When tin foil suits look good…

(Warning: Spoiler Alert)

I just watched Be Kind Rewind and being nerdy and into nerdy films and people wearing bowls on their heads and tin foil suits, I have to say, I liked the film. But beyond the surface stuff its also a pretty good movie with gentrification at the core.

Good ol’ town of Passaic, NJ is apparently down on its luck, particularly the supposed neighborhood near the junk yard and the power plant. Somehow, a magnetizing mishap leads to remakes of beloved, and not so beloved, movies. I loved the montage of Mos Def (who I have yet to see in a movie I don’t like) and Jack Black doing the remake of Ghostbusters. Christmas tinsel as the proton streams? Brilliant. But then somehow these self made movies start to bring the neighborhood together. I get the premise of the area people liking being in the films and seeing themselves in them, but its still on a bit of shaky ground as to how in a few months they get to almost raising $60k. Interestingly though, even though the neighborhood comes together in the end all nice and heartwarmingly, Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) still ends up agreeing to the contract to demolish his store and apartment to make room for condos, which is probably the most realistic part of the movie.

Despite the inherent faults, I’m still telling y’all to go see it. There are some great goofy laugh out loud moments, the montage scenes are high caliber montages (particularly if you consider yourself a movie buff), quirky characters, etc. But one of my favorite things is that the director, Michel Gondry, used actual Passaicans (?) as the majority of the extras as well as some of the minor characters. If you rent the dvd definitely watch the bonus material little film ‘Passaic Mosaic’. I actually wish there was a longer version of ‘Passaic Mosaic’ that Michel Gondry did as I think he would bring a compassionate eye to the subjects of gentrification and loss that many neighborhoods are currently dealing with.

So apparently all we’ve got to do is get together adorable misfits to make short films of real films and fake documentaries and we’re good to go in bringing communities together. Sigh, if only.

- suse

Black holes and vintage wines!

Turns out particle accelerators aren’t just for (potentially) making black holes, you can also figure out the age of wine with them! Leave it to some fantastic French scientists to figure this one out. Turns out you can place a wine bottle in the path of the ion beams a particle accelerator produces and the glass wine bottle will then emit different x-rays dependent on its age. Brilliant! Does this mean that the LHC being the most powerful particle accelerator could give the most accurate readings? So if the people trying to stop the LHC (and these too, awesome) get their way, at least they’ll be something useful to have it do.

The LHC path

+

Old wine bottles

= French scientist’s wet dream

- suse

Government-Issued Comic Books

So, there was this one time when I was at work about two years ago and I stumbled upon the fact that the Federal Reserve Bank made comic books. Right. I was shocked. But, I love comic books and I love the Fed (Greenspan > Bernanke, obvi), so I order, like 10 of all of them ’cause they’re free. Still have copies, if you all are interested. Wishes and Rainbows and Once Upon a Dime are my favorites. Maybe that can be our first blog give-away!

Anyways, apparently when you order like 50 copies of Fed Comix, they think that you’re some kind of teacher who uses them to like educate, um, kids, or the elderly, or something. Not just some nerd who likes ephemera. So, they send you a survey. And it looks something like this:

Shredded Wheat, I get. This, not so much.

So, yeah. I’ll let you all know when I get a bag of shredded currency from the Fed (?!). Or a gym bag.

- Ferrrosha

Conscious Hip-Hop?

No, it isn’t.  But, after watching, you’ll know about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC!), and the Higgs Boson (the so called God Particle…it makes gravity. Maybe…if it exists…and doesn’t destroy the universe.)

I’ve always wanted a Grand Unified Theory.

Also, FOX NEWS THINKS WE SHOULD WORRY.  But they always think that.

- Ferrrosha

S is for Entropy?

Hey there, blogging public! Ferrrosha here. I’ve been neglecting the lovely TOTC fans and friends while trying to pursue my other career. The library is the chicest new spot to summer. Tell your friends.

But, in all of this “OMG did you get a better grade than me?!” madness, what have I learned? Well, here are the highlights:

- Ethanol as an alternative energy source is a terrible idea, solar power is awesome, and nuclear power has a few practical concerns (nevermind political ones).

- CO2 is the greatest!

- Anything you ever learned about the atom was probably a giant lie. Neutrons? Protons? Pah!

- Columbia sold their cyclotron (the first in North America, a major part in the development of nuclear chemistry and the atomic age, nobel prizing-assisting, scientific-history making) for scrap metal, even though the Smithsonian would have probably taken it.

- You can memorize all of the laws of thermodynamics using the chorus from Michael Jackson’s “You Can’t Win.” The seven minute disco version is especially rewarding.

- Maxwell’s Demon would be a great name for a band. A good band.

- I’ve been pronouncing de Broglie wrong for about 6 months. I should get some of my money back.

- Cats excel at optics, triboelectricity.

- 90% of science is making lines, finding the slopes of said lines, and then going “hmm…”

But, I still haven’t learned how Iron Man’s heart works! Maybe I should ask that on the last day of Physics. Before it’s too late.

MJ, crows, take us out!

- Ferrrosha

For the Nerds

Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey

Professor David Harvey has been teaching Marx’s Capital Volume I for
nearly 40 years. Now, for the first time, his entire course is being
made available online at:
http://davidharvey.org

This free online course consists of 13 video lectures by David Harvey,
sharing his close reading of the text of Marx’s Capital, Volume I. You
can watch the videos online, or subscribe to the podcast. The first
four classes are already available, and a new class is being posted
each week.

David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City
University of New York (CUNY) and author of various books, including
The Condition of Postmodernity, The Limits to Capital, and A Brief
History of Neoliberalism.