Chinese Film Beats Bond & Marvel

The biggest movie in the world right now is not the latest Bond film No Time To Die or even Marvel's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

It's a Chinese propaganda film about the 1950s Korean War, centred on a story of Chinese soldiers defeating American troops despite great odds.

In just two weeks since its release, The Battle at Lake Changjin has made over $633m (£463m) at the box office. This puts it far ahead of Shang-Chi's global earnings of $402m, and in just half the time.

It is set to become China's highest-grossing film ever.  Its success is good news for China's pandemic-affected film sector as Covid forced cinemas to shut and reopen multiple times.

It is even better news for the state, which experts say appears to have nailed a formula of making propaganda appeal to the masses.

But for Hollywood looking in from the outside, the immense popularity of a local film like this could mean even more challenges ahead as it struggles to gain ground in China - the biggest film market in the world.

Commissioned by the Chinese government, The Battle At Lake Changjin is just one of several nationalist films which have become big commercial hits in China in recent years.

In 2017, Wolf Warrior 2, about a Chinese soldier saving hundreds of people from baddies in an African warzone, raked in a record 1.6bn yuan ($238m; £181m) in just one week.

Lake Changjin depicts a brutal battle in freezing weather which the Chinese claim was a turning point in the Korean War - formally known in China as the "War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea".  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Underwater Trail

 

Colin Powell

COLIN POWELL’S LEADERSHIP LIST

Like most of our leadership lists, Powell’s rules are actually lessons themselves, gleaned from his decades in uniform. The genius is in their simplicity; the power is in their brevity. He doesn’t waste a lot of words; he doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining them. Instead, he shares them with the same directness that came to define him as a leader.

1. It ain’t as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.

There’s a silver lining in every cloud, you just have to find it. That’s not always as easy as it sounds. Things might look bad today, but if you’ve put in the effort, tomorrow will be a brighter day. It’s a state of mind; believe it and you will make it happen.

2. Get mad, then get over it.

There’s always going to be days when events—or people—push you to the edge. When you do lose your temper, don’t lose control at the same time. People always remember the leader with a bad temper, and never in a good way.

3. Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.

People who think that their way is the only way tend to experience a lot of disappointment. Things aren’t always going to go your way, that’s just a fact of life. Be humble enough to accept that fact.

4. It can be done!

Just about anything can be accomplished if you set your mind to it, have the necessary resources, and the time to get it done. Don’t succumb to the skeptics; listen to what they have to say and consider their perspective but stay focused and positive.

5. Be careful what you choose.

Don’t rush into a bad decision. Take the time to consider your options, weigh the relevant facts, and make reasoned assumptions. Once you pull the trigger, there are no do-overs. So make it count.

6. Don’t let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision.

Powell was fond of connecting good leadership to good instincts. Be a leader who hones judgement and instinct. Take the time to shape your mental models. Learn how to read a situation for yourself. Become the decision-maker your people need you to be.

7. You can’t make someone else’s choices.

Never allow someone else to make your decisions for you. Ultimately, you’re responsible for your own decisions. Don’t duck that responsibility and don’t succumb to external pressures. Make your own decisions and live with them.

8. Check small things.

Success is built on a lot of seemingly minor details. Having a feel for those “little things” is essential. In a 2012 interview, David Lee Roth shared the story of how Van Halen used brown M&Ms as an indicator of whether large concert venues paid attention to the minor details critical to a major performance. Leaders must have ways to check the little things without getting lost in them.

9. Share credit.

Success relies on the effort of the entire team, not just the leader. Recognition motivates people in ways that are immeasurable. Don’t be a glory hog. Share credit where credit is due and allow your people to stand in the spotlight. It ain’t about you. It’s about them.

10. Remain calm. Be kind.

Keep calm and carry on. Kill ‘em with kindness. When chaos reigns, a calm head and a kind word go a long way. When everyone is under incredible stress, be the leader people want to follow, not the leader people want to avoid.

11. Have a vision. Be demanding.

Followers need to things from leaders—a purpose and a firm set of standards. When you see leaders fail, it is almost always for one of those two things. They either lead their followers in a flailing pursuit of nothing, or they don’t set and enforce an example for their people.

12. Don’t take counsel of your fears or naysayers.

Fear can be a powerful motivator, but it can also paralyze a leader at the worst possible time. Learn to understand your fears and channel them in ways that you control rather than allowing them to control you. Think clearly, think rationally, and make decisions that aren’t rooted in emotion.

13. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.

Optimism is infectious. Maintaining a positive attitude and an air of confidence is as important for you as it is for those around you. People will feed off your optimism. Believe in your purpose, believe in yourself, and believe in your people. And they’ll believe in you.

DEAD AT 84, COLIN POWELL DIED FROM COMPICATIONS OF COVID...

Morphex

 

US Bitcoin

China's share of global Bitcoin mining has fallen to effectively zero, research by the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) suggests.

In June China told banks to stop facilitating transactions, and issued bans on mining.

At its peak in Sept 2019 China accounted for over three quarters of all Bitcoin mining.

China's crackdown initially led to a 38% fall in mining globally CBECI said.

However this was partially offset by a 20% "bounceback" over July and August, "suggesting that some Chinese mining equipment has been successfully redeployed overseas", researchers said.

China has since declared all Bitcoin transactions illegal - though that occurred after the period covered by they Cambridge research.

Miners earn money by creating new Bitcoins, but the computing power needed to do it consumes large amounts of energy.

They audit Bitcoin transactions in exchange for an opportunity to acquire the digital currency.

Global mining requires enormous computing power, which in turn uses huge amounts of electricity, and consequently contributes significantly to global emissions.

The CBECI, which is produced by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, tracks the geographic distribution of computing power used for mining Bitcoin - receiving data from a number of commercial Bitcoin mining pools.  READ MORE...

Caution

 

Self-driving Cars

Residents in a "dead-end" street in San Francisco say they are being plagued by an influx of self-driving vehicles.

Autonomous-driving firm Waymo's cars have been going up and down the cul-de-sac at all hours "for weeks", according to local news station KPIX.

Residents say vehicles sometimes have to queue before making multi-point turns to leave the way they came.

Waymo says the vehicles are just "obeying road rules" designed to limit traffic in certain residential streets.

"There are some days where it can be up to 50," Jennifer King told KPIX. "It's literally every five minutes. And we're all working from home, so this is what we hear."

She said the human "safety drivers" supervising the automated cars "don't have much to say other than the car is programmed and they're just doing their job".

A spokesman for Waymo said the cars sometimes made a detour because of the presence nearby of one of San Francisco's "slow streets", which aim to limit traffic in certain residential areas.

"We continually adjust to dynamic San Francisco road rules. In this case, cars travelling north of California on 15th Avenue have to take a u-turn due to the presence of 'slow streets' signage on Lake," the company said.  READ MORE...

Moose

 

Back on Earth

A Russian film crew are back on Earth after wrapping up scenes for the first movie shot in space.

Klim Shipenko and actor Yulia Peresild left the International Space Station and landed in Kazakhstan - to be met by a crew filming touchdown scenes.

The ISS shooting was not without drama - suitable for a film called Challenge.

On Friday the ISS unexpectedly tilted after a glitch in its thrusters, pausing filming. It was not thought to be part of the script.

In a farewell tweet from the ISS, Peresild showed off a weightless hairdo likely to thwart any conspiracy theorists who think it was all shot on Earth:

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.View original tweet on Twitter

The movie has been in its own kind of space race - with Tom Cruise. He is apparently part of a Hollywood filming-in-space project involving Nasa and Elon Musk's SpaceX.

The module carrying Peresild and Shipenko, along with cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, parachuted down to Earth at about lunchtime on Sunday in the Kazakhstan steppe.

Their departure was not delayed by Friday's glitch, which resulted in lost positioning control for about half an hour.  READ MORE...

Fanciful

Changling

 

Optical Illusion

We're big fans of mind-bending optical illusions in art. But while it's entertaining having your brain scrambled, they're usually just a bit of fun.

Here's a 16th-century optical illusion, though, that goes beyond just being a clever trick, and offers a more profound reflection on life.

The illusion appears in 'The Ambassadors' (shown above), painted by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1533, which memorialises Jean de Dinteville, French ambassador to England, and his friend, Georges de Selve.

Most people won't spot it when viewing the painting face on, and the illusion only properly reveals itself when you view the painting from the right. Watch the video below and you'll see exactly what we mean.



As the video shows, there's an anamophic skull lurking in the foreground, which only fully reveals itself when you're in the correct position. It's quite a clever trick, and a real 'wow' moment when you spot it. But the artist didn't just put this in to show off. 

There's a deeper story to tell here.  READ MORE...

Classic Sunday Newspaper Cartoons

 

The Big Band IS NOT the Beginning

The Big Bang teaches us that our expanding, cooling universe used to be younger, denser, and hotter in the past...

However, extrapolating all the way back to a singularity leads to predictions that disagree with what we observe...

Instead, cosmic inflation preceded and set up the Big Bang, changing our cosmic origin story forever...

Where did all this come from? In every direction we care to observe, we find stars, galaxies, clouds of gas and dust, tenuous plasmas, and radiation spanning the gamut of wavelengths: from radio to infrared to visible light to gamma rays. No matter where or how we look at the universe, it’s full of matter and energy absolutely everywhere and at all times. 

And yet, it’s only natural to assume that it all came from somewhere. If you want to know the answer to the biggest question of all — the question of our cosmic origins — you have to pose the question to the universe itself, and listen to what it tells you.

Today, the universe as we see it is expanding, rarifying (getting less dense), and cooling. Although it’s tempting to simply extrapolate forward in time, when things will be even larger, less dense, and cooler, the laws of physics allow us to extrapolate backward just as easily. 

Long ago, the universe was smaller, denser, and hotter. How far back can we take this extrapolation? Mathematically, it’s tempting to go as far as possible: all the way back to infinitesimal sizes and infinite densities and temperatures, or what we know as a singularity. 

This idea, of a singular beginning to space, time, and the universe, was long known as the Big Bang.

But physically, when we looked closely enough, we found that the universe told a different story. Here’s how we know the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore.  READ MORE...

Horses

 

Resonance Theory

Why is my awareness here, while yours is over there? Why is the universe split in two for each of us, into a subject and an infinity of objects? How is each of us our own center of experience, receiving information about the rest of the world out there? Why are some things conscious and others apparently not? Is a rat conscious? A gnat? A bacterium?

These questions are all aspects of the ancient “mind-body problem,” which asks, essentially: What is the relationship between mind and matter? It’s resisted a generally satisfying conclusion for thousands of years.

The mind-body problem enjoyed a major rebranding over the last two decades. Now it’s generally known as the “hard problem” of consciousness, after philosopher David Chalmers coined this term in a now classic paper and further explored it in his 1996 book, “The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.”

Chalmers thought the mind-body problem should be called “hard” in comparison to what, with tongue in cheek, he called the “easy” problems of neuroscience: How do neurons and the brain work at the physical level? Of course, they’re not actually easy at all. But his point was that they’re relatively easy compared to the truly difficult problem of explaining how consciousness relates to matter.

Over the last decade, my colleague, University of California, Santa Barbara psychology professor Jonathan Schooler and I have developed what we call a “resonance theory of consciousness.” We suggest that resonance – another word for synchronized vibrations – is at the heart of not only human consciousness but also animal consciousness and of physical reality more generally. It sounds like something the hippies might have dreamed up – it’s all vibrations, man! – but stick with me.  READ MORE...

Use Spinach

 

Its in the Hips

 

Aztec Empire Spirit Mirror

John Dee was a mathematician, astrologer and occultist. (Image credit: Copyright Antiquity Publications Ltd./Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)

The 16th-century courtier John Dee, a scientific adviser to England's Queen Elizabeth I, was also deeply involved in magic and the occult, and he tried to commune with ghosts, using a so-called spirit mirror made of polished obsidian.

Now, a new analysis of Dee's infamous mirror has finally traced its origins — not to the spirit world, but to the Aztec Empire.

Obsidian mirrors such as Dee's were known from Aztec culture, but there were no records on his mirror's origins. However, geochemical analysis enabled researchers to link the mirror's obsidian — a type of volcanic glass — to Pachuca, Mexico, a popular source of obsidian for Aztec people. This finding indicated that the artifact was Aztec and not a copy made from European obsidian, and Dee likely acquired the mirror after it was brought to Europe from Mexico, according to a new study.

Though Dee was a scientist and mathematician, his interests also swung toward the magical and mystical, and in addition to the spirit mirror, he owned other objects related to astrology, divination, alchemy and the exploration of "demonic magic," scientists reported Oct. 7 in the journal Antiquity.

Dee claimed that one of these objects, a purple crystal on a chain, was given to him by the archangel Uriel, along with instructions for making a philosopher's stone — the mythical alchemical marvel that promised the gift of eternal life and the ability to turn base metals into gold, according to the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) in London. Dee also possessed a Claude glass, a black glass mirror kept in a sharkskin case, which he used for "peering into the future," according to the RCP.

Dee's obsidian mirror, now in the collection of the British Museum in London, is polished on both sides and is nearly perfectly circular, measuring about 7.2 inches (18.5 centimeters) in diameter and 0.5 inches (13 mm) thick, and weighing about 31 ounces (882 grams). A perforated square tab at the top of the mirror measures about 1.3 inches (33 mm) long and may have served as a handle, according to the study.  READ MORE...

Baby Elephant

 

Doesn't Go Boom

Concorde flew from London to New York in three and a half hours. It soared at nearly twice the speed of sound, leaving an almighty sonic boom in its wake. The noise restricted where it could fly, but now NASA hopes it can resurrect faster-than-sound travel, with quiet supersonic flight.

Enter X-59 QueSST (Quiet SuperSonic Technology), developed by NASA and Lockheed Martin. With its uniquely designed shape, the aircraft should allow NASA to break the sound barrier again – but this time, with no more noise than your neighbour slamming a car door.

At Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works factory in Palmdale, California, an engineer works on the fuselage section of the X-59. The black rectangular panels are air intakes for the plane’s environmental control system (ECS), and the silver grate is the ECS exhaust. These features are placed on the top of the craft to reshape the shock wave pattern © Lockheed Martin

The general shape of the X-59, including the wings, can be seen here as the craft is assembled © Lockheed Martin

This image is looking inside the X-59’s engine inlet. Usually, the engine is placed on the bottom of an aircraft, but on the X-59, this section of the inlet and engine are mounted to the top of the plane. This is so the shock waves from the inlet and engine are shielded by the wing to reduce the sonic boom to a sonic thump © Lockheed Martin

The F414-GE-100 engine sits in the assembly area at GE Aviation’s Riverworks facility in Lynn, Massachusetts as it prepares for checkout tests. The engine will power the X-59 in flight © GE Aviation

Illustration of how the completed X-59 might look © Lockheed Martin

Rather than a forward-facing windscreen, the pilot sees the view via an HD video display © Lockheed Martin

TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS AIRCRAFT, CLICK HERE...

Playful

 

Being Successful

We all have those days — days of deep insecurity, when things don’t go exactly as planned, and we end up questioning every single decision we ever made. Days when every little ‘fail’ hits you hard. For example, you thought you’d be so much further in your career by now or you ask yourself, why you haven’t you found “The One” yet? Or you feel like you have no idea what you’re doing with your life, and you’re not traveling half as much as you want to.

Sound familiar?

Now, logically you know that success is more than just money, a big job title, a particular relationship status or a certain lifestyle. But on days like this, it’s difficult not to compare yourself to others based on these very parameters. And if you’re not exactly where you had hoped to be, it’s really difficult to think of yourself as being ‘successful’.

Next time you’re having one of those days, stop and read this. If you relate to any of these points, you are more successful than you give yourself credit for.

YOU LEAD A BALANCED LIFESTYLE
When I say a balanced lifestyle, I do not simply mean that you wake up at 5 am, go for a run, meditate, and still find time to pack a healthy lunch before heading out for work. There are innumerable other ways to find balance in your life.

Maybe you spend an awful lot of time working, but you are careful to pay equal attention to your mental health too. Maybe you post quite a bit on social media, but you know how to stay in the moment when you’re with your loved ones. Or maybe you just know yourself well enough to understand when you need to go for a run, and when you need a pizza. If you are able to enjoy the things that make you happy, without going overboard or feeling guilty, then that according to me, is a mark of success.

YOU FEEL COMFORTABLE ADMITTING WHEN YOU’RE WRONG OR GIVING CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE
You messed up. You overlooked an error in that report you just turned in. You forgot to pick up groceries when you know it was your turn to do so. You hit ‘Reply All’ on a message that was not meant for everyone on that thread. What do you do?

If you own up to your mistake, apologize, and avoid shifting blame (“How about that one time YOU forgot to do the laundry?”) — you have a lot to feel good about. It shows you don’t think less of yourself just because you’re wrong — and you don’t think others will either. The same goes for times when you are praised for something that you did not do, and you feel comfortable redirecting credit where it’s due. Not everyone is mature or confident enough to do that. The fact that you are, makes you more successful than you think.  TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THIS, CLICK HERE...