I never write about my travel trips anymore as I don’t go anywhere that millions of other people haven’t already been and I have no particular insights of my own to add to what everyone else has to say. Plus I don’t care about photography enough to take much effort with them so I don’t even have pretty pictures to show everyone. Still my recent trip to Lenggong, Perak right here in Malaysia was such an eye-opener that it merits making an exception. The phrase “underappreciated gem” is clichéd and overused but if ever a place deserves to be called that, this is surely it.
Any documentary that is three and a half hours long would be formidable to approach, let alone one that is about a library. Yet this is exactly that, a documentary about the New York Public Library, which is really a whole institutional system spread out across the entire city rather than a library in a single building. I do think this might a little longer than it needs to be and I can’t say I found every part of it that interesting. But it is an illuminating look at a system of much greater scale and breadth than I’d imagined by a director, Frederick Wiseman, who work I had not previously seen, and who seems to specialize in documenting the institutions of American society for posterity.
Films that are centered around other artistic endeavors are tough to judge when we have no basis on which to decide whether how good that art is. This is doubly true here in a film about a very specific form of north Indian classical music. Even if it’s hard for us who don’t even understand how this form of music is supposed to work, the reverence that the film holds for the art form shines through. Yet what elevates this film to greatness is that this is not blind reverence but a powerful memoir of one man’s journey and how he matures past the teachings of his beloved guru.
Despite my gripes, I did like the first game enough that I would eventually play this so now I have. There are so many things that are similar and so many that are different that it’s hard to decide where to start. I will note that like the first game this was quite a high-profile release but it’s still noticeably not an AAA-quality. It actually feels a little short for the epic scale that it is going for and there are all kinds of shortcuts in the writing and mechanics. Still it’s a solid party-based RPG and I suppose some compromises have to be accepted for it to even exist.
This film opens with the name of the production company and the title and nothing else, as if allowing the film to speak for itself. And speak it does. The director’s name and the acting credits only appear after the end of the film. The two leads apparently play some fictionalized version of themselves and the director Ramin Bahrani isn’t exactly a household name, but he was the scriptwriter for The White Tiger that we watched not long ago. As different as the settings of these two films are, both are about under the underclass of society and Chop Shop may well be one of the best films about the lives of illegal immigrants in the United States ever made.
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.
