Neither 100% Good nor 100% Evil

I think that my favorite part of Zootopia, other than the snarky attitude of both protagonists and the various jokes, is that the fact that none of the characters, well at least none of the main ones, are one-dimensional caricatures. Judy, despite being an overall heroic good character, has her faults and prejudices; even though she and Nick had been working together she instantly reaches for her fox spray as soon as he bares his teeth. This sort of wariness around foxes is brought about by her parents and the fact that she had been attacked by one when she was younger, but since she had been working with Nick you would think that she knew that he wasn’t like the ones she had been warned about by her loving but misguided parents. On the flipside, the villain, Bellwether, isn’t just a villain for the sake of being evil; being constantly bullied and nagged by her predator boss definitely played a role in her contempt and framing of the predator minority in Zootopia. Are her actions forgivable? No. But at least her relatable frustration gave her more dimensions than simply, “I was bad all along for absolutely no reason.”  Another interesting thing about Zootopia is how the majority (the prey) transitions from being the oppressed to the oppressors. All in all, this was a fun movie with character development and social commentary hiding just beneath the surface of the goofy character models and the irony of a slow sloth speeding in a fast car.

The Potential of Immuno-oncology

For me, this table talk had extremely good timing, because I was just about to learn about CAR-T cells and other immunotherapies for cancer treatment in my intro to biomolecular class. Shiv’s introduction really helped me understand the mechanism of how the treatments worked when I encountered it again in class. Despite having heard of the term before, I was just as much in the dark about how this stuff worked as everyone else. s. I’m very impressed  the idea that immunotherapies can be tweaked to treat all sorts of different cancers: from leukimia to lung cancer to glioblastoma and more. Additionally, I’ve been able to see the benefits of this new technology in action; one of our very close family friends had been diagnosed with late stage lung cancer, and had tried a new experimental immunotherapy which improved his health rapidly, although the cancer has unfortunately since relapsed. I look forward to seeing what these new therapies have in store for solving the mystery behind cancer. If CAR-T, or some other immunotherapy, can be expanded to include virtually every type of cancer possible, then I think we’ve found the cure that medicine has been looking for.

Dramatizing Real Life in Movies

First of all, I really enjoyed the characters; I felt extremely bad when Katherine screamed at the white men for treating her like a subhuman. I spent so much of the movie dreading that some kind of obstacle would be encountered by the trio. I liked the sass, their friendliness, they were generally extremely likable. After Jim Johnson met Katherine, I spent so long dreading some kind of drama in their courtship; luckily that didn’t happen. When I checked the facts behind the movie, I was a little disappointed in the fact that the movie heavily dramatizes the situation of the women, making it seem that they were facing a much larger hill that they really were. Sure, Dorothy Vaughan was definitely recognized as the first black woman supervisor with a extensive knowledge of Fortran, Mary Jackson was one of the first female engineers in NASA. Katherine Johnson was indeed requested by John Glenn to check the launch coordinates. But Katherine didn’t have to run to the colored bathroom in a different building in heels everyday. Mary didn’t have to convince the court to let her take all night classes. Dorothy was a supervisor in real life years before she was promoted in the movie. I know that it’s natural for a movie to want to dramatize; NASA treating their black female employees just the same as everyone else doesn’t have the same impact. But I dislike the fact that they changed it so drastically. Going from that point, Al Harrison not being real, being the savior of Katherine, giving her permission to attend important meetings and expand beyond her role as a lowly computer, was a bit odd . Do these women need a older white man to give them what rights they need? Why did the movie have to make him up? I enjoyed Harrison while watching, but in hindsight, something about the fact that the writers made him up bothers me somehow. Perhaps I would have enjoyed this movie more if it was a documentary and not a drama, or if it had been completely fictional.

Obsession and Complications in The Talented Mr. Ripley

The first thing that I want to say about The Talented Mr. Ripley is that the titular character started off as being somewhat sympathetic but then started making me uneasy when he found Dickie and Marge in Italy. Ripley lives in a pretty terrible life in New York City, living in a trashy apartment in the meatpacking district doing what he can to get by. But the way Ripley sticks out in Italy, the way his pasty skin stands out on a beach of tans, the way he seems both endearingly awkward and obsessive over Dickie’s life, struck me the wrong way. From trying on his host’s clothes, covertly getting Dickie’s signatures and a handwriting sample, and pretending to kiss an asleep Dickie on the train, Ripley just feels uncanny and disturbing.

A big part of this event was determining how to interpret the killing about an hour into the film in the law sense. I had originally felt that Ripley was definitely guilty of murder in the second degree, and I felt bad for the people who Judge Miller had designated to defend him, feeling like they would be grasping at straws. However, I was completely incorrect; there were a lot of good points that people made, such as Dickie initiating the conflict by hitting Ripley first, or noting Ripley’s surprise when he knocks Dickie back with the oar. There was also room for interpretation, such as considering whether Ripley’s verbal insults count as provoking or not. This really gave me a feel for how complex and confusing a case might be, even when it looks, at first, like it’s a clear cut ruling. Even though the law has rules on what constitutes murder and what constitutes manslaughter and self-defense, there’s a lot of room in the definitions to move around and twist the case to favor one side or the other.

Creativity and Enjoying the Process

When I returned to the Johnson Museum to sculpt more with clay, I was fully expecting us to make representations of fruit again. However, this time Annmarie had us make mugs. As it turns out, mugs offered more freedom that fruit; they all have a standard shape and guidelines to make sure that the mug is structurally sound, but after the all that you have a lot of room to explore. Animals and plants were popular inspiration. There were mugs based on tree trunks, dogs, owls, whales, and flower petals. It was interesting to see the creativity that everyone had, all from the original base, walls, and handle. No two mugs were completely alike.

I had fun smashing my wet clay onto the table, peeling it off, and eventually creating a mug with what was supposed to be a vine wrapped around it. Unfortunately, the life of my mug was tragically cut short after I accidentally knocked it off my shelf mere hours after taking it home. However, the pleasant memory of having a study break during a stressful week and getting my hands dirty is much more lasting. After all, I feel that crafting is mostly about enjoying the journey to a finished product and not just being laser focused on the final product. Sometimes the final product doesn’t turn out exactly the way you expected or wanted it to, but having fun with it makes it worth it.

It’s Better the Second Time Around: Visiting the Cornell Botanical Gardens

My first visit to the Cornell Botanical Gardens, on some random day during this summer when I didn’t have much else to do, was interesting. I walked down from the dairy bar and wandered around a bit, enjoying the herb garden, reading about roses, and studying a bit inside the summer house near Comstock Knoll. On my second trip to the botanical gardens last Saturday, I went to all the same places i had seen before, but I was able to get more out of it, not only because this was an official tour containing knowledge that I wouldn’t have been able to pick up on my own the first time around, but I extremely enjoyed going with a group of fellow scholars instead of just by myself. I liked learning about all the herbs i had been fascinated by the first time around and finding out about the llenroc limestone that makes up many of the buildings on campus. Between smelling the fragrant chocolate mint, walking up the knoll and sitting on the benches atop its peak, and trying out some of the plants that our guide, Peter Davies, told us were safe to eat at the herb garden, I really felt like part of the group, even though I didn’t especially stand out. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to stick around for the whole tour, but I’m grateful for the opportunity to experience the Botanical Gardens with all of my five senses in a deeper way, even if it was only for a little bit.

A World Without Internet Privacy

Ex Machina might be about artificial intelligence, but what really got to me was the issues of internet privacy that the movie addresses. In the movie, Nathan pulls out much of the data he needs to create his human-like robots out of information he gets from unwitting phone and search engine users. For instance, he models his androids’ facial expressions using information captured from the cameras on the phones of thousands of users. He picked Caleb as his modified Turing Test “administrator” because he was able to deduce his loneliness and malleability from his Bluebook searches. Heck, Nathan’s ability to pry into other people’s private electronic data is so deep that he was able to base some of Ava’s features on Caleb’s pornography collection. What’s terrifying about Nathan’s being able to get all this private data whenever he wants is that there’s no way for us to know whether or not Google or Facebook has stored this kind of data on us. Sure, AI is scary in its own way-computers so adept at being human that we no longer know the difference is frightening. But Internet privacy, or lack thereof, is a much more pressing issue in this present day. After all, the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal had happened only half a year ago, and Facebook suffered no real consequences from that; according to CBS, Facebook was able to recover all the financial losses from the scandal within two months. And who’s to say that large tech companies like Facebook or Google don’t have all of our personal data, ready to be used for a purpose (such as AI) that we didn’t know about and didn’t agree to?