut of Tim Roth and also stars British film greats John Hurt and Terence Stamp. In addition to the always funny capers the characters get to up in it, I was surprised by the seriousness with which the film treats the prospect of imminent death as well as the respect it pays to its female lead, who usually in such films is very quickly killed and forgotten about.
