Door Number 3. (This is going to be a drum.)

 A nice plug in the Guardian yesterday for Gemma Brockis' Oddvent calendar, and thanks to Gemma for allowing me to grant all of you ole unattendees Very Important Person access, as we say in the threshold business, through today's door. Click here to open it and witness my contribution – possibly inspired by the Cosmic Shambles' many show-and-tells – there's more information about the calendar here, and if you need one the password for today is "help". (My first idea was to giftwrap an egg, but I'm not doing that now, so giftwrapping an egg is still going.) Enjoy! 

 

 UPDATE: Now the Calendar has vanished, my contribution's up on youtube.

Un-Slowed-Down Footage Of Those Faked Moon Landings

 In further deep fake news, a lot of people have put music on this footage but none have managed to make it funnier. When I recorded my growing doubts, here last year, about Humanity's Destiny in Outer Space, I hadn't even considered gravity. I mean... look at this! Living on an actual other planet? Every day? Doing this?

 Earth it is. 

 I heard recently on this Cosmic Shambles Q&A that one proposal to combat climate change was the reintroduction of cloned mammoths to the Arctic because they'd break up the permafrost or help create more or something. It was debunked though. Maybe I should stop eating hamburgers.

Gods, Men and Monsters. And Snakes... Oh, and Women!

   For centuries, it seems, the defining characteristic of a gorgon was actually her tusks. This two-and-a-half-thousand year old antefix from the island of Thasos for example doesn't even bother with snakes in the hair. I hadn't realised not having snakes in the hair was an option. I wish I'd known that when I was nine.

 I just assumed you really had to commit to the snakes. I also thought you had to give a gorgon breasts, which as a nine-year-old I would definitely have found harder to draw than snakes; but the Medusa in Clash of the Titans had breasts, and the Medusa on the front cover of my school's copy of Gods, Men and Monsters clearly had breasts, so in the best traditions of Classical Sculpture, room was made. And speaking of grotesque misrepresentations of women from Greek Mythology: my friend and teacher Natalie Haynes has a new book out to set the record straight called Pandora's Jar, which she talks about on a very fun Book Shambles HERE! 

 Here's another misrepresentation: the Pythia at Delphi, showing a lot less skin than Medusa, and surrounded by big, scary Dangermouse eyes in tunnels. I've clearly misunderstood "Pythia" to mean "half-lady-half-python" which it didn't at all. It just meant "priestess". Still it gave me a chance to draw more snakes. And here are more: the giant cobra that apparently guards the Golden Fleece, facing Jason in his Speedos over on the right...

 And one of the heads of the magic deity Hecate up in the centre, whom I have also given hairy legs, knee windows and a nighty. On the bottom left is Medea, single-handedly taking on the bronze giant Talos. Not Jason at all. I'd forgotten this, but Natalie mentions it in the Shambles so I'm happy to see this was also the version I was taught. And fuck it, here's a slime monster.

 Now a plug: On Friday I'll be one of seventy-two actors reading The Odyssey aloud in its entirety on the Jermyn Street Theatre's live stream here. I'll be on around 4pm, I think (after Mark Corrigan's mum!) telling of Odysseus' conversations with ghosts in Hades, including the ghost of Agamemnon who sacrificed his own daughter Iphigenia and was in turn murdered by his wife Clytemnestra. "She has poured down shame on her own head," Agamemnon moans, "and on all other women, even good ones." The italics are mine, but I'll be the one reading it so they're staying. Natalie also talks about Agamemnon. She says her next book will be a novel about Medusa. I can't wait.

#WhyTheyAreDoingThis (with the Incomparable Ince)

 

 I was actually planning on posting this before #WhyAreTheyDoingThis started trending on tw*tt*r, just because it's so good, but anyway yes, here's why. I feel Robin Ince should be given the chance to turn down a knighthood for his stewardship of the Cosmic Shambles during this pandemic; he takes his job incredibly seriously without taking himself seriously and every one of their videos has made my lockdown life a little richer. This Covid-specific Q&A is a particular highlight, whether you want your own questions answered, or something to answer someone else's, or even if you think you know it all anyway but just want to enjoy patient and enquiring minds presenting their findings and discussing their differences. Pretty much everything is covered here, including the problems faced when trying to communicate this stuff: messages require clarity but without becoming so simplified they provoke "rage against the soundbite". I was also interested to learn the two biggest problems attending the coming winter won't be the cold itself, which is actually bad for the virus, but the closing of windows, which will keep infection in, and the turning on of central heating, which will make virus-carrying particles floatier. I've assumed the only thing stopping the current government from turning out similarly useful information packages - like they used to do with seatbelts and the country code -

 

F***ers.

 

... was a hatred of the seventies, but on reflection I suppose the message does have to be allowed to change. So in the absence of Joe and Petunia, or Jimmy Savile shaking an egg in a box, here is an absolute good, to be used unsparingly. Again, their patreon's here.

Icebergs, Sirens and A Thing that looks like The Biggest Thing

 HMS Captain, which sank on its first night out with the fleet 

because it was too heavy and weird-looking (image source).

 At the 3:26 mark of the latest Ships, Sea and the Stars from the Royal Museums Greenwich I read Lawrence Beesley's astonishing eye-witness account of the sinking of the Titanic. The subject of the show is marine archeology and the guests are Andrew Choong, who loves boats, and Helen Farr, who loves time, which is handy. Helen Czerski's the host, and I feel she would have described the Titanic sinking in a very similar manner to Beesley; both share an attention to not just detail but exactly the right detail, and a clarity of insight into just what it is about that detail which makes the processing of it so unforgettable. Catching up with a Science Shambles from a couple of weeks ago, in addition to some excellent talk about astronomy for the blind, what the big bang looked like, and why candles don't work in zero gravity, eleven minutes in I heard Helen offer this great vignette: "I remember the biggest thing I've ever seen - and it wasn't the biggest thing I'd ever seen, but my brain thought it was - and it was a tornado. And the thing about a tornado is that clouds are normally there, but you don't normally see them connected to the ground. The cloud base was probably three kilometeres. So I was looking at something three kilometers big."
 I've no idea what the actual biggest thing Helen's seen is.

"Obviously You Have a Bunch Of Physics And Stuff Going On..." Learning Science With The Corridor Crew.

 If people didn't love special effects we'd never have had the Renaissance. Leonardo and Michelangelo didn't study the sciences out of idle curiosity, but because mastering their art meant fooling the eye, and that meant understanding perspective, light, physics and biology. Even John Dee started out in special effects at Trinity College. I arrived at this conclusion after a couple of days down a rabbit hole with Los Angeles-based Visual Effects youtubers, the Corridor Crew. I'd come to them through their "stuntmen react to stunts" videos, which led me to their "VFX artists react to VFX" videos, and I was just enjoying the clips and vicariously getting off on their work ethic, but then realised I was also beginning to learn some science. The penny dropped when they were reacting to 2012. I knew from Helen Czerski's zero gravity reports over on the Cosmic Shambles Network that physicists have been after a general theory of granular material, but it hadn't occurred to me that CGI artists working on disaster movies would also be after exactly the same thing. Here. (I think all these videos begin at the appropriate point)...

 And it's not just a one-way street. Instead of producing concept art for the black hole in Interstellar for example, an astrophysicist was approached to provide equations to feed into a purpose built rendering engine, and the resulting visualisation produced two research papers...

 I've also learnt from these videos how light acts beneath the surface of the skin, and how important an understanding of this "subsurface scattering" is in producing non-gummy-looking CGI humans. (I've also learnt that far too many artists think there's a muscle linking the filtrum to the upper lip)...

 Less universally applicable, but still fascinatingly, I've learnt that being set on fire as a stuntman is surprisingly feezing...

 And that for all the battle scenes in which you may have seen a flying arrow sliced in half, it turns out you shouldn't actually try to intercept a missile with a weapon specifically designed to pass through things (that's my conclusion, not theirs)...

 These are just examples of the science I picked up by the by. The Corridor Crew also produce more traditionally educational videos, and they're also superb. As Visual Effects Artists the Corridor Crew are first and foremost communicators, so they don't just understand the science that they're explaining, they understand how people receive information. For example here's a very simple idea that's hard to communicate: the scale of the Universe. As a potentially unfair comparison, here first is Arvin Ash, zooming in and out a lot, wasting our time on how a shrew is bigger than an ant, and throwing in a weird amount of stock footage of blondes in their underwear.

 And now here's the Corridor Crew's contribution. A problem has been identified and addressed, and fun has resulted. First scaling down...

Then scaling up. (In summary, if the planck length were the diameter of a tennis ball, an American penny would be ninety thousand times wider than the entire universe)...

 There's such a glorious clarity to all their stuff, and I really can't recommend their channel enough. And it reminds me how much I love Los Angeles. The city's a workshop, and as was true in the Renaissance, the polymaths are all there, working in VFX.

The View From Space: Catching Up With Lembit Öpik

From Dinosaurs And All That Rubbish by Michael Foreman. 
(I found out today my friend Saskia knows him.)

 Firstly, apologies for missing out the umlaut in "Öpik" in my previous post about the Chair of Parliament for outer space's first ever pyramid scheme zero-gravity sex-farm micronation "Asgardia", but I didn't know how to do them in January. You just have to keep the vowel key pressed, it turns out. Moving on: I'm not sure what those images are behind Öpik, something space-based no doubt, and it doesn't look like wherever he's quarantining himself allows the hanging of pictures, but that print of an aeroplane window looks pretty levelly propped up on the back of his sofa so I've no further notes. Take it away, Lembit!

Clearly.

 (The Cosmic Shambles Network, by the way, has also been doing some actual zero-gravity research, here.)

Sea Change

 This is methane ice, which is a thing, There's estimated to be more than one thousand trillion cubic metres it at the bottom of the ocean. Not all of it stays there. The warmer the ocean gets, the more of it is released up into the atmosphere, warming the air, which warms the ocean, which releases more methane, and so on. And by "and so on" I mean of course "until this planet is as uninhabitable as Venus" but currently however, fortunately, ninety percent of the methane's absorbed by little flitting microbes as it rises to the surface. I picture them flitting anyway, but not vividly enough to see upon what. Good for them. All this and more I learnt on Monday which was "World Ocean Day", from the frankly exciting Dr. Helen Czerski in World Ocean Autopsy: The Secret Of Our Seas - featuring an actual porpoise autopsy, be warned - which screened that evening, and is now viewable here.

 Michael Pinsky's Pollution Pods

 Earlier in the day Helen joined the Royal Museums Greenwich again to host an Ocean Day Special, packed with experts, no expert more immediately invested in the fate of the oceans perhaps than Lisa Koperqualuk of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, co-managing the new world as the ice melts. The show is typically inspiring and surprising and just plain kind, and I'm so pleased to have been involved with these (obviously the grumpiest guest is the artist.)

 In an article for the Washington Post, climate expert Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Robinson quotes Toni Morrison: "The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work" and that article's now behind a paywall so I'm also sharing this that she wrote for Scientific American: "To Save the Climate, Look to the Oceans". According to Helen Czerski, they're engine of the world, and that's a hell of an image. To end with here's a great little tour of the engine's highways, cities and volcanoes, accompanying a tuna in May's epic Sea Shambles. And that on the wall behind Helen is apparently a "bait ball". I'll post a real one tomorrow, because they're amazing.

O Sweet, O Sweet Content!

 

All set!

 I am seriously considering a review of the two-hundred VHS tapes I keep in the cupboard to replace Frankenstein Wednesdays. I started on tape #1 last night, containing Flash Gordon, The Man With Two Brains and The Fellowship of the Ring, Extended Edition (or as my Dad put it, the version where they put all the acting). It's interesting to note that Hobbiton, supposedly the most backward, unchanging community in Tolkein's world, appears to be centuries ahead in its influences of the Medieval-inspired civilisations surrounding it. Boom! Blog done. I'd also been considering blogging about Ming's daughter Princess Aura for a while: She seems to have been to Flash Gordon creator Alex Raymond what Satan was to Milton: entirely and unintentionally heroic.

 Boom! Another blog. Really though today's post is all about flagging up some of the beautiful ways others have been using their time. The magnificent Andy Stanton, for example, has been reading aloud all of a Mr. Gum book, so we can finally know for certain what everyone was supposed to sound like:

 His fellow Nincompoop, and my own colleague and definite future Dr. Who, Carrie Quinlan, has initiated The Wild Freelancer Blog, and also this: 

 The writers of Mitchell and Webb's "Remain Indoors" sketches have remained indoors to bring us this episode of Rule Of Three (no way of embedding that, sorry) while Mighty Fin impresario Robbie Hudson has set up his own Emergency Broadcast System over on Spotify, on which I can occassionally be heard bellowing songs. Seasoned Science shut-in Helen Czerski (six weeks aboard a ship studying bubbles at the North Pole is nothing to her - she's like an astronaut if space had bears) joins the ranks of Science Shambles' Stay at Home Festival:

 More fictionally, Monster Hunters co-creator Matthew Woodcock has created a surprisingly prescient submarine-based thriller for Definitely Human called Down, its presience almost exactly matching that of Avenue 5, if anyone's seen that. No spoilers. Avenue 5's shuttle pilot John Finnemore meanwhile, perhaps most heroically of all, has gone and shaved his beard just to give us this wonderful thing:

 And obviously I've been rebranding procrastination as "social isolation" from pretty much ever since this blog went daily last Christmas (April the first will be the hundredth straight post) but, Oo! My second pilot to Time Spanner, The Dan in the High Castle, is being repeated on Radio 4 tomorrow if anyone fancies a huddle. Huge thanks and love to all these makers and partakers. Be well, everyone.

For when I run out of VHSes.