This movie is considered to be a classic of cinematography. All B&W with true unvarnished views of New York City from the late 1940s. I did appreciate some of the views and shots in the movie, but the crime story here was….odd. A model gets murdered and it turns out, like in real life, that those who seem to not be involved really are and nothing in the story is neat and tidy. There are twists and turns, but some of the characters and vignettes that showed up in the film were very dated for a typical movie audience in the late 40s. Some characters were a little too nice, or a little too stereotypical. Then there is the omniscient narrator, throwing commentary out about the characters and the city as the story progresses. I did find it interesting that the narrator was strictly neutral – sometimes mocking the police for not getting anywhere, but other times routing them on. Same with the murderer – pointing out how much he’s in deep now, and then rapidly telling him not to go and do something that will just make it worse.
So in the end this is one of those movies that I can say “Yep, I’ve seen this classic” but I still have mixed feelings about my enjoyment of it. I did not hate it, but I didn’t exactly feel fully enriched by having watched it either.
For those of you who like Malt Bombs – this Scotch style ale is for you.
A dark copper color, with some sweet fruit smells and toffee/caramel malts in the flavor. I will say that I was expecting something high in malts (which I got) with a more bitter finish, which you think at 50 IBUs you would get. Nope. My experience with the Dirty Bastard was that I think he’s more of a Polite Scotsman. Still – invite him in and give him a try. At 8.5% ABV you’ll get nicely warmed up the fellow and have a cheerful evening of sipping and enjoying this fine fermented beverage.
Want a walk through some of the most interesting scientific papers published by the Royal Society since 1650? Well, here you go.
For someone who publishes scientific articles, books, and proceedings, seeing these old old articles in their original form is truly awesome. To think that this was how some of our oldest discoveries were originally discovered and communicated and to try and intepret it yourself reminds you how unknown things used to be. First reported instance of smallpox vaccination, the basics of optics, the invention of the battery, a tool for accurately measuring angles, the foundations of photography, the basics of thermodynamics (by Mr. Joule himself!), and many many more. It’s really something to see how these articles were written. Nowadays, if you wrote a fundamental article like you were having a conversation with the reader, the reviewers would throw out your paper. Back then you really were defending your work to a review of your true peers.
I think all of the papers up to the 1950+ era are worth taking a look at. Beyond this date I think it starts to get a little bit subjective if these articles really are trailblazing. I don’t think we can really say what the trailblazing articles are of the late 20th and early 21st century are until we have more time to really go back and digest what those discoveries really led to. Still, an freakin’ awesome walk through scientific history and well worth your time to look everything over if you have the time.
WWII was a period of massive change and upheaval, and very often I find a movie that covers this era that fits into the “too amazing to be true but yet it is” category. Interestingly they always seem to be about the Jewish experience in WWII. Europa Europa was the first, Schindler’s List was another, and now I can add Defiance to that list.
Defiance (if you haven’t seen it) is the story of a small group of Jewish brothers who escape their town being attacked by the Nazis and take to the country to live off the land in Belarus. Eventually they come upon other escaped Jews and as more and more show up, they form a small band and later a community out in the forest. They act as partisans but also try to live with dignity and not be like the Nazis they’re fighting against. However, in war nothing goes well and indeed this happens to the group. They’re constantly hounded by the Nazis and leave their first encampment in late fall and have to try and quickly build another one before winter sets in. They manage this, survive the winter, but then get hunted by the Nazis again in the spring and then run through the swamps to try and escape. They accomplish this only to run right into a Nazi infantry platoon supported by a Tank. And due to good fighting they survive, again. They all make it through the war and build an even larger community and the main characters who enabled all these Jews to escape and live a life of freedom in the forest leave for the US and start a new life, never making a big deal out of what they’ve done. I would think that if the book which chronicled these events was never published then no one would know this story at all. All in all – a triumph of humanity and desire to survive in spite of war and all the odds against them.
I found this to be not your typical war movie. It’s not overly preachy, nor overly violent, nor a special effects/gung-ho action pic. I found it interesting for the Nazis simply being shown simply as a menace. You never really see them much except in occasional fights and certainly the movie never shows their point of view at all – so no Nazi nemesis playing an intricate game of cat and mouse against the lead characters, no general scheming for their demise, nothing – you know they’re the force of evil but they are mostly relegated to a force of influence in the film, not a constant menace. The occasional vignettes in the film are notable as well. For some reason I keep remembering one of the main characters (a woman) is out foraging in the winter and is sneaking back to camp and is set upon by a wolf. The wolf wants her food and attacks, and luckily with a pistol she wins. Rather than just dusting herself off and getting back to camp shaken from the attack she picks herself up, picks up the food, and picks up the dead dog too. Everyone is starving and meat is in short supply. It’s a notable story – it shows what happens when people are forced from their homes and choose to live rather than curl up and die. Bad things happen but you’re not left depressed at the end of the film. So I’m glad I saw it and I wonder what other untold stories are out there from this era that have yet to be told.
Every now and then I come across something that is so elegant in its science that I call it “High Science”. Something that is so cutting edge and advanced, and so well designed you have no choice but to look at it and be amazed. This most recent advance is a vaccine delivery system for cancer.
For starters, the whole system uses immunotherapy to teach the body to fight off the cancer cells. No selective poisons of chemotherapy, no highly targeted radiation, but teaching the body to do the work. Secondly, the system is implanted in a way that mimics a lymph node – again using the best aspect of the body to fight off problems. It does this in a really neat way. Since cancer cells really are part of your body (they’re just cells set to divide and grow at faster rates than the rest of your body) this system teaches the immune system to find these things and destroy them while at the same time not telling the rest of your body to shut off it’s typical immune response, which would be to make even the cancer cells “invisible” to the immune system. Finally, the entire system is constructed in a way that is really well engineered. The immune cells of the body can easily get to this implant and over time the implant dissolves away – the implant not leading to a foreign body syndrome which in turn initiates a cancer cell building process in the future as the body tries to encapsulate the foreign body as a cyst.
Outstanding science here – I can only hope they move to human trials soon, and with such high science practiced here I would be surprised if it didn’t just move to human trials soon, but also work well. Of course the trick will be getting this implant to release the right type of cytokines that the human immune system will recognize, but still, the concept and results are a beautiful thing to behold.
I watched a documentary last night which was brief history of Estonia from 1939 to 1992, covering how the culture held together under invasion from the USSR, the Nazis, and again by the USSR. What was particularly striking about this little Baltic nation was that despite extensive damage from WWII and deep cultural suppression by the USSR, the collective aspect of Estonian culture, and their need to sing as a group, survived. Indeed, as the title of the movie suggests, it was that group singing that brought the nation together on more than one occasion, no matter what the Soviets tried to do.
The most interesting aspects of the movie for me were the later years, especially the Glasnost and Perestroika era under Gorbachev. As the Estonians put it mildly as they were interviewed in the film, this was Gorbachev’s big mistake, giving aspects of free speech in the Soviet system to question things and demand better. And the Estonians did. They began questioning things, and got away with it – things that if they had done it in the past they would have been brutally crushed. Just about all of the leaders of the movement had been in prison before under the Soviet system, so one wonders if the threat of jail held nothing over them, but regardless of such potential threats they still spoke out. On top of that – the Estonian citizens ate up the message being put out by the small organized resistance questioning things, and came out in droves for meetings that the resistance movement organizers thought would be barely attended. This is even more of a special thing in that 40% of Estonia’s population had been forcibly relocated over the years and replaced with ethnic Russians, and that slight majority turned out in droves for these events. And then the singing – as the events attracted more and more people, the old national anthem got sang – even though it had been banned since the late 40s, and everyone still knew it in the crowd. That collective mass singing culture of the Estonians unified them to push for more and more. The final moments of the film chronicle the fall of the Soviet Union, from attempts in the Baltic states to break away from the USSR, to the military interventions and crackdowns in Latvia and Lithuania, and how the troops were dealt with in Estonia. As Soviet troops were coming back into Estonia in droves it took a lot of courage in those 12 hours for the self-identified Estonian assembly to declare itself a free nation even as hard-liners arrested Gorbachev and some fighting was occurring in Moscow. Most of you know how all this turned out – the USSR collapsed and every state in the USSR declared itself a free nation, but you could argue that Estonia certainly catalyzed or helped push over the edge a lot of what occurred.
A good documentary – and interesting for me in how a collective culture held together despite Soviet occupation and how something as nonviolent as singing helped reunify a country and give it its courage to peacefully throw off Soviet rule. Certainly if Gorbachev hand’t been willing to be lenient I think none of this would have gotten as far as it did, but still, it’s rather interesting to see a mass resistance movement come together like this.
So this event begs the question – why was this done? Should one be paranoid and assume that the hackers were paid by those against the aims of the institute to reveal choice data bolstering their cause, or is it possible that someone just wanted the information to be free and let everyone make up their own mind?
Which comes back to my comments previously on doubt and climate change. If you can supposedly get the goods on scientists candidly talking amongst themselves and you show a potential bias, you can cast doubt on their ability to be objective. So if you’re paranoid one wonders if this is a politically motivated hacking job since we know that there are plenty of hackers for hire. Or maybe it really is an idealist behind this who truly wants the information to be free.
Which is it? I have no idea, but I can say that if this case goes further and enough doubt is sown then this tactic will be used again to deliberately stymie any and all research in an area that someone objects to. Stem Cell research, nuclear/fusion power, alternative energy, vaccine research, new chemicals, animal research, and just about any topic one can think of that has some potential of controversy behind it. It will be interesting to see if this event occurs again and with what regularity it occurs.
