– remember to look up –
Apparently, if you smell a fresh meteorite it smells like sulphur, according to reports about the Tagish Lake meteorite and the aroma that filled the air during its fall in 2000. And the Aguas Zarcas meteorite that fell in Costa Rica in 2019 has been said to smell of compost, vanilla and Brussels sprouts, depending …
Graphics showing all asteroids and comets visited by spacecraft as at 21 September 2020. Images and distances are not to scale. However, the images have been been scaled and laid out to give a rough idea of increasing size and distance. Trans-Neptunian Object 486958 Arrokoth is not included, but as at 1 January 2019, it …
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You might think Asteroid vs Comet is the title of a new disaster movie where one Solar System object battles another. We have all seen fictional depictions in the movies where an asteroid or comet is knocked by the other onto an Earth-bound trajectory with devastating consequences, for example in the the classic When Worlds …
Last year I did some digging around for space rocks – that's movies about space rocks. The idea was to compile a list of every asteroid and comet disaster movie ever made, from the very first silent black and white offering in 1916, to those well-known blockbusters that launch at us the whole arsenal of …
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Having watched all five seasons of the Amazon police drama Bosch, I was excited to find Season 6 arrive during the lockdown imposed on us due to the coronavirus pandemic. Ten minutes into the first episode and Bosch is called out to the Overlook at Lake Hollywood Park on a murder case. An abandoned 911 …
Misuse of the pronouns me, myself and I causes much annoyance to those who read or hear the error, but figuring out the correct form to use is really very simple. I am ashamed to say that many of the perpetrators of the misuse of me, myself and I are the English themselves. I must …
Knowing when to use who or whom in a sentence is a challenge to those it may concern. But figuring out which of these pronouns to use is really easy and simply a case of identifying the subject (who is doing the thing) and the object (to whom the thing is being done). The simplest …
It's the end of the year and some tabloid newspapers are again warning us that it could soon be the end of the world – yes, asteroid 2019 AE3 is in our vicinity and closing in. In keeping with the drama, below is a list of every cinema and TV drama ever made that feature …
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Taps, faucets, valves – call them what you will – this post is about basin monobloc mixer taps and how to make the choice when manufacturers all produce very similar designs. Being in the process of renovating my bathroom, I've spent countless hours, nay weeks (could even be months) trawling through catalogues of basins, baths, …
Amazon TV's Goliath is back for a third instalment and after the diverse offerings in Seasons 1 and 2, no-one knew what to expect in Season 3. When Billy McBride in Season 1 said, “Ever since I took this case, weird shit is happening to me…”, well, that kind of weird has nothing on this. …
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So there's another apocalyptic asteroid warning in the tabloid news headlines. The lead scaremongerer in the UK is the Daily Express, who started out playfully alerting us to asteroids that will skim by Earth in the coming days. It didn't take long for a war of the digital world to start warning of swarms of …
How many spaces should follow the punctuation at the end of a sentence? One…two? And does anyone really care? Since 1929, the American Psychological Association (the eponymous creators of the APA style) have had their say about how many end-of-sentence spaces we should be using, as set out in their style guide manual. But in …
I once read a quote in a conference abstract that stated the paper had been written to serve as “a historical guide to the asteroid literature for the perplexed”. That quote aptly sums up my desire for writing a piece on the history of asteroid classification and taxonomies, and the schemes currently in use. When …
More than 100 years have passed since the first film was shown in movie theatres that depicted events surrounding a rock from space making an impact with Earth. In that case, it was a comet rather than an asteroid. The movie, a silent film called The End of the World (1916), was inspired by the …
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Many people will remember the day in 2013 when one asteroid stole the limelight from another. On 15 February 2013, all eyes of astronomers were on the close approach of a 30 metre-sized Apollo asteroid 367943 Duende (then known as 2012 DA14). The asteroid was not expected to be visible to the naked eye. Nor …
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In this post I go down a rocky road of clarifying some of the often confused terminology relating to asteroid and comet impacts and the associated phenomena of meteoroids, meteors and meteorites. Much of the confusion is due to misunderstanding and misuse of the terms in the media and movies, but somewhat surprisingly you can …
It has been a while since Amazon's eagerly anticipated Goliath Season 2 was released. Those who watched the drama unfold might think it has taken so long for me to get round to writing a review because I needed to get over the shock of what we saw. I admit, I did have to cover …
Rewriting characters: Goliath Season 1 follows on from my post about rewriting characters in a long-running TV sitcom. I now discuss some of the character changes to the first season of Goliath, the Amazon legal drama series starring Billy Bob Thornton as an underdog lawyer. The following discussion is a comparative analysis between the third …
As part of my fledgling scriptwriting aspirations, I was interested to understand how a hugely successful TV show knows right from the start what people will watch whilst making content unique. This led me to start reading drafts and pilot episode scripts of TV shows. I soon realised that those making these shows often don't …
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Knowing what sells is essential if you want to write a successful script, so a key part of a scriptwriter's toolbox is to read as many scripts as possible written by others. It also becomes less disheartening when you see that some of the most successful films and TV shows contained ideas in early drafts …
Graphics showing all comets and asteroids visited by spacecraft as at 1 February 2019. Images and distances are not to scale. However, the images have been been scaled and laid out to give a rough idea of increasing size and distance. Trans-Neptunian Object 486958 Arrokoth is not included, but as at 1 January 2019, it …
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In a previous article I explained how to display videos inside title text in Premiere Pro. In this post I explain how to put a different video clip inside each letter in the title text. And yes, before you shout in protest that the featured image should say FLY PAST, I apologise for using FLY …
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A colleague recently saw an ad on TV for a series of Star Wars movies which showed a different movie clip playing inside each letter in the Star Wars logo and asked me how it was done. In a previous article, I explained how to put still images inside text in InDesign so I thought a new …
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From advertising billboards to TV show opening sequences to movie trailers, images inside text have been a growing trend since 2018. Print advertisers using the look included British Airways and Smart Energy GB, and and on TV the effect was used in various ways including to advertise Star Wars movies, to animate the Channel 5 …
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