Category: Films and movies

Whether big-studio or independent, celluloid or digital, anything about movies

After a PhD

I am not depressed, but I definitely feel a lot of what this video from Andy Stapleton discusses:

I have certainly experienced the odd stutter-step ending of the program, which never brings a single day or moment when you are really done. There is such a moment, but it is mundane, private, and undramatic — probably the last time you make a formatting correction for the unknown administrator who reviews your dissertation for conformity to writing standards like which page numbers in the front matter are Roman numerals. That creates an odd sense of the thing being unfinished, even when there is nothing left to do.

The points about needing to prove yourself in the job market after finishing, as well as anxiety about whether a PhD was necessary, are also familiar from my recent thinking.

I wouldn’t say the video provides any useful and non-obvious advice, but reading within the broad category of writing by current and recent PhD students actually has immense psychological value by demonstrating the reality of shared experience and shared struggle, engaging about all the things we didn’t known when we began and (even more juicily and importantly) all the things your university will lie to you about to keep their business model going. A post by Bret Devereaux is a fine example of the genre, and was discussed here before.

Language use by non-human animals

I came across an interesting video debunking the idea that Koko the gorilla actually used sign language:

I don’t have the expertise to fully evaluate this on my own, but it accords with the theory which I have heard that it is more plausible that Koko was trained to respond to prompts from trainers than that she expressed her own thoughts and used language in any kind of sophisticated way.

Nevertheless, it remains a fascinating question whether inter-species communication will ever be possible with non-human beings who do seem to use sophisticated communication, such as whales, dolphins, and great apes. The question of whether they are capable is different from the question of whether we know how to help them do it. Maybe one day we will find techniques that allow them to express what they say to each other in a form that people can understand.

P.S. A great recent episode of the Ologies podcast discusses acoustic ecology.

Meltdown

I watched the four-part Netflix series on the Three Mile Island disaster and found it to be well crafted and emotionally poignant, though only OK as an educational resource on the partial meltdown.

My technical complaint is that they explain almost nothing about why the accident happened and exactly what took place while it was going on. There is a lot of interesting material on how complex systems have interactions which cannot be foreseen, as well as user interface issues in the control room, which would have helped viewers better understand.

In terms of storytelling, my objection is with how the filmmakers basically set up two kinds of interview subjects: forthright and emotional local residents who suffered, and a few wicked representatives of the industry. They quote dismissive claims about culpability and the accident’s severity from the insiders, while uncritically quoting residents on how an unchecked disaster would have destroyed Pensyllvania or the East Coast. To me this all felt like too much handholding about who to believe, coupled with insufficient reference to credible outside accounts.

I wouldn’t especially recommend the series to either people who know a lot about nuclear energy or those who know fairly little. The former are likely to be annoyed at how anecdote-driven the whole thing is, while the latter may be given a false sense of confidence about the correctness of the view expressed. Unlike the remarkable 2019 series on the Chernobyl accident, this is one that can be safely missed.

For better explanations on TMI, I would suggest Nickolas Means’s talk (which also contains some fascinating discussion about what human error means in the context of major industrial accidents and how to investigate them after the fact) or this Inviting Disaster episode from The History Channel.

Ginsburg documentary

After today’s three presentations on my research — and the surprise discovery of another very pertinent U of T PhD dissertation which I will read tomorrow — I learned that through the library I have access to the Kanopy streaming service and watched the RBG documentary which was the first thing recommended. It’s rightly praised as very well done, and I learned a lot about her life.