Movies to look out for in 2014

Animal Rescue - American feature film debut by Belgium's Michaël Roskam, who gave us the fantastic Bullhead. This will be another crime flick and it stars Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace and the late great James Gandolfini.

Birdman - A comedy from Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director who gave us Amores Perros and Biutiful. And it has a killer cast too.

Boyhood - Richard Linklater's latest in which he followed a boy and his family for a period of 12 years.

Calvary - The new comedy/drama from John Michael McDonagh with Brendan Gleeson. Previously they made The Guard together so they have my attention.

Captain America - The Winter Soldier - Still riding on the fact that I really enjoyed The Avengers. And the first Captain America is probably my second favourite Marvel Studios flick.

Child 44 - A crime procedural set in the Soviet Union of the 1950's. This one is on the list for the cast alone: Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Jason Clarke, Vincent Cassell, and Paddy Considine. Amazing.

Cobbler, The - New film by Tom McCarthy, who's three previous films are were great. And it stars Adam Sandler who proved in Punch-Drunk Love that he can impress with the right director.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - The first one was a mixed bag but the teaser trailer for this one sold me.

Cold in July - New Jim Mickle movie. His last two films were the most interesting horror films to come out of the states so I'm dying to see what he'll do with a crime flick.

Dom Hemingway - Latest movie from Richard Shepard, who's previous two movies were both interesting. And Jude Law seems to go all out in this one based on trailer.

Double, The - New film by Richard Ayoade, who made Submarine, after a story by Dostoyevsky. Jesse Eisenberg stars as the guy who sees his life invaded by a far more confident doppelgänger.

Enemy - Another doppelgänger film. This one by Denis Villeneuve, who has been on fire with Polytechnique, Incendies and last year's Prisoners. This time Jake Gyllenhaal gets in trouble with his double. Looks amazing.

Foxcatcher - Latest from Bennett Miller, the director of Capote and Moneyball.

Godzilla - The teaser was dope and I just want to have a big monster movie I actually will like. So far the teaser was cool. Fingers crossed.

Gone Girl - New David Fincher. The man never makes a bad movie and some of his films are great. I'm hoping for one of the latter again.

Grand Budapest Hotel, The - New Wes Anderson with possibly his biggest cast yet. Everybody seems to be in this.

Guardians of the Galaxy - A new Marvel and a space adventure. God I hope this will be good. More Avengers goodwill...

Hobbit, The - There and Back Again - I don't care what the haters say. These movies are truly epic and in a league of their own. And this will be the grand finale. Can't wait.

How To Catch a Monster - Ryan Gosling's Directorial debut. No idea how this will turn out but the plot synopsis is interesting at the very least.

Immigrant, The - New film by James Gray starring Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner about a Polish immigrant and her relationship with two men in 1920's America.

Inherent Vice - New Paul Thomas Anderson. Nuff said.

Interstellar - New Chris Nolan SF flick. This one could be truly awesome.

Locke - Real-time drama starring Tom Hardy who's life comes to pieces as he drives his BMW with a cell phone for the duration of the movie. If anyone can pull it off, it's Hardy.

Midnight Special - New Jeff Nichols and Michael Shannon is in it once again. Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter and Mud were all great, so bring it on.

Monuments Men, The - George Clooney directed film with a great cast and great premise (WW2 platoon saving art from the Nazis). The reviews aren't that great but I just want it too be good.

Most Wanted Man, A - John le Carré adaptation by Anton Corbijn, who did the excellent Control. Rachel McAdams, Willem Dafoe and Philip Seymour Hoffman stars in this spy tale.

Mr. Turner - New Mike Leigh, which is good enough for me. A biopic on British artist J.M.W Turner with Leigh regular Timothy Spall in the title role.

Noah - I can't say I'm excited about a film about Noah but it's Darren Aronofsky directing so I will just have faith in that.

Raid 2, The - The most bonkers action movie of 2012 gets a sequel and it's looking to be even bigger. God help us.

Rosewater - A film directed by John Stewart about an Iranian journalist who was tortured and imprisoned for over 100 days as a result of a mock interview he conducted with the Daily Show.

Sin City - A Dame To Kill For - I absolutely love the original so I can't wait for this one. Gordon-Levitt, Willis, Rourke, Liotta, Brolin and many, many more star.

Serena - New Susanne Bier but set in depression-era North Carolina, which is quite a change.

Snowpiercer - Looks like we will finally get to see Bong Joon-Ho's SF American feature debut. And word is it will be uncut. Can't wait...

Transcendence - Another potentially big SF flick by Christopher Nolan's cinematographer. Johnny Depp & Rebecca Hall star. The trailers do make me worry however and he has never directed before.

Trip to Italy - Michael Winterbottom's follow up to the excellent The Trip. Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan are on a culinary road trip through Italy this time around. Should be good.

Under the Skin - Latest from Jonathan Glazer, who did Sexy Beast, looks like a giant trip. Sort of like Kubrick directing Beyond the Black Rainbow. And Scarlett Johansson stars as an alien who captures humans.

And maybe:

Fury - WW2 movie about a bunch of dudes in tank. I love a good movie set in a tank. Let's hope this will be one of them.

Jupiter Ascending - New SF by the by Wachowskis. They haven't made a great one since the first Matrix but they do their own thing and I'm always curious to see how their next movie turns out.

Imitation Game, The - Biopic about Alan Turing by the guy who's last movie was the fantastic Headhunters. Benedict Cumberbatch stars.

Big Eyes - New Tim Burton. I don't like Tim Burton films but the one exception was his biopic Ed Wood. This is another biography and an oddball subject. Fingers crossed.

Tom Yum Goong 2 - The first Tom Yum Goong was a truly horrendous film but it has some of the most amazing action sequences ever. Probably the same for this one.

What about the cosmological arrow of time?

According to the theory of the Big Bang our universe had a beginning, we know well though we unknown the finer details of such origin. After it opened, it has been expanding and evolving. If we look at the arrow of time which appears to induce increasing entropy we could deduce that in the past the entropy of the universe must have been smaller than at present.

But that statement that at first glance looks innocent hides a serious problem. The problem is to understand why the hell the universe began in a state of low entropy when, if you think about it a little, that must have been a "totum revolutum" particle interactions, changing at very high energy and temperature, etc. The natural thing is that the universe was born in a state of high entropy. Or at least, there is no reason to suppose that began in a state of low entropy.

Mr. Boltzmann attempt to answer this question by saying that our universe is due to a lavish fluctuation that the entropy decreased. That's not going against any physical law, not even the law of increasing entropy. The entropy is a quantity that makes perfect sense when many particles at stake and we must accept that local fluctuations occur (in a given region) where the entropy decrease.

If our universe is a fluctuation of something previous, now to that thing we call quantum vacuum, in our past entropy was younger and now we live in that fluctuation because we are trying to recover a high entropy. This image appears consistent with what we know about cosmological inflation, a subject that you have multiple entries in this page.

But as usual, the answers generate more questions. Why is this fluctuation in a universe like ours? Why do we see many galaxies expanding when it is more likely that one will be formed? Furthermore, why do not we see only a solar system? Or a single planet? Why we exist when it is more likely that a fluctuation generates a unique brain than an universe like ours?

This chain of questions point to the problem known as the Boltzmann brains, which states that vision is Boltzmann be much more likely that fluctuation to generate a single brain that a whole universe.

Maybe it's only Physics ...

Perhaps the answer to the origin and existence of an arrow of time is due to a conspiracy of the laws of physics. Maybe one by one are not sensitive to the direction of flow of time but maybe when we have many particles or many laws while playing naturally becomes an arrow of time.

That is what we are trying to show Barbour, Koslowski and Mercati. That provides a physical arrow of time, selecting the physical states of low entropy naturally from which may evolve into higher entropy states.

His work is collected in the following article which was recently published in Physical Review Letters:

Identification of a gravitational arrow of time (and I have linked the freely publication available on arXiv at the end of this post).

This work is insultingly simple and fabulously beautiful. It may not be a definitive answer to the problem at hand but a first step on which further work.

The idea is very, very simple. Suppose we have a set of many particles that interact only through Newtonian gravity. They attract more or less depending on the mass of each particle and the involved close they are from one another. For lovers of the details I will say that these particles are simulated so that the total energy of the system and its total angular momentum is zero (relative to the center of mass).

Steps:

1. We start with all huddled particles each having a speed that is assigned randomly.

2. If we evolve the system at the end we find that the particles are grouped in pairs, orbiting each other and occupying most of the available volume.

What they have done Barbour, Koslowski and Mercati (BKM) has been started by the end. Have taken a distribution of particles in the final state above and have evolved backward in time (this is done by reversing all particle velocities in the game). They found that all (or nearly all) the initial configurations give rise to a unique state of minimum size and uniformity.

Not content with that, BKM have left the system evolve further and what they find is that this configuration evolves to give back a scattered configuration in which the particles are associated in pairs.

View images images below where:

a) only plays Newtonian gravity.

b) The condensed "initial" and homogeneous situation may extend into the future or the past likewise leading to (not identical) similar situations. This is consistent with that of the laws of physics pay little attention to the direction of the arrow of time.

c) However, yes we can say that there are states that occur naturally that if we tend to evolve more entropic configurations. That is, as simple as that can select an initial state which evolve into the future (in either direction) system. So we are giving an arrow local time.

Have you solved the problem?

No, there are still several things to do (and make them take a long time):

Extend this work to situations where gravity described by general relativity operates.
Introduce more interactions and see if the game with gravity selects an arrow of time consistent for all. For all we know radioactive nuclei always change in the same direction, electromagnetic waves are generated by the acceleration of electric charges, but it not happens that a radioactive nucleus recompose or has emission of electromagnetic waves before accelerating charges.
Sure it's interesting what BKM will discover in the future, whatever that means.

What NOT to say this work?

I read somewhere that this work shows that we live in the past of a universe explode or something. The truth I have not paid much attention.

This article shows only that can be generated with the participation of initial severity for which there is a notion of time arrow situations. For all purposes, we still remember the past and not the future. Our universe will expand and not recolapse.

What it says the work is that there are states in which one can not choose where to point the arrow of time to see only the status of the initial image, ie, so you have begun in the dense and homogeneous situation your future will be go to the diluted and structures situation (two interacting particles). For you there is an arrow of time for physics no.

Although it is fair to make an exception to this last statement and is as follows:

in 1964 first discovered a phenomenon that violates the symmetry T. This is the disintegration of a certain type of particle (called Kaon or K meson) in the image below you can see the picture. This finding represents the first microscopic process where there is a physical difference between the past and the future. Contrary to the disintegration of other particles, the kaon is the only one if we will film a movie and we passed backwards, we would see a phenomenon that can not exist in the Universe. This discovery was of great importance for the understanding of time, but obviously we are still far from reaching a clever concept.

So the laws of physics are not reversible in all cases, but more disturbing is that in the subatomic world the arrow of time is contrary to what we perceive, ie it goes from future to past, it seems that taking energy "borrowed" from the future. This is explained in more detail in the following entry (available in Spanish only)

How exactly does the brain function in each sex?

Men and women’s brains are not all that different when they have an orgasm, as they feel like they’re losing control, but how exactly does the brain function in each sex? 

The moment your clothes come off, and you’re in bed with your partner turning up the heat in between the sheets, your heart is racing, blood is pumping, and muscles are tensing up. As you and your partner strive to reach the big “O” — an orgasm — your body is filled with the intensity and tingling sensations of a promising sexual climax. Overcome with a feeling of euphoria as a surge of blood rushes to the genitals, what exactly happens to the brain when you have an orgasm?

GENITALS COMMUNICATE WITH THE BRAIN

During sex, our brain acts as a “pleasure center” to let us know what is enjoyable and what is not. The different nerves in the genitalia communicate with the brain about the sensation experienced. This can help explain why sensations can be perceived differently depending on what part of the body the person is being touched. A French study found women experiencetwo different kinds of orgasms — clitoral and vaginal — that differ in blood flow and sensations. These orgasms also contain a different set of nerves. The clitoris, which extends along both sides of the vulva underlying the labia minora, is erectile with arousal as it has more than 8,000 nerve endings.

For men and women, there are four types of nerves responsible for sending information to the brain during an orgasm. The hypogastric nerve transmits signals from the uterus and the cervix in women, and from the prostate in men; the pelvic nerve transmits signals from the vagina and cervix in women, and from the rectum in both sexes; the pudendal nerve transmits from the clitoris in women, and from the scrotum and penis in men; and the vagus nerve transmits from the cervix, uterus, and vagina in women.

NEUROCHEMICALS GIVE OFF THE ‘EUPHORIC’ FEELING

The “cloud nine” feeling reported by many during sex is linked to the nerves sent to the brain’s pleasure center, or reward circuit. The sexual arousals felt in the body flood the brain with a surge of neurochemicals, which are chemical messengers that forge emotions, feelings of attachment, and even love, according to Psychology Today. The level of pleasure is contingent on the release of these chemicals that can be used to measure the intensity of your climax. The areas of the brain impacted by sexual arousal include the amygdala, nucleus accumbens, ventral tegmental area (VTA), cerebellum, and the pituitary gland.

MALE AND FEMALE BRAIN SIMILAR TO BEING ON HEROIN

Although both sexes tend to engage in different behaviors during sex, the brains of men and women are not all that different. During an orgasm, the lateral orbitofrontal cortex — the brain region behind the left eye — shuts down during an orgasm. This region is considered to be the voice of reason and controls behavior. The brain of both a man and woman is said to look much like the brain of a person taking heroin during an orgasm, according to a studypublished in the Journal of Neuroscience.

A difference between the two sexes lies in the periaqueductal gray (PAG) — the part of the brain that is activated when a woman has sex. The PAG is not activated in men when they reach an orgasm. Moreover, women will experience a decrease in the amygdala and hippocampus — which help monitor fear and anxiety — during an orgasm.

WOMEN CAN’T ‘FAKE IT TILL THEY MAKE IT’ (IN AN MRI)

Women are notoriously known for faking orgasms out of pity for their partners, or to convince themselves the sex is good, but an MRI scan can show the truth. In an MRI scan, the brain is able to identify whether women were actually experiencing an orgasm. When the women were asked to fake an orgasm, their brain activity increased in the cerebellum and other areas related to movement control, but this brain activity was not seen during an actual orgasm.

Overall, an orgasm is the body’s physiological response to sexual stimulation, and involves involuntary body movements and vocalizations. This has a similar effect on the brain to that of an addictive substance, such as heroin. Men and women tend to have similar brain activity during an orgasm, despite the different emotions and behaviors displayed by both genders.

Read more at http://www.the-open-mind.com/brain-on-sex-how-the-brain-functions-during-an-orgasm/#tY5d5qivctrcBJoX.99