2020 Banff Mountain Film Festival

The Banff Mountain Film Festival tour came to the New Theatre in Oxford on Tuesday 28th January 2020. The Oxford showing featured the “red” program, the other being “blue”, and you can see both lists of films here. I had not attended a film festival for years, but had grown up with Tropfest in Sydney, and was excited to share my enjoyment of film and adventure with friends.

Charge

I expected that a film festival about adventures involving mountains would include action-camera and drone footage, and the intense video game quality of Charge met those expectations.

You can watch Charge via Salomon TV on YouTube.

Thabang

The rags-to-riches story of the eponymous South African trail running champion left me wanting to go out and get in some more miles. There is a beautiful simplicity to running, and the wide shots of Thabang running over dusty roads exemplify it.

You can also watch Thabang on YouTube.

The Flip

BASE jumping is an incredibly dangerous sport, and not one I aspire to. This tiny 3 minute spectacle did make what is often seen as a stunt for adrenaline junkies feel closer to an art form, whilst also getting the audience’s hearts pumping.

Home

Sarah Outen’s story intertwines the physical challenges of attempting to circumnavigate the world by human power alone, with the psychological challenges of poor mental health and grieving for her father. It is intimate, inspiring, and often raw in a way that makes the alien experience of spending months alone at sea relatable.

Sarah’s website has more details about her story.

The Ladakh Project

Nouria Newman kayaks solo through 375 km of rapids to join the Indus river. This film, and films like it, convert a geographical fact (850 cubic meters of water per second) into a tangible sense of the power of a river that cradled one of earth’s earliest civilizations. Newman took a self-admittedly stupid risk, and very nearly paid for it with her life, but the story (and her courage) is compelling.

You can see the Ladakh Project on Newman’s sponsor’s website here.

The Imaginary Line

Slacklining, something I am mostly familiar with as a side show to rock climbing and university student picnicking, is brought into the political realm by two teams, one Mexican and one American, working together to cross the Rio Grande. Having crossed land borders in Europe absentmindedly, it is still a little shocking to remember how intensely polarised the debate is regarding migration in the US.

The Imaginary Line is also on Youtube

Up To Speed

A humorous documentary on speed climbing (a new sport in the upcoming Tokyo Olympics) featured interesting interviews with the setter of the defining route (slapped together in 3 hours), the aesthetic Iranian team, and a slew of athletes who will be contesting gold medals in only a few months time.

This video from WIRED featuring legendary climber Alex Honnold explains speed climbing.

Danny Day Care

Danny MacAskill demonstrates his cycling skill over a series of stunts towing a bicycle pram. This fun video showcases some beautiful Scottish landscapes and elicited the most gasps and groans from the audience of the night. It reminded me of the similar Road Bike Party videos, which also feature Danny.

Danny MacAskill’s YouTube channel has Danny Daycare, among other “trials biking” videos.

2020 Week 4: Xīn Nián Kuài Lè! 新年快乐!

Saturday was Chinese New Year, and I was fortunate to celebrate in traditional style by making dumplings and watching the CCTV New Year’s Gala. 2020 is the year of the rat, and the first year in a new cycle of 12 years. The ordering of the animals is explained in this amusing story.

Things I wrote this week

No longer posts to share just yet, I’ve been working on sharing some thoughts about productivity, and am hoping to finish it off in the coming week. I’ve also started writing some fiction, for the first time since school, inspired by a writing club which has started at work.

Things to share this week

Chinese news wasn’t all song and dance, the Wuhan virus caused the lock down of two cities, Wuhan and Huanggang.

Davos hosts the World Economic Forum where Russia continues its cold war antics.

This paper caused some controversy; it is unclear if algorithms or people are driving more extreme content since we don’t know how the algorithms work.

Photo from the week

Dumplings for Chinese New Year 2020

2020 Week 3: Acceptance

This week I celebrated both two years with ONI and twenty seven years of life in general. I felt particularly cared for by the people around me, and appreciated both that this is the case, and that I am aware and able to enjoy the feeling. It is one thing to accept someone into a community, but it is even more difficult to make them feel accepted.

Things I wrote this week:

Training Fasted, a spontaneous experiment I conducted, noting how my physical performance shifted in response to not eating over a 30 hour period.

Things to share this week:

A team from the University of Vermont, Tufts, and Harvard published the dryly titled paper A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms. As the video from the Supplementary Information shows, the team have actually grown (or built) working biological machines based on computer aided designs. The resemblance to headcrabs is eerie, but the work is very impressive.

I came across this Zombie Simulation coded in R, while looking for help with my own R code. It reminds me of people who hack Doom onto TI-83 calculators.

I played two games of Captain Sonar, a chaotic submarine-warfare themed board game between two teams who must work cooperatively to out maneuver their opponents. Not an easy game to learn, but a lot of fun.

Training fasted

On Tuesday I tested out how my training was impacted by fasting. Overall I lost about 20% of my power output over 30 hours of fasting. Over this period I lost about 2 kg of body mass, which I assume was mostly due to emptying my digestive system and some loss in water due to losses of salt and glycogen. Both this weight and power were quickly restored after resuming eating.

Numbers from the fast:
7 hours before fast begins:
90 minutes moderate exercise, approx 3600 kJ
5 hours before fast begins: Weight 67.7 kg
0 hours (final meal before fast): Consumed 1 bowl (~200 g) oats + 30 g pea protein in water, approx 3500 kJ
5 hours into fast: Light exercise (30 mins indoor cycling) approx 1000 kJ
16 hours into fast: Hard exercise (30 minutes indoor rowing) approx 1700 kJ. Able to sustain 93% of maximum steady state power output.
18 hours into fast: Weight 66.4 kg
28 hours into fast: Weight 65.7 kg
29 hours into fast: Hard exercise (30 minutes indoor rowing) approx 1600 kJ. Able to sustain 81% of maximum steady state power output.
2 days after fast: (normal diet resumed) Weight 67.9 kg

Energy expended over fast roughly approximates to 9000 kJ, i.e. 110% of glycogen stores, or equivalent to 250 g fat.

Things I consumed during the fast:
2 double espresso (coffee with no sugar or milk)
Multivitamin
about 1 g salt
about 4 L of water

Things I felt during the fast:
Hungry (for periods, but not consistently. Hunger mostly peaked in the first few hours, at approximately 10 hours in).
Foggy (felt a little more distant than usual after the afternoon coffee wore off).
Unmotivated to exercise vigorously (wanted to quit while performing hard rowing efforts earlier and more intensely than usual).

Thoughts:
This was a spontaneous experiment. I happened to have a very early breakfast on Tuesday and missed lunch due to being needed in the lab, so decided to use the inconvenience as an opportunity to test performance impacts of fasting. The result was a small loss of power, and a moderate loss of motivation to exert that power.

I feel, but have no first hand evidence, that long distance running has left me pretty well physiologically adapted to having a large energy reserve and being able to utilise it (e.g. running a marathon uses up approx 10,000 kJ, or about the same as the entire fasting period). I also think that mentally, knowing that I am capable of going on long runs before breakfast, and knowing what it feels like to use up my glycogen stores (known as “hitting the wall” in running or “bonking” in cycling), together give me confidence to undertake fasting with exercise safely.

Given many people in the developed world struggle with obesity, I would recommend experimenting with fasting. Simply re-calibrating one’s sense of hunger (and knowing it is possible to delay the need to eat by at least several hours) could help with generally reducing calories consumed and therefore weight loss. Obviously some people struggle with disordered eating, which can be more harmful than obesity. Online communities around weight loss can drift from being supportive about achieving a healthy weights to creating unhealthy expectations about weight loss, particularly rapid weight loss.

Science:
Rafael de Cabo and Mark P. Mattson published a review on Intermittent Fasting in the last week of December 2019, which longevity specialist Peter Attia commented on in his email today. The science is currently inconclusive, but there seems to be a growing body of evidence that the human body is capable of going extended periods without food not only without detrimental effects, but with benefits to overall health.

2020 Week 2: Acceleration

Already 12 days into 2020 and things are falling behind. I missed a Week 1 blog post, but am back with the regular Sunday blog post in a new, punchier, format. Longer posts will now be separate and linked to from the weekly posts, while topics that I return to will grow into subsections of the main website. Updates to come soon.

Things I wrote this week:

2019 Altmetric Top 100
I share my thoughts on the most shared scientific papers of 2019.

Things I read this week:

The Pac-Man rule at conferences; how to avoid excluding people by making it easier to join your conversations.

Nature: Boris asks for weirdos to hang out with him
The UK government appears to have a “cinematic” view of scientists.

Introduction to Data Science
Still working my way through this data science course, and starting to see how machine learning is an application of statistics through training some basic algorithms.

Apollo 11 (2019)
Despite being well aware of the success of the first mission to the moon, this was a compelling and immersive retelling. I found the interludes of heart rate data amusing.

2019 Altmetric Top 100

Fires in the Amazon and Australia, a case of HIV cured, and the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, were all big headlines for science in 2019. This summary of the science that shaped 2019 from Nature covers a few more stories. There is not one clear metric to quantify the “biggest” story in science, but Altmetric creates a ranking based on the media (social and conventional) impact of scientific papers. I previously wrote about 2018’s Altmetric Top 100, and this year I take a look at the themes.

AI and Fake News

The top paper of 2019 was this description of a system developed at Samsung to create realistic video of talking heads from single images. The authors provided a video summary of the work, and the result is impressive and unsettling. AI image generation also took out the 5th slot with image generation.

While crossing the uncanny valley remains a challenge for visual effects artists, the strong emotional reaction to this paper is driven by a fear. As it becomes easier to fabricate content, it becomes harder to trust the media we consume. There is also the fear that we could become victims of these “deepfake” techniques. Fake news was the subject of the 51st ranked paper “Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook” and the 58th ranked paper “Fake news on Twitter during the 2016 U.S. presidential election“. On fake stories making real news; the 44th ranked paper about the 44th President’s birth was pushed up the altmetric rankings as “The researchers avoided calling the subjects’ views ‘racist’, earning them a high-scoring Twitter roasting.”, highlighting how issues of race can drive a flurry of discussion on social media.

The world is on fire

Bill Nye demonstrates the point on Last Week Tonight

As Climate change continues to worsen so do its effects. If you’re not familiar with the scale of the problem I recommend this briefing; Global warming 101. About 1 in 6 papers in the top 100 were on or about climate change, with 3 of the top 10. World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency has an authorship exceeding 10,000, stating that “Earth is facing a climate emergency”, and highlighting the disturbing gap between the scientific and political consensuses.

Human Health

Just as health research makes up a huge share of scientific research projects, so too did papers on health make up a big share of the altmetric 100. Many of the papers featured are only surprising in the unwillingness of the public to conform to the recommendations. Vaccines work (and do not cause autism), exercise is good for you and most people need to do more, highly processed food and sugary drinks are bad for you, and eating only junk can lead to terrible health (including blindness).

In a moment of doctors showing that publications don’t have to be more complex than “check out what this guy just coughed up”, this cast of the right bronchial tree was coughed up and became this publication, ranking at 19th.

This highly discussed paper (74th) was retracted, demonstrating both that scientific papers (even in top journals) should be questioned, and that scientists are actively doing that questioning. The article relates to the He Jiankui affair that made headlines for the gene editing of human beings, however that work itself has not been formally published, and the scientist himself was sentenced to prison.

Scientists have fun too

“Joke” papers such as 8th ranked “Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial” and 61st ‘”Death is certain, the time is not”: mortality and survival in Game of Thrones show that scientists (and critically, publishers) can have a sense of humour too.

Take Home Points

  • With tools like google scholar and increasingly open access publishing, the scientific literature is becoming ever easier to consume.
  • AI is becoming more powerful at image generation and manipulation, and will threaten the reliability of video footage as evidence.
  • The climate has changed and the consequences are already being felt. Urgent action is necessary.
  • Whilst advances in medicine are lessening the burden of diseases, educating the public to make good choices on vaccines, drug consumption, and nutrition would have an enormous impact on health.
  • Publishers and reviewers have a sense of humour (requires further verification).