September 4, 2024　　# Boswell and Asimov on Diary

September 13, 2024　　# Boswell and Asimov's Use of Diary

As a consequence of the two types of "philosophy" of diaries Boswell and Asimov held, respectively, Asimov, whose diary lacked "innermost feelings and emotions", never (at least to the best of my knowledge) in his writings used his diary more than a mere record of dates and names for the events in his life. Boswell, who lived no more than he could record, however, constantly drew content from his diary ‒ which he called Journals ‒ and mingled it into his writings. English critic John Wain once commented in his introduction to The Journals of James Boswell: 1762‒1795 that Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson "suddenly bursts into glorious vitality with the entry of Boswell himself into its pages in 1763", because this is the point "where the Journals effectively take over".

September 14, 2024　　# Film: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Watched film Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, partly because I enjoyed Jenna Ortega's performance in the Netflix series Wednesday, and she was costumed similarly enough in the preview of this film to renew my interest. Generally speaking, this is a nice and humorous Halloween-style film in which there was one scene I particularly liked and felt touched by: When Astrid (played by Jenna Ortega) and her mom met with her dad in the afterlife, and they sat and talked with genuine joy and smiles, regardless of the horrible look her dad retained, which reflected his death. It was a scene simple and natural, as if it was at an ordinary coffee shop, and yet it deeply demonstrated what a family is.

October 2, 2024　　# Penrose on Hawking and Nobel Prize

It was widely known, perhaps at least among my readers, that British mathematical physicist Roger Penrose was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity". Regarding that Nobel Prize, however, I always considered it a great pity that Stephen Hawking, who also contributed a lot in that field, had passed away and therefore didn't get a chance to share the prize. Recently, I noticed in a book Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work that Penrose had made the following comment: "I am often asked if I thought that, had he survived, Stephen could have shared the prize too. It is not clear to me that the Nobel committee would have made this decision because it appears to be a requirement that such theoretical work needs observational confirmation and this is the kind of thing that my colleagues who were co-awarded the prize actually recently achieved." I was a little surprised that this comment had completely missed the point. First of all, the question Penrose attempted to answer was a hypothetical one ("had he survived"), and should be understood as assuming the same observational confirmation that had made Penrose's own prize possible. Secondly, LIGO's detection of the merger of two black holes, which happened two years before Hawking passed away, was no less observational confirmation than what Penrose's colleagues, who were co-awarded the prize, had achieved, and therefore would have negated Penrose's argument even if the hypothetical part of the question was dismissed.

October 9, 2024　　# Training AI

Training AI... a humorous schematics which itself was perhaps generated by AI, in an era in which Nobel Prizes in both Physics and Chemistry were, for the first time in history, awarded to AI-related works. :-)

October 15, 2024　　# Film: Code 8: Part II

Finished film Code 8: Part II on Netflix. This is a sequel to Code 8, which I watched several years ago (also on Netflix). Both films feature a fictitious society in which a small percentage of people have superhuman powers, and those people are marginalized and eventually have to hide their powers and live underground lives. Both films are more or less about the struggles of those people against law enforcement. The story of Code 8: Part II itself is OK ‒ but merely OK, with nothing particularly impressive. The general social background of the story, however, is a little odd, since the "villain", a law enforcement officer, was brought to justice by a video showing his supposedly non-lethal robotic dog killing a person. This is very normal in a normal society, but a little odd in so oppressive a society as pictured in this film.

October 21, 2024　　# Science in Magical World

Watched film Hocus Pocus (in theater) by mistake ‒ because I so confidently confused it with Wicked (whose preview I watched a few weeks ago), that I didn't even bother checking the trailer before booking. While generally regrettable, it reminded me of one thing I would like to comment on. In this film, as well as in some other fantasy films that are set, by definition, in magical worlds, there are often characters who believe in science at the beginning, which makes not only those characters but science itself look dumb. Such plotting, though a humorous contribution to the stories, has a fundamental misunderstanding of science. Science is more a methodology of discovery than a static set of "laws". In a magical world, if there is anything that can be synthesized into a magic book, science would be the most probable way to discover it. The recipes in the magic book would be among the scientific "laws" in such a world, and a person who believes in science would be relatively knowledgeable rather than ignorant of the magical features of the world.

October 31, 2024　　# Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween! Although "a picture is worth a thousand words", I suppose a few words might be helpful, perhaps even necessary for some, in shedding light on those "thousand words" for the picture I'm sharing. Disguised under the ghost costume are "computer scientists" (to be understood in a broader sense) who, after conquering the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry, are knocking on the door of the Fields Medal ‒ an equivalent of the nonexistent Nobel Prize in Mathematics.

By the way, it is actually quite a surprise that the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry should fall into the hands of "computer scientists" before the Fields Medal does, since computation has a much closer theoretical relation to mathematics and made prominent contributions to the field much earlier, such as in the proof of the four-color theorem in 1976. "Computer scientists" might have won the Fields Medal back then if it were not for the age requirement (under 40) that the Fields Medal has.