Not a bad mix of articles this month though a key one is here more as a cautionary tale.
Said big news is of course the claim that a fly has been uploaded, fueling frenzied speculation that the singularity is nigh as demonstrated in a video released by the team behind the project. Detractors disagree with that assessment. The team behind the video used the FlyWire connectome, which mapped every one of the fruit fly’s neurons and synaptic connections with the assistance of AI. They then linked this to a relatively simple physics-based simulation of a fly body to create a video depicting realistic fly behaviors that include grooming, feeding, flying and so on. However these are canned behaviors of the body model and the connectome is only used to select the behavior without actually simulating all of the coordinated movements. The connectome itself is a remarkable achievement but this should not yet be considered a full upload.
Another fascinating news item that went viral is that a tech entrepreneur seemingly created a customized cancer vaccine for his dog with the help of ChatGPT. The dog was diagnosed with aggressive mast cell cancer that kept returning even after chemotherapy and surgery. The owner paid to have a lab sequence the DNA from the dog’s tumor and used ChatGPT to sift through the results to find a sequence that would make for a good neoantigen, a protein sequence that identifies the cancer and helps make it visible to the immune system. He then enlisted researchers who designed an mRNA construct that instruct the body to manufacture these spike proteins, in effect making it a vaccine. The dog’s tumors did shrink after being treated but it is difficult to attribute the success to the vaccine, given that this is a sample of one. The amazing thing about this story is that one person was to mobilize the scientific and medical apparatus to achieve this for his dog and for not very much money at all.
Also in medical news is a result that is perhaps obvious and still important to take note of for anyone who cares about maximizing their lifespan. It’s a study meant to find associations between infection history and frailty. To no one’s surprise, it found that a history of any infection at all is linked to frailty, increasing the risk of death. This means that any infections even after they have been treated and the patient has recovered, could be said to cause lasting damage to the body that affects your overall longevity.
The next paper similarly has implications about longevity. It claims to find an association between caffeine intake and lowered risk of dementia. It even differentiates between caffeinated coffee, decaffeinated coffee and tea to determine that it is the caffeine content that matters. What’s especially impressive is the size and period of time covered by the study, over 131,000 individuals followed up over the course of 43 years, which will certainly ensure that this particular paper will establish an important baseline for years to come.
Coming from the same creative team behind Talk to Me, this one bears many of the same hallmarks and lacks the unique imagery that defined the earlier film. Yet it fixes one of the most glaring flaws I complained about by developing the characters enough that I actually care about them and so I would consider it the better film. I am somewhat disgusted that much of the horror is achieved by victimizing children who have little ability to fight back or even understand what is going on. But I can’t deny how viscerally effective the technique is.
I wasn’t intending on watching this documentary but clips for it are going viral and my wife seemed vaguely interested. I’m familiar with neither Louis Theroux’s work nor any of the male influencers featured here. Still Theroux seems like a skilled interviewer and the influencers are obviously huge celebrities in their own niche. That means this does have value after all even if I’m familiar with most of the talking points. The most fun parts are certainly when Theroux speaks with the women in the lives of these men but the scariest part is when it suggests that political power is the logical next step of the movement.
This was a free game, on Steam this time, and I’d never even heard of it before I saw the offer. It seems one reason why this was given away and then subsequently taken off the store is that the publisher lost the right to the IP. Unfortunately the offer was only for the base game and now you can’t even buy the many DLCs even if you wanted to. After playing this for a while, I very much wanted to because the prospect of having the extra ship types to experiment with is very enticing. The strategic layer is lacking and feels inconsequential. But the tactical layer is very strong and one of the best implementations of fleet-based starship combat I’ve seen.
I haven’t seen enough of Mike Leigh’s work and after taking the time to watch this one, I continue to be wowed by his ability to depict the lives of the British working class. This is ostensibly a film about abortion, one so realistic that it feels like it should be based on a real person. But it’s also about the lives of the working class, their concerns and their problems and how they’re forced to solve them in their own way because the laws as written were made by and for the rich.
This film was made by Zhang Lü, a Chinese director of Korean ethnicity. Its title refers to the White Pagoda that is a landmark in Beijing, said to be shadowless as due to a combination of its white color and sheer size, its shadow is difficult to perceive. It’s definitely one of those arthouse films with depths that are difficult to perceive as said tower’s shadow. In this case, it’s both subtler than I’d prefer and even when I can work out what it’s trying to say, the stakes seem too small to support the weight of its presentation.
The name Peter F. Hamilton was not familiar to me and I thought I knew all of the big name science-fiction writers. While popular and commercially successful, this trilogy is closer to being space opera and so never won any major awards which could be why I never noticed it. The books are also notable for being huge doorstoppers. That kind of length isn’t that unusual for the current era of web series but present real logistical issues when printed on paper. The cast of characters is extensive and Hamilton takes his time to describe his setting so the plot doesn’t really get going until a few hundred pages in. For a long while, I enjoyed the action adventure story well enough but couldn’t see much point in it. Then the action got started and I must admit that I got hooked.
