‘Wanderers’ – by Erik Wernquist

 

While all the hype about Interstellar and that-film-where-Matthew-McConaughey-is-soaked-into-black-hole thing is dwindling, Swedish artist Erik Wernquist is now making his own space epic, supported by photographs taken by NASA spacecraft traveling across the solar system, ranging from Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, to their revolving moons. Utilizing the images and his own realist concept, supported by scientific theories, Wernquist devised spaceships, human explorers, colonies, as well as human settlement in asteroids, something by which we could expect to observe by the end of this century.

Too poor it lasts for less than 4 minutes. Still, it’s a wholly breathtaking 4-minute moment you will regret not seeing ‘Wanderers’. If it were to last three hours, it could have been ‘Interstellar 2’, or any title else.

Christopher Nolan, you’ve got a rival I should say!

 

Don’t forget to visit Wernquist’s gallery and take a look at all the pictures taken by NASA spacecraft (together with his lengthy, detailed explanation for each).

La Detente – a short animation

 

In a Baz Luhrmann typical story, the opening always commences with a happy-go-merry atmosphere. Couples in love, people around infatuated enough to give support, and life seems as though things were destined to be -needless to say – ‘happier and merrier’ each day. Then things start to not work out well. And it ends with either tragedy, or devastation.

Okay, Baz Luhrmann is an overstatement, or even an imprecise comparison, but looking at this award-winning short film by Pierre Ducos and Francois Bey, which has been well-prepared for over 4 years, and released on the centenary commemoration of World War I, this is surely going beyond the way of that Australian filmmaker, and of course, with more intensity.

It all starts with ‘imagine’. When the world is on its nadir, and desperation looms elsewhere, particularly amid a battlefield, a soldier, whoever he or she is, will eventually find his or her own inner child again. Imagine, a world where humans don’t need to fight a bloody, merciless war. Imagine, a world where only plastic toys go to war, and humans look at the amusement of this scene. Imagine, a world where plastic toys fight not with sharp objects, but with candies and lollipops. It all comes with ‘imagine’, and when reality penetrates like a shockwave, it’s ready to haunt you for a lifetime.

It’s both entertaining (well, plastic toy animation shooting lollipops and candies, isn’t that funny?), but also scary in the end (spoiler alert: some ‘graphic’ sceneries, intense music, and violence).

The changing face of international students in US

 

The number of international students admitted in the United States in 2014 is now on its record high. 886,000 – a significant 8% increase compared to last year – is already a burgeoning figure, and this trend continues to increase. What does this mean then? The world still puts its confidence in the superpower – not so much in its ability to lead the global geopolitical order anymore, but rather in its ability to deliver quality education and boundless opportunities to succeed (the American dream to some extent still works). Having nearly half a trillion US$ to spend every year in research, why waste this chance?

But what really strikes out is the structure of international students nowadays. As you can see from the picture above, nearly one-third of all these students originate simply from one country: China. Despite China’s rise as a major, global power, many of these people, exhausted by the country’s over-competitive curriculum system, now resort to overseas studies as an alternative for either their children or themselves to grow. US, in fact, turns out to be the most favored destination. And guess what? 50% of all international students in the country are based simply from three Asian countries: China, India, and South Korea (the third being a principal US ally).

Read the summarized report in Science Magazine to know more about this trend.

 

And download the infographic to learn more about the facts.

IIE – Open Doors 2014 -Infographic -InternationalStudents

Africans in Guangzhou – ‘Chocolate City’

 

Migration has been a continuous trait in human journeys across the world, one continent and beyond. Globalization, in fact, makes it even more intensive, and more complicating than ever; as many as 250 million people over the planet – that’s a quarter billion – are now living outside their home countries, and it is rapidly increasing higher than ever.

Global migration changes the demographic faces of countries, cities, and societies; they also transform how people perceive of social and cultural fabric within their neighborhood, forcing them to rethink about ‘durability’. As changes are always constant and imminent, people, like it or not, must be prepared for changes.

Guangzhou, one of China’s largest cities, is one example. Populated by over 10 million people, this city, once nearly homogenously Chinese, has seen a drastic influx of African migrants, all of whom are in search of better life. Between 20,000 and 200,000 Africans, scattered across dozens of countries over the continent, are now calling this metropolis ‘their second home’. They don’t simply set up businesses, earn money, and leave it; they are meant to inhabit it. Some marry local women, and now, a whole new generation of ‘Afro-Chinese’ children are now growing up in Guangzhou. It’s something no one had imagined three decades earlier, when everyone was busy about market reforms.

 

View the whole slides in Al Jazeera to understand better about this brand-new community.

JT Singh gets the Internet ‘shanghaied’

 

A few months ago, JT Singh and Rob Whitworth shook the Internet with their lively city-branding portrayal of Pyongyang, a city otherwise known for its totalitarian, robot-like population as always perceived by media influence.

This time, Internet gets ‘Shanghaied’, as the word implies, from this China’s most populous metropolis. Once a city with empty skyline three decades ago, today, the number of skyscrapers has surpassed 4,000 – according to Whitworth, twice the number of those in New York City, the pioneer of ‘corporate cathedrals’. Even with 4,000, this is already a breathtaking fact. Welcome to the future.

Hmm, they should try Hong Kong next time. It even has 8,000 skyscrapers, no match for the world ranks.

Watch the short till the end to know the answer

 

Just some hints, so you know: it’s set in a some sort of advanced world, inhabited by millions of potato-like nose-less creatures stacked like salmon cans, and the world keeps expanding. Things seem to be fine, with daily, mundane activities going over and over, until one day, a bluish ‘meteor’ strikes their world, and things start going wrong. A ‘potato-like creature’, case zero, holding that bluish stuff which turns out to be slime-like, starts to disintegrate, and the germs it carry begin spreading beyond control to its entire populace. As more and more these blue slimes invade their world, a prospect of apocalypse becomes seemingly inevitable, and everything reaches its critical, boiling point in leaps and bounds.

But I won’t tell you what it actually is all about until you watch the end of this video (which is set in Channel 4).

Either Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay should learn more from this video, I suppose.

 

Enjoy!

Dear metal fans, this is Babymetal

 

 

Telling from their appearance, you may be forgiven to assume they are simply ‘another so-so, mainstream J-pop group’. I personally find it hard to identify their genre, precisely, but here’s what I can sum up. It’s still a J-pop girl band, definitely, but this time, with a rather electronic, catchy, and of course, metal touch, a touch that no longer involves screeching, screaming, intense headbanging (to a certain extent there still is), and ear-deafening tones. Boundaries between music genres are becoming increasingly blurred, and these girls are now here to shutter our previous stereotyping about what ‘metal’ actually is about. Welcome to 21st century, headbangers.

Bonus: an NPR article about the Japanese group which consists of three ‘baby-faced’ teenage girls singing metal lyrics in cute, puppy style.

 

One video you can listen below:

 

“Enter Pyongyang”, by JT Singh

 

When it comes to North Korea, our minds never cease associate this isolationist, hermit-state with mostly negative terms. Dictatorship, totalitarian rule, no free Internet, famine, underfed people, state-controlled daily life, and all these things, what have you, will make you feel as though the only thing North Koreans could survive, day by day, were mere inhaling and exhaling. We often think of a Stygian vision, a panopticon-like perspective about this mysterious country we actually haven’t known the bulk out of it.

All these things do still exist, sadly, even in 21st century. Life seems gloomy, and only slightly better in the capital, Pyongyang (whose best hospitals even rely on electric generators to avoid blackouts and suffer from chronic lack of medical devices).

But JT Singh, a professional brand marketer, offers a reversed glimpse of what life seems to be in the capital. Okay, we should forgive ourselves for overlooking the other 90% of North Korea’s population who lives beyond the metropolis (and they certainly fare much worse than their Pyongyang counterparts with famine and all kinds of undernourishment), but thanks to his hard work, his immense creativity, and his deep passion in recording the heartbeats of this city, Pyongyang is actually, despite all its current hardships, more colorful than we now perceive.

If Kim Jong Un were wise enough (and could think rationally like Deng Xiaoping), he should have asked Singh, well-known for his city-branding expertise in numerous major cities across the globe, to promote North Korea, endowed with rich natural resources (but still abysmal human rights record, one we should slightly compromise), as an investment destination. Get real about it.

Cocoa farmers give first try on chocolate

 

Cocoa industry is now one worth up to 100 billion US$ a year, and it is an economic lifeblood for countries in West Africa, say Ghana and Ivory Coast. This industry employs millions of farmers, middlemen, and on a later stage, hundred thousand workers in factories scattered across Western countries and in Asia. Nonetheless, this industry has been hampered by numerous allegations: countless child labors have been exploited, human rights abuses are oftentimes rampant, but, on top of it, and one irony we have barely imagined before, is of the farmers themselves having never tried the final-end product of the cocoa beans they produce: chocolate. The one we so highly prize in patisseries, bakeries, and cafes in major cities worldwide.

VPRO Metropolis, Dutch international news broadcaster, highlights a special report about the cocoa industry in Ivory Coast, and the journalists attempt to get these farmers’ reaction when they give a try to chocolate for the first time. First time, ever.

 

Source: NPR 

 

(Bonus from Metropolis: as Ivorian farmers have barely seen a chocolate for the first time, the reverse happens to Western consumers, especially the Dutch; they have never seen a cocoa fruit as well. Click on the link above to find out more)

“To deal with climate change… make people smaller”

 

Three American and British scientists (including one on the picture above, named Matthew Liao) have figured out one extreme, hypothetical solution to solve the decades-old climate change that has hampered the entire world, severely affected its currently fragile ecological balance: create a brand-new human race that is, physically speaking, small. Small in the sense that they will be smaller than us, the already small, tiny creatures now relying on machines of monstrous enormity in satisfying our consumerist needs and desires. But that is ‘infinitesimal’ compared to their ongoing ‘attempts’ to purify humanity’s moral values, their perception of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, and what’s more, the alteration of humankind’s view on philosophy.

Source: Improbable Research. You can read their proposed human-engineering research paper in Matthew Liao’s personal blog.

Excerpt (I’ll take one example of their envisioned solutions):

 

Making humans smaller

……. 

One way is through preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). While genetic modifications to control height are likely to be quite complex and beyond our current capacities, it nevertheless seems possible now to use PGD to select shorter children. This would not involve intervening to change the genetic material of embryos, or employing any clinical methods not currently used. It would simply involve rethinking the criteria for selecting which embryos to implant.

Another method of affecting height is to use hormone treatment either to affect somatotropin levels or to trigger the closing of the epiphyseal plate earlier than normal (this sometimes occurs accidentally through vitamin A overdoses (Rothenberg et al. 2007)).  Hormone treatments are used for growth reduction in excessively tall children (Bramswig et al. 1988; Grüters et al. 1989). Currently, somatostatin (an inhibitor of growth hormone) is being studied as a safer alternative (Hindmarsh et al. 1995).

Finally, a more speculative and controversial way of reducing adult height is to reduce birth weight. There is a correlation between birth weight and adult height (Sorensen et al. 1999), according to which birth weight at the lower edge of the normal distribution tends to result in the adult’s being ≈5 cm shorter. Birth height has an even stronger effect for adult height. If one is born at the lower edge of the normal distribution of height, this tends to produce ≈15 cm shorter adult height.  Gene imprinting has been found to affect birth size, as a result of evolutionary competition between paternally and maternally imprinted genes (Burt and Trivers 2006).  Drugs or nutrients that either reduce the expression of paternally imprinted genes, or increase the expression of maternally imprinted genes, could potentially regulate birth size.