I’ve always assumed that much of the western scientific tradition is a series of That’ll-Do measures made by imperfect humans in imperfect circumstances. This monograph showed me just how imperfect were both the circumstances (the English civil war) and the humans (naive, vain, incestuous, sometimes all at once). And just how much like the present times was the whole scientific endeavor: even back then, with so much yet to be discovered, most published papers were trivialities, most scientists (and “scientists”) cared for status more than truth, and most research (and “research”) was left unheard and unread.

It’s not a mystery then why we have such a hard time changing the ways of the ancients when those ways were built out of sheep’s blood and luminescent meat. But then I realized: we don’t get the science we need, we get one that we deserve, and we’ve been deserving the same kind of science for centuries now.

Written by Adrian Tinniswood, 2019

• Francis Collins is a physician scientist who after a particularly tough patient interaction went from being atheist to agnostic to evangelical Christian. He is also kind of my boss, and while I hope that fact is not influencing my opinion of his book, it probably is.
• The books has two audiences: scientists prejudiced against (organized) religion, and Christians prejudiced against science, evolution in particular.
• The message to the scientists is: read C.S. Lewis to find out more.
• The message to the faithful: don’t be narrow in your reading of the Bible, it’ll come back to bite you. And also read C.S. Lewis.
• The first few chapters read like Dr. Collins’ personal statement. Residency and fellowship applicants, take note.
• The scientific parts are accurate and an easy read for me and probably for the target audience as well.
• The parts on religion are vague, subjective, and rely too much on “trust me”.
• The part where he turns a story of a sexual assault against his daughter into a story about his faith deserves a cringe, a face-slap, and a letter of apology in future editions.

Written by Francis S. Collins, 2007

There are so many wasted opportunities in this movie that I hesitate to recommend it. Here is the raw material in more-or-less chronological order: an atheist theoretical physicist studying time, black holes, and the beginning of the universe falls in love with a devout wife, develops a catastrophic neurological condition, gets married and has children, becomes world-famous, gets a tracheotomy and can’t talk any more, gets a robotic voice, falls out of love, divorces, marries his nurse, denies suspicions of domestic abuse by the said nurse, divorces the nurse, reconciles with the first wife, never wins a Nobel prize and never will because it will take too much time for his theories to be proven correct.

With so many intertwined plot lines and obsession with time you would think this would be non-linear story, or better yet a series of reverse-chronological set pieces that covers the highlights in depth. What we get instead is a shallow, lukewarm love story carried entirely by the walking-to-debilitated transformation of Eddie Redmayne whose best actor Oscar is one of the better deserved. If you want to tell such a complex life story beginning-to-end, make it into a mini-series and put it up on Netflix.

Directed by James Marsh, 2014

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is a book with a brilliant idea, adequately presented. Collapse is also presented adequately, for an undergrad ecology course textbook. The ideas aren’t lacking, but are dull, undefined, hard to follow, and boil down to this: it is hard for a society to survive in a harsh, isolated environment, and some places tend to become harsh and isolated once humans start overexploiting resources, so better be careful. He presents several past societies that thus failed (Easter Island, Anasazi, the Greenland Norse, etc.), several that survived, and gives some not entirely plausible accounts of current societies which may be on the brink of collapse (Montana, China, Rwanda).

Diamond likes to enumerate: there is a Five-point Framework for Societies’ Collapse, but also Ten (?) Reasons Why The Vikings Failed, Seven Ways the Hard Mining Industry is Ruining the Environment, and Fifteen Things to Do in Iceland. I made-up those last three numbers, because I couldn’t remember the actual ones — he likes to enumerate, but doesn’t like lists, so it doesn’t make for a very good textbook either.

Written by Jared Diamond, 2011

• Yes, I know I’m late to this.
• Comedy and horror both work by playing with your expectations, so that a comedian made the best horror movie in decades is not a complete surprise.
• A surprise is how good of a director Jordan Peel is: you could easily take 95% of the dialogue, and 80% of the acting, and make a comedy out of this. That it is so suspenseful and creepy is all from direction.
• Speaking of creepy: Catherine Keener. Yikes.
• Of course there was still some comedy gold — the surgery scene in particular (yes, I know it wasn’t meant to be funny).
• Watch it at least twice. The second time, pay attention to Rose (i.e. Allison Williams, i.e. Marnie).
• The 2018 best movie Oscar went to The Shape of Water. I thought it was a bad choice after watching Phantom Thread, but now it’s a travesty: Get Out was clearly the most deserving that year.

Directed by Jordan Peele, 2017

A cheap (estimated budget $5,000,000) sci-fi movie that doesn’t look cheap. Its looks are a blessing and a curse: yes, the camera work is good and the actors are photogenic but what are supposed to be gritty run-down inner cities of the utopian/dystopian near-future look instead like HD-bloomed props of a glossy magazine photoshoot.

The story features drones, self-driving cars, moments of gender ambiguity, and — the title gives it away — upgraded humans. It is timely, but also kind of lazy; I would have preferred more time dedicated to the huge inequalities between the different flesh-and-blood humans rather than the more obvious AI versus humanity plot line.

But I like where the movies are going much better than TV: the barrier to entry for both the makers (again, $5 mil) and consumers (90 minutes on the couch) is low, potential payoffs high (Upgrade’s gross was double its budget, a pretty good return on investment), and with word-of-mouth traveling more quickly and easily than ever before the good ones are more likely if not guaranteed to get awareness. Upgrade is not as good as it gets, but it’s pretty good.

Directed by Leigh Whannell, 2018

“I’d like this book more if it weren’t so…”

“If it weren’t so what?”

“If it weren’t so repetitive!”

“You would have liked this book more if it weren’t so repetitive.”

“Yes, that’s what I said. Also the book is kind of meandering and takes it’s time getting to…”

“What book?”

I much preferred Slaughterhouse-Five. This one just wasn’t for me.

Written by Joseph Heller, 1961

Those things are God and religion, and Donal Knuth discussed them in a series of lectures at Harvard, the transcripts of which make this book. The lectures amount to a Director’s Comment edition of another one of his books, 3:16, so if you’ve read that one your yield is sure to be higher than mine: I hadn’t. In 3:16, he makes a thorough analysis of verse 3:16 from each book of the Bible. So yes, that makes “Things a computer scientist…” a book containing lectures about a book that deals with books of The Book.

Knuth is religious and also a brilliant computer scientist, and he brings a programmer’s mind to the Bible. Alas, I don’t have the mind of a programmer: the only parts of the book I could follow and enjoy were those dealing with typography, another one of Knuth’s interests. It did raise my interest enough to look for a religious physician’s take on Christianity, and what do you know: the boss of my boss’s boss wrote one. It’s on the pile now, but not before I scratch my typographic itch.

Written by Donald E. Knuth, 2003

I’m late to this, seeing as it’s already gotten a bunch of awards including one from the Academy, but wow. Everyone involved in making this should be proud of the work they’ve done. Having said that…:

• Some action scenes (looking at you, final boss battle) are too fast-paced with too much unnecessary stuff going on in the background, just because they could.
• PP’s death was… banal. Is this how he died in the comic book? Sheesh.
• Auntie May should got over his death quickly too.
• That’s not how a linear accelerator looks like or works (not on this Earth, at least).
• But take note: I saw this on the back of an airplane seat during a red-eye flight with a sleeping offspring ramming her head into my flank every few minutes, and I still thought it was amazing. Five stars, will see again.

Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, 2018

• H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” makes an early appearance, foreshadowing some Cthulhu-inspired creatures our hero will first fight and then command. Sadly, the (very!) big baddie in Dunwich is Yog-Sothoth, not Cthulhu, so this also foreshadows a movie that has some good ideas but doesn’t quite get them all right.
• One thing it did get right was a spectacular chase scene on the rooftops of Sicily that reminded me of the best moments of Assassin’s Creed and Uncharted. This is also one of the few places where the setting wasn’t obviously CGI (because it wasn’t).
• Seriously, if your budget is $160,000,000 you should either just film a real sunset or have an obviously fake one as a statement. It looked like most above-ground scenes were shot in the Uncanny Valley.
• William Defoe is a lifelong resident of the Uncanny Valley, no matter the movie.
• Nicole Kidman has a good fight scene. The fight scenes in general were easy to follow and nicely choreographed.
• Dolph Lundgren, huh? Good casting there, but I was hoping he’d have a nice fight as well
• Jason Momoa can’t pull off the dumb muscle look they were going for at the beginning and the smartass one-liners don’t help. So his character’s arc is in costume more than psyche: shirtless, street clothes, Aquaman.
• Speaking of which, that Aquaman costume came fresh off a corpse that had been simmering in the deep sea for millennia. But we already established that Aquaman had bad b.o. so that made it fine I guess?
• The underwater villain was entirely predictable and boring. The human baddie was delightful and I look forward to seeing more of him and his equally delightful new companion in the sequel.
• Nutshell review: Predictable but delightfully over-the-top.
Directed by James Wan, 2018