I have read two things today that I found most interesting, and I thought I’d share them via my blog, particularly since I don’t feel articulate enough to add any of my own thoughts. Too much gardening. :-)
The first has to do with some science information contained in an article reviewing The Core, which opens today (Friday). In the movie, the earth’s core has “stopped spinning, which causes a breakdown of the global magnetic field that has sheltered life from deadly solar and cosmic radiation for billions of years.” In real life, however, it’s true that “the earth’s protective magnetism really is weakening, and it’s happening 10 times faster than if the core had stopped spinning, as it does in the movie.”
The article goes on to point out that “by one count, 171 pole reversals [when the earth’s magnetic poles swap positions—north to south, south to north] have occurred in the past 71 million years”, and that “in a sense, we are overdue” for a pole reversal, since the last one “occurred about 750,000 years ago—three times the average interval.”
Apparently there is a spot off the coast of Brazil known as the “South Atlantic Anomaly”; “it’s a giant pothole in the magnetic field”, and it might mark a “reverse eddy in the flow of molten iron far below” in the earth’s core, and possibly presage a reversal of the magnetic poles.
The second thing I read is from the March 3, 2003, issue of The New Yorker, in an article about the actress Frances McDormand. I laughed out loud when I read the following:
“Concerned that she was too small-breasted for certain roles, McDormand got herself a pair of prosthetic breasts—‘lovely, big, C-cup, jiggly things’—which she would haul around with her, in a box, to auditions. (She wore them in Fargo, because her character was pregnant, and on that subzero set one of them froze and exploded. ‘I advise women with silicone breasts who are going to Minnesota not to stand outside in the cold,” she told W).”
Posted by elizabeth at March 28, 2003 01:01 AM