This is another game that has been sitting unplayed in my library for way too long even though I was quite enthusiastic about it when it was first released. It’s just a matter of it being known for being a very difficult game that would require considerable investment and too many titles competing for my time. The difficult part is certainly right. A couple of days after starting to play, my band of mercenaries was wiped out to the last man. I had to experiment with a few more restarts at lowered difficulty levels in order to understand how it works before committing to it for real at normal difficulty.
This live action adaptation of the anime by the Wachowski brothers was very poorly received, which is why I never watched it. Since one of the brothers has been in the news again recently, some discussion went on to cover their previous work and I read that while this isn’t a good film, it may at least be a visually unique one. Having now watched it, I certainly agree that it has a bold artistic vision but that’s not enough to make this bloated and nonsensical monstrosity worth watching.
This was the last film made by Yasujirō Ozu as he died about a year after its release. All of the director’s usual themes are present but with an expanded cast of characters, the focus feels a little diffuse. I do like it a lot though as there are all of the little stories for the characters and it makes for a more comprehensive picture of Japanese social mores. Setsuko Hara doesn’t appear in this one so this is more strongly a film about Chishū Ryū’s character and his relationships.
Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine dominates the news and deservedly so. It will also have major repercussions on the scientific world as cooperation with Russia in many fields has stopped, leading to a lot of research work being lost including projects in Ukraine and on the International Space Station. But scientific work in other countries goes on.
The scariest and most widely shared bit of news this month is surely the announcement of how easily AI technologies used to generate promising molecule candidates can be turned towards making biochemical weapons. Normally the machine learning software searches for molecule candidates that score well on whatever bioactivity they are targeting while minimizing toxicity. It was a simple matter then to invert the parameters to search for molecules with high predicted toxicity and very quickly the model came up with the already known nerve agent VX as well new molecules that aren’t known to exist yet but are predicted to be even more toxic. Of course all this is in simulation so it may not even be possible to synthesize these molecules and the researchers aren’t releasing their data to the public, but this was done using open-source software and publicly available datasets of toxicity and so should be easy to replicate.
One of my favorite science stories this month is the invention of a device to detect Parkinson’s disease early. What is fascinating is how this came to be. A retired nurse in Scotland claimed to be able to smell a distinctive odor emitted by people with the disease, beginning when her own husband developed it. This ability was confirmed when she met more patients with the disease in the support groups her husband went to. A team of researchers then built a device to detect the same organic compounds that this woman could smell in the natural oils produced by the skin of patients and found that it worked. However the woman’s nose still has significantly highly accuracy.
Next we cast our eyes to far larger objects and events in this article discussing how two supermassive black holes will collide about 10,000 years from now. They are some 9 billion years away from us of course so even if the collision is expected to cause warps in the fabric of space and time, we only detect them as ripples and the real story here is the process by which astronomers figured out what is going on.
Finally here’s an older paper published in a journal about religious studies which I usually avoid but this one is interesting enough to be worth noting. The subject is Turkey and the decades long effort to Islamize the country. They found that such metrics as mosque attendance, trust in clergy and so forth have actually declined, probably because by associating the state so closely with the religion, the failures of the state also become the failures of religion. I believe that this is an important finding in examining repressive states which attempt to use religion to legitimize their rule.
This was a recommendation from our cinephile friend who probably likes dark movies a little more than is healthy. It does have a decently high Rotten Tomatoes rating and it starts with some promise as it seems to have been made with decent production values. But ultimately I did not like it at all, finding it a shallow film that is interested in little more than stringing together a succession of scary images and makes no effort whatsoever to impart any deeper context or meaning.
Everything about this film, its title, the poster with John Travolta’s iconic pose and of course the Bee Gees songs, have long been subsumed into popular culture. But I’ve never watched it before now and I wonder how many people really have. It would be so easy to dismiss this as a standard dance movie about the protagonists trying to win a dance competition but it is so much more than that. In parallel with the disco dancing which is of course wonderful to watch, this is a fairly serious drama about a young man learning to grow out the milieu he has grown up in and I loved how both tracks complement each other so perfectly.
This film was such a major cultural phenomenon in China that it would be remiss not to watch it. It was adapted from a popular novel but it would be fair to say that it in turn was inspired by real suicides among high students. It was directed by Derek Tsang who most people will know of as being the son of Eric Tsang but this is a China film through and through. Although it is well made and the young actors deliver excellent performances, it is ultimately a sentimental and shallow romance that panders to the sensitivities of the Chinese government and does a disservice to the issue of bullying in school.
