A slower news month and somewhat different in tone too as the articles are all on softer side of science.
The first one deals with the grim subject of suicide, now one of the leading causes of death for Americans in the 10 to 34 age range. This study highlights a novel approach to identifying who are most at risk of an imminent suicide attempt, thus warranting immediate intervention. The somewhat surprising finding is that the best indicator isn’t the severity of depression but the intensity of agitation. This comes statements such as the urgent need to alleviate pain or discomfort, o feeling like being in a burning room and wanting out, or wanting to shut the world out. These usually turn out to be temporary conditions and suicide is of course permanent. The hope is that equipped with these findings, clinicians will be able to better identify those most in need of immediate aid.
Next we have an interesting paper that attempts to quantify the addictiveness of the short-form video format that is increasingly successful at grabbing the limited attention of users. The author shows that users have a limited temptation horizon of some 11 minutes, which is short enough that traditional episodes aren’t appealing. The short-form clips that now make up the micro-drama format are only about a minute long each and so easily tempt users into watching them. Yet every time they start a new clip, that temptation is partially renewed, resulting in users spending far more time on them than originally intended.
Finally here is an article about a project to map the spatial distribution of coins of the Roman Republic. It takes advantage of the digitization of archaeological collections to bring together millions of records from excavations conducted in many different countries. The result covers some 4 million coins focusing on the period from 155 BCE to 2 CE. It reveals a map of Roman influence, showing that the monetary circulation closely follows the development of Roman infrastructure. It also shows that while the coins were disseminated at first in the wake of the Roman army, they later became the basis of the local economy, generating demand for more coins.
I like that even as Netflix is making adaptations of all kinds of intellectual property, some of questionable merit, that includes great novels as well. I haven’t read the novel by Orhan Pamuk though my wife has but both of us have fond memories of our trip to Turkey so watching this seemed like a good idea. The production is as usual sumptuous and I enjoyed visiting the Istanbul of the 1970s. I’m less of a fan of the obsessive love story and the character Kemal Basmaci seems like any other creepy older man preying on a younger girl. Yet as befits a great novel, the sheer intensity of his emotions is intoxicating and his externalizing of his love into mundane objects is a fascinating form of mania.
This is the first film I’ve watched by G. Aravindan who is a filmmaker of note in Malayalam cinema. The title refers to a town in India that is apparently famous for its temple. The imposing structure naturally makes an appearance and the film also features the region’s beauty. Unfortunately the imagery and even the sound are poor in quality, as if the film were much older than something made in the 1980s. Worst of all, I struggled to make sense of what the film wants to say despite the simple plot until I realized that it must be interpreted through a Hindu lens. I did not like that set of conclusions at all.
Playing this including its sole DLC took a whole lot more time than I expected. In particular I didn’t realize that there is quite a bit of unmarked or hidden content that pops up only after you’ve visited certain places or done certain actions. Nonetheless it’s done and it’s been a blast. Players love this DLC because it gives you new, more powerful toys. But I especially appreciate that it includes a number of intense, heavy combat scenarios that finally allow you to make use of the full suite of your abilities. The main story is decent even if it’s oddly isolated from the events of the main game. But the new area of Dogtown, small as it is, is amazing and I’d rate this as a must-have DLC.
The film is upfront about its premise, no surprises there. But I was caught off-guard when it pulled an Up right at the start to tug at our heartstrings. This is an old-fashioned romantic comedy and as such shamelessly falls back on many familiar tropes. But it uses them smartly in an updated context and averts those that have aged badly. It’s never going to win any awards but it’s wickedly funny, makes no missteps and sometimes this sort of back-to-basics approach is just what we need.
I’m getting to be quite a fan of ShÅhei Imamura with his predilection for covering the underside of societies. Here he highlights the plight of Japanese prostitutes who were tricked into coming to Southeast Asia in the early 20th century. What’s more, the primary subject is Kikuyo who arrived in Klang and so Imamura comes to interview her in Klang and other places in Malaysia in 1973. Not only does this reveal an almost certainly unknown part of history even to us, it’s a fascinating treasure trove of footage of life in Malaysia from that era.
I read Vernor Vinge’s two Zones of Thought novels so long ago that no record of them exists on this blog. They’re fantastically good space opera stories and the fresh ideas in them inspired many other works including the Mass Effect games. The Children of the Sky was a sequel that was published much later and was more of a miss than a hit. It made so little impact that I wasn’t even aware it existed for a long time. I added it to my reading list around the time that Vinge passed away because I wanted to know how the series actually ends. Unfortunately it really is as underwhelming as most make it out to be and doesn’t even feel complete as an ending.
