Tell me if this doesn’t sound familiar to you: you’re sitting in class in your usual spot, up front but slightly off to the side so you can see the board but not be too obvious about it. It’s about twenty minutes into the lecture and the white board is now so covered in notes, drawings, and equations that the professor has to start erasing things to make room for the rest of the... »
This is probably a good time to make this confession, before I get to the meat of the article: Astronomy terrifies me. I don’t just mean that I get nervous when I think about zipping on a space suit and going into orbit 240 miles above the Earth, which I do. Like, I’m afraid of planets. I feel a bit of vertigo if I’m browsing through Wikipedia pages on the solar system for too long. Star-gazin... »
Do you remember what you were doing eight years ago on June 8th, 2004? No? Neither do I, but on that early day in the Northern Hemisphere’s summer, celestial bodies in our solar system were aligning. The planet Venus’ orbit brought it directly between the Earth and the Sun and for six hours, Venus appeared to observers on Earth as a black silhouette against the solar disk. It was an itty, bitt... »
Scarlett Johansson gets to reprise her role as superhero/superheroine Agent Natasha Romanoff, also known as “Black Widow”, in a quaint little independent film called Marvel’s The Avengers that made its premier in the United States a couple weeks ago. Agent Romanoff is a reformed freelance assassin who now works for S.H.E.I.L.D., the international espionage and military law-enforcement divis... »
You know what would be great? If I could unscrew things without using my arm to apply the torque. You know what would also be great? If I could have some surgery done on a part that’s inside my body without doctors having to slice through the other bits of me that are in the way. You know what else is great? Bow ties and chucks. »
On March 8th, 2012 Disney’s John Carter was released in theaters to the general public. Adapted from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1917 pulp novel, A Princess of Mars, the movie’s plot follows the swashbuckling antics of John Carter, a disillusioned Civil War veteran who is transported to Mars after he kills a Martian god on Earth and touches a magic talisman. The native Mart... »
