My prediction, come the Oscars, "Gravity" won't win any of the big prizes. The Academy seems to have little minimal respect for the minimalist, strengths of the medium it is supposed to represent. Once again, as it has consistently done it the past, it will reward the size, weight and worth. Watch out for "12 Years A Slave" and the other awards' season Oscar bait to come.

"As an aside, I also have to say, I really don't feel compelled to see another film about the holocaust or slavery..."

I don't see those kind of movies anymore either. Did you see The Butler? It does start out with slavery, but it just shows the tragedy that the butler, as a child, goes through and takes off from there. It's a very good movie.

Quvenzhané Wallis plays Chiwetel Ejiofor's daughter in 12 Years a Slave, and she's following it up with the lead in Annie. Yes, that Annie.

It's good to see her getting the chance to build on her brilliant performance in that "Wild Things" thing.

Agree that Gravity lacks the specific gravity needed for gold statuettes.

Did you hear about the astronaut who drifted off into deep space? He's 0K now.

The Casimir effect is a strange and mysterious force that operates on the tiniest scales. It pushes together small metal objects when they are separated by a tiny distance.

That’s a problem because engineers are increasingly interested in building tiny machines with parts that move against each other on precisely the scale. For some years now, they’ve been thwarted by a problem called stiction in which the tiny cogs, gears and other parts in these machines stick together so tightly that the device stops working.

The culprit in these strange stiction events is often the Casimir effect. But since it is poorly understood, physicists and engineers have never known how to prevent it.
...

This ability to reduce the Casimir force could have a profound effect on the way microscopic and nanoscopic machines are designed and built in the near future and on their reliability.

The Casimir effect comes about because the universe at the smallest scales is filled with virtual particles leaping in and out of existence. When two metal plates are close together, the gap between them is so small that some of these particles cannot form. That creates an excess of virtual particles on the other sides of the plates which pushes them together.

This force is impressive. At distances of around 10 nm, the force is equivalent to about 1 atmosphere of pressure. But it drops off dramatically as the distance increases

After he woke up ...

(I didn't get Jeremy's joke, so made one of my own)