Wired had this interesting article which states:
Gollum, if you remember, dove into the lava of Mount Doom after his precious ring was thrown in — he proceeds to sink into the lava (see below) and leaves the ring floating on the lava until it melts away. Guess what? Sinking into lava just will not happen if you’re a human (or remotely human). You’d need to be a Terminator to sink into molten rock/metal …
On a discussion of the article on some other site, author John Scalzi wrote:
In a film with spiders of physically impossible size, talking trees, ugly warriors birthed out of mud and a disembodied malevolence causing a ring to corrupt the mind of anyone who wears it (and also turn them invisible), we’re going to complain that the lava is not viscous enough?
I can understand Scalzi’s point, but I disagree with his argument that one shouldn’t complain about the physics of Middle Earth lava just because one has accepted the existence of fantastical Middle Earth creatures.
I agree with Scalzi when he writes:
… you should consider the work in its totality and ask whether in the context of the work, this specific thing is inconsistent with the worldbuilding.
I’d also add (though it should be obvious) that this will be a subjective issue. Some people can more easily suspend their disbelief about certain things than others. If your area of expertise includes lava, lava falsehoods will stand out to you more than talking trees (and Ents are not trees, by the way).
Personally, the lava issue doesn’t bother me, but I’ve never seen a living creature fall into lava before. And it’s not something I ever really want to see. But if I did see such a thing, aside from being scarred and depressed for the rest of my sad sorry life, I can understand why Gollum’s death goop might stop working for me, even while I accept all the other magic of Middle Earth. There’s nothing in the story that signifies that the lava should behave in any other way than it does here on earth. Similarly, gravity behaves the same way, temperature behaves the same way, elf and hobbit and wizard emotions behave the same way. So it’s not like we assume that everything is so different that we have to just accept everything that comes our way.
Imagine if Gollum had bounced on the lava as if it were a trampoline. Who would accept that? Would me saying “hey, you accepted talking trees!” make you change your mind? I doubt it. You expect the lava to behave a certain way in the context of the story.
I would say that most audiences accept the physics of Gollum’s death because that is exactly how most of us imagine falling into lava should look, because most of us haven’t witnessed creatures falling into lava before. When we watch videos of rivers of lava pouring down the side of a volcano, it looks as viscous as it does in Gollum’s death scene. So our acceptance of the physics of Gollum’s death is based on our own lava-physics ignorance, not on our consideration of our own acceptance of the wizards and talking trees and giant spiders that preceded it. This lava-physics ignorance is also what makes the Wired article interesting at all in the first place (at least to me). It’s fun and educational!
Also, I think we could argue that as the lava liquefies Gollum’s innards, because the ring of power has turned him into the ugly gross unnatural goblin-like creature he is, his unnatural innards would liquefy in such a way that they mix in the lava in such a way that what we see in the movie makes perfect sense. That is, the Wired article may be right about the physics of the lava, but it hath no knowledge about the physics of melting Gollum guts, which might become extremely dense at high temperatures. (Sure, why not?) Or perhaps his skin vaporizes easily at lava temperatures, and lava pours into muscles and bones. He’s not really sinking; he’s being pulled down by the flow of the lava. Why didn’t Tolkien specify these sorts of things? He could’ve had an entire section of the appendix for this!
. It’s not nearly the super-fanciest camera in the world, but for my simple purposes, it will work wonderfully. It’s great at auto-adjusting to almost any lighting conditions, whereas my cheaper camera can’t deal with lack of light very well. It’s also great at focusing on very close things; you can put something up to almost the lens, and it can get it in focus. It also shoots video in 720 HD, which will be great for shooting animation reference. My only complaint is that it seems to suck up battery life, especially when shooting videos. None of that may seem all that impressive to those of you with very high end cameras, but I’ve only had much cheaper cameras up until now.
on blu-ray. They had a good deal for it at Best Buy, so I cancelled my Amazon.com order for it and picked it up. Testing it out, it looks fantastic. It looks a little too good, in fact; you can notice some special effects mistakes. For example, when Gollum gets the ring at the end of RotK and the camera zooms out above him as he’s happily looking up at the ring in his hand, his feet wobble unnaturally in front of the ground; you can really tell how he was inserted digitally into the scene. There are also plenty of scenes in which you can really get that blue-screen effect, in which the edges of the characters are strangely blurry and the lighting doesn’t quite match. Actually, that happens on the DVDs too, but I think it’s even more noticeable on blu-ray. But I don’t think anything is so bad that I won’t be able to enjoy it. Overall, it still looks fantastic. I can’t wait until I have time to watch them… I’d love to try watching all three right in a row, though I know that will take all day.
Last Friday my mom and I went to Wolftrap to see a 
A few days ago, all the applications on my laptop, from Firefox to Microsoft Office programs, kept crashing. Then I’d often get the bluescreen of death saying something about a physical memory dump and then restarting the computer. I was sure it was a RAM issue, and thought one of my sticks of RAM was bad and needed to be replaced. So I took out one of the laptop’s RAM modules and, voila, it worked! Though I was out 2 GB of RAM. I wanted to go buy some more RAM just for the quick fix of it, but my father insisted that I call Dell support. So I did (well, actually, he did, and then handed me the phone) and, by switching the working RAM into the other slot as support told me to, I discovered the problem wasn’t with the RAM, but with the motherboard; it couldn’t communicate with that RAM port for some reason.
Last week, I finished reading 
. It was written in 2006, and in the computer world, that makes it outdated already. (Though there is now an updated and revised edition that I haven’t read, but I’m linking to it anyway.) YouTube wasn’t as big when the book was written, and it mentions Google Froogle every now and then. But, overall, the ideas in the book are very good.
I also recently started some projects with a friend. The first idea was to create cartoony shorts, similar to PowerPoint presentations we used to give in high school. You can see our first animation