Brazil showed us a couple of weeks ago how you can have the highest-grossing film of the year also be a respectable and artistically interesting film and now India does the same with PK. Not only is it the most commercially successful Indian film ever made, both domestically and in international markets, it also happens to be a courageous film that pokes fun at religion in an inventive and intelligent manner.
This marks the third film we’ve watched by Luis Buñuel, all within a year. This is because I’d asked for recommendations of South American films from a Broken Forum poster and he must really like Buñuel. We’re still slowly working through the list. To be honest, I was hoping that this would be one of his more surreal films like The Exterminating Angel, but it turned out to be a more direct social commentary film like Los Olvidados, albeit in the completely opposite direction.
I wasn’t a big fan of Cities in Motion, so I prety much just ignored its sequel. But this fully-fledged city building game from the same developers was so well received that I always knew I would have to play it. As it turned out, I liked it so much that about a dozen hours in I went and bought its DLC even though most of its changes have already been patched into the main game just to reward the development team.
This is a fairly prominent documentary that my wife asked to add to our usual list and it’s no wonder why it made waves. The subject matter is so intriguing and so humanistic that it lends itself naturally to film. It’s also worth noting that nearly every documentary I’ve covered so far in this blog involves significant ethical questions and this one is no different. In fact, given that the producer and primary driver of this project, John Maloof, is the person who is mainly responsible for popularizing this artist after her death, the ethical issues here may be more thorny than usual and makes for a fascinating study in its own right.
Despite what it must sometimes look like, I don’t pick films to watch based on whether or not they’re from a country I haven’t covered yet. This one popped up on the best films of 2014 lists of multiple critics and yes, not only is it the first Ukrainian film I’ve ever watched and it’s also the first film I’ve watched that is entirely in sign language. This means that there isn’t one single line of spoken dialogue, plus as a deliberate decision by the film makers there are no subtitles or translations of any kind as well.
Just a small scattering of science related news for the last month of 2015, and most of them are medical:
I’ve probably written more about CRISPR-Cas9 more than any other science subject over the past year. It’s just that promising, scarily so even, but the major problem encountered so far is that it doesn’t seem to be very precise. This article talks about how a team modified it by changing just three of the around 1,400 amino acids that makes up the enzyme. This tiny change apparently reduced “off-target” edits to genome sequences to undetectable levels. I find this hard to believe but if true, this would probably kick off an explosion in the usage of this gene-editing method.
Next up is this announcement of a discovery that may spell an end to pain for humans. Through a combination of blocking the sodium ion channel that helps generate electrical signals that travel through pain-related nerve cells and a very low dose of an opioid drug, a team of researchers managed to eliminate pain in mice. Interestingly, in human subjects they’ve managed to do the reverse: make people who have never before experienced pain due to a genetic mutation feel the unpleasant sensation. This may seem like insignificant news for some people but having seen terminal illness in a couple of my relatives, perfect pain management is a huge deal to me.
Still on the subject of medical science, this cool new paper quantifies how important it is to follow your doctor’s advice exactly. Most people are probably rather lax about adhering to their doctor’s instructions about the dosage of medicines. The paper found that less than half of patients consumed the prescribed amount of medicines but those that did so lived 2.5 years longer than those who took less than 70% of the prescribed amount and 3.2 years longer than those took more than 130% of the prescribed amount. Yes, it means that overdosing is more dangerous than under-dosing.
The Flynn Effect is the well known phenomenon in which the average intelligence of humans seems to be increasing over time but the causes for it are a matter of some dispute. This blog post highlights new research that correlates the effect with the size of humans similarly increasingly over time. There’s some discussion that better nutrition resulted in larger brain masses and hence improved intelligence.
Finally just for your reading pleasure, here’s a very long article about the real reasons for the failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940. Ever since then its collapse has been the go-to example of the catastrophic effects of forced resonance and popularized the idea that any object can be destroyed if it is induced to resonate at its natural frequency. This article seeks to debunk that explanation once and for all and advances a much simpler reason: that the wind hitting the side of the bridge caused it to sway. It goes into plenty of detail about the design of the bridge and why so many people latched onto resonance as the explanation.
I got this as a recommendation from a number of different places and one of them was the videogame Max Payne 3. The game included a level that was set in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and Rockstar cited this film as one of the references they used. The film itself was a massive success in its native Brazil, both commercially and critically, and its sequel is the single highest grossing film in the country. Not bad as the feature film debut for its director José Padilha.
