China, movies, censorship, and The Act of Killing

From Priceonomics, Hollywood's New Chinese Censors:

Some of the changes made to placate China’s censors are the type of harmless edits only a bureaucrat could love, like tweaks to Kung Fu Panda to ensure that the image of China’s beloved panda was not slighted. Others are for graphic content. Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained had to remove some violent scenes and nudity. 

But other changes demanded or encouraged by censors are not as harmless. The pandering to China in Looper (portraying China as a strong superpower) and in Iron Man 3 (flying the protagonist to China to seek out a particularly skilled surgeon) fits nicely with China’s desire to strengthen its global image.

Chinese censors removed a line from the movie Life of Pi, “religion is darkness,” for fear of angering the devout. This suggests that former President Hu Jintao’s concept of a “harmonious society” and avoiding polemic issues motivates the censorship board. 

Censors also successfully demanded changes to the zombie flick World War Z. Originally, the movie cited China as the source of the zombie outbreak. Quartz writes that the script also called for characters to discuss how the Chinese government covered it up - a plotline that censors probably found far too reminiscent of accusations that the Chinese government covered up a SARS outbreak in 2003, as well as more recent viruses. The moviemakers changed the location of the outbreak to Russia.

Indonesia is not anywhere close to the size of China as a movie market, so the question of censorship when it comes to the recently released documentary The Act of Killing is still being answered.

Counting Errol Morris and Werner Herzog among its executive producers, The Act of Killing was the most fascinating movie I saw at TIFF last year. It's a documentary about former Indonesian death squad members who are still alive and thriving in modern Indonesia, but what sets it apart from other documentaries is its approach to driving at the truth.

Instead of simply interviewing the former death squad members about what happened, or sifting through archival footage or photos (I'm not certain if any such material exists), the director asked them to re-enact their atrocities as Hollywood-inspired movies.

Some have criticized the documentary for a dearth of hard historical facts and narrative. That's fair.

However, this documentary is less just hand-wringing over a historical atrocity than an examination of the interplay between narrative and memory. He could've asked these murderers what happened, but it's not clear that they'd be any more truthful than they were when asked to recreate those events. What's shocking is how much they actually embrace the exercise and cast their movies in the genres they love: gangster films, musicals, and westerns.

In one particularly unforgettable scene, the death squad member we spend the most time following, Anwar Congo, takes the film crew to a theater where he recalls swaggering out after an uplifting Elvis movie and then crossing the street to a building where they killed several people while still flush with the emotional high from the movie.

What Oppenheimer does with Congo and others is essentially lead them through a crude sense memory exercise. It's using method acting as a way of tunneling into the past and trying to bring about an emotional reckoning for these men. 

The most famous instance of this is a fictional one, of course. Hamlet has a theatre troupe act out what he suspects was the murder of his father in front of the suspected murderer, his uncle Claudius. In this case, Anwar Congo and others are themselves the actors, and they write their own narrative. Given those differences, does Oppenheimer "catch the conscience of the king"? It's worth seeing the documentary to judge for yourself.

Here Joshua Oppenheimer talks about how he avoided having The Act of Killing banned in Indonesia (video).  How people receive it in Indonesia is the most important response, and what little I've read so far suggests it is causing Indonesians to rethink their history.

The internet, as I've noted many times before, is greatest at increasing the accessibility and distribution of information. Given the importance of information in construction of narrative, it's not surprising that China would put up a Great Firewall, and the censorship of movies that come into its market from abroad is simply another type of information that must be filtered.

If you visit China, what's disturbing when you speak to many of the people there is that the censorship works. To the victors belong the illusion. 

The chemical composition of socioeconomic stratification

A new study in Environmental International looked at the association between income level and the presence of 179 toxicants. It found that the Poverty Income Ratio was associated with 18 chemicals—with different toxins found in both the poor and the rich.

Individuals with higher socioeconomic status had higher levels of mercury and arsenic. I would’ve expected higher levels of silver poisoning from the spoons they’re born with in their mouths, but apparently argyria isn’t much of a problem these days.

Those of lower socioeconomic status had higher levels of lead, cadmium and three types of phthalates—compounds commonly found in plastics.

The reasons for these disparate chemical levels point to disparate lifestyles and environments.

From here. Important data  should you ever have to resort to cannibalism. Just like wines, I guess humans taste of their terroir.

Polyphasic Sleep

Under the Quora question "What is something useful I can learn right now in 10 minutes that would be useful for the rest of my life?" Swami Nathan posted a sleep hack called Polyphasic Sleep:

You may know that sleep is divided into five stages. Polyphasic sleep concentrates on the fifth and most important stage of sleep, rapid eye movement (REM.) This is the most beneficial stage of sleep; it is when the brain is most active and is when dreaming occurs. REM is the only stage of sleep that is actually required to survive and function normally. The interesting part of all this is that you only spend 1 to 2 hours in this stage of sleep every night. The other 6 or so hours spent asleep every night are seemingly wasted.

Polyphasic sleep cycles basically cut out the other useless phases, giving you an additional 4 to 6 hours of time awake.

I enjoy my sleep, but perhaps I could get the same pleasure with less time. Here's one polyphasic sleep cycle pattern:

The Siesta

This sleep cycle is actually pretty common around the world in warmer countries such as Latin America, where the temperature is so hot during the middle of the day that people retire to take a short nap after lunch. It involves 6 hours of core sleep and one short 20-30 minute nap. You will find in these countries that most shops close during the early afternoon, as everyone is ‘busy’ taking their siestas!

I'm surprised I don't see any answers from Tim Ferriss in that Quora thread.

Hmmm, it's early afternoon here in San Francisco. I'm going to take a 20 minute siesta.

First generation HUD's

I was really tempted to splurge for pre-order pricing on the Recon Jet, this wearable HUD for cyclists. The idea of being able to see your speed, distance, heartrate, and so on while running or cycling without having to look away from the road is so enticing.

But I had previously purchased something similar, the Oakley Airwave snowboard goggles, and those were such a disappointment, that I'm going to wait until actual users have beta tested this product. The UI was awful, the setup was painful, and in the sun I couldn't see anything in the HUD while snowboarding down the mountain. All these HUD's that require you to focus on a tiny point to the bottom right of your visual field as the digital data comes through a tiny display wedged in at the bottom right of the right lens.

But when we imagine these futuristic displays we always picture data actually being overlayed on top of the glass that we're looking at or through. Some might argue that overlaying data on your glasses is dangerous, but I find shifting the focus of your eyes from the real world to a tiny point at the bottom right of your right eye while in motion (on a snowboard, on your bike) is much more dangerous. At least when you look through your glasses your peripheral vision can still come into play.

Well, a lot of people seem to have ordered the Recon Jet as it sold out of its pre-orders despite a high price so we'll likely have real-world reviews in the near future. I hope it's great, but I suspect it won't be.

Why do traffic circles work some places and not others?

One day as an undergraduate student in a law and economics class, I listened to my professor tell a simple story about traffic rules in a quaint European town. I’ve forgotten where it was—probably somewhere in Holland—but the gist was that the municipality had gotten rid of all stops signs and traffic lights in the town center, and after the change, travel times and accidents both fell.

Almost a decade later, there are numerous examples of small European towns that did away with signal lights and traffic signs and, voila, traffic began to flow better, transit times decreased, and roadways became less dangerous for pedestrians and vehicle passengers alike. The absence of conventional rules improved outcomes.

...

In Haiti, there is no meaningful enforcement of any set of traffic rules. Virtually all road space could be called “shared”—pedestrians, motorcycles, and four-wheel vehicles use the same space everywhere; only the largest intersections have traffic lights; there are no crosswalks and almost no stop signs. Instead of following a rulebook, drivers rely on local, informal norms.

Traffic in Port-au-Prince is horrifying. People do not yield to each other and spontaneously fall into an efficient order, as in England’s Poynton. In Haitian transit, people approach shared space as if they’re homesteaders on an Oklahoma land run. It’s every-man-for-himself, where every man is trying to grab every centimeter of available road space before someone else does. Instead of a free-flowing circle, a roundabout becomes an immobile tangle of tap-taps, traffic jams radiating in all directions.

 Insightful. I'd long taken for granted the idea that doing away with traffic lights would encourage both drivers and pedestrians to be more vigilant and aware, leading to fewer accidents, but I had not considered that the context in which that would work required some established norms which don't exist everywhere.

Also:

Perceptions of risk and consequent trade-offs might explain other differences between countries. “Differences…between high- and low-income countries are probable,” the authors write, “because there may be differences in the hazardousness in the respective road traffic environments, and how much people choose to focus on such risks when there are other unmet needs such as food, stability and protection against diseases.” They suggest that people in low-income countries may “prioritise urgent needs such as food, water and stability over accidental risks such as road traffic accidents.”