It’s been a while since I wrote one of these as I don’t travel all that much. South Korea is also a very common destination for Malaysians, so I won’t waste time talking about the itinerary and will restrict myself to personal observations.
Their tourism infrastructure is excellent, amazingly so. Since my wife organized the whole trip, this is more her talking point than mine but it’s hard not to notice how seriously they take the industry and how well run their promotions are. We found their tourism promotion office in KL to be extremely helpful, both in providing the usual set of useful and updated information and by offering free T-money chips to start off with.
Running very late this month as I was on holiday in South Korea, but I haven’t forgotten about this. In fact, I’ve collated more than the usual number of articles over the past month.
I usually start with the biggest piece of science news for the month. It’s a bit hard to judge that this time around but probably the news that the most people have seen is the announcement of the World Health Organization’s finding that red meat and processed meat is carcinogenic after all. The risks involved for processed meat is clearly much more significant but it’s still fairly low. I’d file this in the good to know but mostly just confirming what we all already suspected category. If you already have a balanced diet and a fairly healthy lifestyle, this doesn’t seem to call for any changes.
The next most significant news is what is supposedly the final nail in the coffin of the hidden variables explanation of quantum mechanical spooky action at a distance. This article covers what is described as the most comprehensive and loophole-free iteration of the famous Bell test experiments yet performed, proving once and for all that quantum entanglement effects are real and do violate locality. However so many enthusiasts have equated this with faster than light communications that I feel compelled to point out that this isn’t true at all and as the article states, the most we can look forward to in the way of practical uses is improved cryptography.
Continuing in the vein of important news, here’s this analysis that continuing climate change will eventually make some portions of the Earth uninhabitable to humans. The prediction is that extreme heat waves will make population centers like Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Doha among others impossible to live in by 2070 as temperatures rise so high that the human body is unable to get rid of excess heat through sweating. This isn’t exactly a surprising prediction, but it’s important to note this as just another reason why carbon emissions is a big deal and urgent action is required.
One common assumption about modern life is that humans sleep less than they did before the advent of electric lights and easily available entertainment. This article tests for that by examining the sleep patterns of pre-industrial groups of people who continue to live largely as hunter-gatherers. Surprisingly they were found to actually sleep slightly less than people who lived in modern societies, staying awake for an average of over three hours after nightfall. The biggest difference is that their sleeping patterns vary more across seasons compared to urban populations.
On lighter news, I’m amused by this announcement that a comet, named Lovejoy, has been found to be releasing large amounts of alcohol into space. It doesn’t do this constantly of course since its chemical activity ticks up only when its sufficiently heated by proximity to the Sun but at its peak it apparently releases the equivalent of 500 bottles of wine per second. More seriously, since alcohol counts as organic molecules, it adds to the evidence that the early development of life on planets may have been kickstarted by passing comets.
Finally the most exciting discovery is the strange variations in the brightness of a star, designated KIC 8462852, that’s about 1,500 light years away from our Sun. Small dips in a star’s brightness is normal and is indicative of a planet passing between the star and us but the changes in brightness for this star in particular is far too large to be explained by a planet in transit. The changes also don’t seem to be periodic. This means that a plausible explanation for this weird behavior is that an extraterrestrial civilization is messing with that star, perhaps by building some large structure. It’s still a pretty unlikely conclusion as the changes are probably due to some natural process that is still unknown to us, but it is a possibility that is very exciting to think about.
Shadow of Mordor is now considered to be one of the best games of 2014 but it was dismissed by many at first because it looked like a generic action game crapping all over the Lord of the Rings IP. I ignored it myself because it looked like a poor clone of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. But after reading reports that it’s closer to WB’s own Batman games, which I’m a big fan of, plus it adds a significant new innovation to the genre, I bought the GOTY edition.
This one was picked for three reasons: it stars both Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, it has the single most famous musical performance over the course of Monroe’s entire career, and it was directed by Howard Hawks, the man who can and will seemingly direct anything. It isn’t generally considered one of Monroe’s or Hawks’ best films though the characters played by Russell and Monroe are now icons in popular culture.
This animated film was made by the same production team behind The Secret of Kells, headed by director Tomm Moore. This shows both in its art style and the way that it showcases Irish folklore. As with the previous film, it’s traditionally animated, not CGI, which is always a novelty and once again it’s a story with children as protagonists.
As I noted earlier when writing about Los Olvidados, Luis Buñuel is remembered more for his surrealist works and this pick, The Exterminating Angel, is a fine example of that. The strangeness of the situation here doesn’t take long to show up either. The setting is a lavish dinner party in a huge mansion, one so luxuriously appointed that it looks impressive even today. Yet even before the dinner party starts getting underway, the servants beg permission to go off one by one, each for unrelated and trivial reasons until only the majordomo is left. We also see that there is inexplicably a herd of sheep and a small bear inside the house. What’s even stranger is that some scenes seem to be repeat themselves, at least to us as the audience but the characters in the film never seem to notice anything.
I pretty much only bought this game because I saw screenshots of it on a forum and was totally entranced. Later, I regretted this a bit when its Polish developers came out as being pro-GamerGate. This is a bit weird since it actually most resembles games like Gone Home and Dear Esther which gators love to deride as being not real games. But they don’t seem to have similar problems with The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Note that I played the original version and not the Redux version because I didn’t realize that it was available as a separate download for free.
