Idiocracy is not a good film and I have a low opinion of the style of humor of Mike Judge. Nevertheless it is talked about so much online particularly in the post-Trump world that I feel obliged to watch it. I console myself with the thought that it is at least short and technically counts as science-fiction. The basic premise isn’t too bad and its giant matte paintings to depict a crapsack world is actually kind of impressive. Unfortunately the film itself is as dumb as its premise, is thoroughly unfunny and just too mean-spirited to be likable.
Kingdom of Heaven was critically panned upon release so I never got around to watching it even though I really liked the idea of a historical epic about the Crusades. Critical opinion then turned around with the much longer Director’s Cut that Ridley Scott claims is the version that should have been released in the first place. That is of course the version that I’ve finally just watched. All the old criticisms are still valid including the obvious weakness of Orlando Bloom as the lead, how it can’t quite decide where to opt for gritty realism or fantastical heroism and the historical inaccuracies. But damn if it isn’t a spectacular epic that dunks extra-hard on organized religion.
I first came across this deduction game when it was just a free game available online. When I learned that it would be made into a full purchasable game, I held off on finishing it to wait for the real thing. I’ve been hankering for more of the type of gameplay in Return of the Obra Dinn so this seemed like exactly what I wanted. So here we are and I’m glad I waited because in addition to improved production quality, this version also includes an expanded mystery to solve. I found the new mystery a tad too difficult and perhaps not completely fair but the game as a whole is still great in my books.
Made with a tiny budget and starring no one most audiences would recognize, Sorry, Baby is a truly independent film. It’s also remarkable that one person Eva Victor wrote, directed and starred in it. Only minutes in, I noticed the sharpness of its dialogue and how succinctly it establishes the relationship between two best friends. It uses wry humor to balance out the bleakness of the sexual assault that is at the heart of the film and demonstrates a deep understanding of what recovering from the trauma feels like. I have some quibbles about how it chooses words to use but there’s no denying it’s an outstanding directorial debut.
I’m always a sucker for weird films and an Iranian vampire movie certainly counts. This one is actually a bit of a cheat as while it’s in Persian, stars ethnically Iranian actors and is set in some weird comic book version of an Iranian town, it’s an American production. They changed the signage and added some props but you can still see that it was shot in the US. There are some cool vibes in here as who could have imagined the sight of female vampire in a full-body chador riding a skateboard. But for the most part this is not a very interesting film and commits the sin of dragging things out so long that it gets boring.
An Agnès Varda film bearing the title of Kung Fu Master is an oddity that I feel compelled to investigate. What’s more is that it stars Jane Birkin and the rest of the performers are relatives of Birkin and Varda herself. The title turns out to be a reference to an arcade video game and the film is full of other 1980s cultural references. But its core is an age-inappropriate relationship. Varda handles the taboo subject with her usual equanimity, never quite letting us know what she herself thinks. It’s a minor Varda film and perhaps not that good but it is fascinating in a very disturbing way.
Just because it’s Nobel Prize month doesn’t mean science stops. This month we will deviate a little more from the usual run of announcements in the life sciences to turn to more AI-related news.
However we’ll start with something more political. This paper revisits predictions that eliminating race-based admissions at US colleges would substantially reduce enrollment of Black students. It finds that two admissions cycles after the landmark Supreme Court ruling that forced colleges to change their policies, black enrollment has only declined modestly, nowhere near the fifty percent level previously forecast. It may be that colleges have not substantially altered their policies and found other ways to discriminate based on race without explicitly doing so. And yes, I included this because I find the subject of double-think on the subject of race in the US fascinating.
The next article is about AI and is also arguably political. It is now well established that public opinion in the US has turned strongly negative against AI to the point that it may be shifting politics. This survey however that in much of the rest of the world, AI optimism outweighs pessimism. It is notable that those living in wealthy Western countries tend to be the most worried about AI. By contrast, those in East Asia tend to have more positive attitudes.
One of the most AI positive countries is Singapore where they are willing to push the envelop on research in directions that feel like science-fiction. This article talks about a project at the National University of Singapore which is hosting the world’s first commercial data center deployment of server racks that incorporates actual brain cells. Each rack uses approximately 800,000 lab-grown human neurons, reprogrammed from adult donor skin or blood cells into induced pluripotent stem cells. The system fires sub-millisecond electrical pulses into the neuron culture that are able to respond, reorganize, and fire back. Being living cells, the neurons live only for about six months at which point they need to be replaced.
Finally here’s a more pleasant article about how dogs seemingly share some of our speech processing abilities. We take it for granted but the way speech works means that there is no actual gap in between words. It is our brains that add the gaps as we process the speech and the ability is called consonant bias. This ability was previously thought to be unique to humans but a team has demonstrated that dogs seem to be able to develop that ability to some extent by using EEG to study how their brains respond to speech with repeating patterns. Dogs are still not as good as humans at it as they are seemingly unable to track vowel patterns.
