Film Review

The Last Time, a short film directed by Christine Hooper, is about the struggles of quitting smoking.  A woman whose name was not portrayed in the film narrates her battle with smoking cigarettes. 

            The film opens with a scene between the main character and a random man standing at a bus stop.  The man is smoking a cigarette and when she sees that he is, she flips quickly into her sudoku booklet to try and distract her from the cigarette.  The narrator, who is also the main character begins to reminisce about her beginning interaction with a cigarette that started her on the path of addiction.

            She believed it made her look cool and gave her a new set of friends, yet it also gave her a way to escape from an awkward situation.  From there this escape plan turned into an addiction.  An addiction that she couldn’t get away from where cigarettes were the only thing she could think about and it began getting in the way of her social life.

            The narrator talks about how she began to quit, and the short film ends with her back at the bus stop with the man.  The bus drives by and pics up the man and when it leaves his half-finished cigarette is on the ground. The woman walks over picks it up and takes a draw from it saying, “one last time” before she runs away, and the screen goes black.

            The film was a great way to show how many people battle this addiction with cigarettes, with a fun twist to it.  The director turned it into this sort of love story between the main character and the cigarette and the way it was shot helped keep audience interested to some extent.

             There were some week points in the film however.  The way it was shot made it seem like a long commercial instead of an actual film, and with there being no name to the character it didn’t allow this sort of connection that some people would like.  The plot line of the “love story” seemed to be the only thing really going for this film.

            Adding a sort of comedic element to a not so comedic problem makes it something that people would want to see, especially people battling the same addiction.  Many people who smoke do not like watching commercials or videos on quitting because they would say “oh well it’s not that easy”.  However, this film showed that yes, it is not that easy, but it is a struggle that one can overcome.

Why Does Ice Float?

Why Does Ice Float?

            A lot of substances in the world can be formed into three different states, solid, liquid, and gas.  Normally each state the substance is in changes its density with solid being the most dense, then liquid, then gas.  Density is the degree of compactness in a substance, water for example has a density of about 1g/cm³, anything with a larger density will sink, and anything with a smaller density will float.

            Ice is the solid form of water, so why does it float?

            Theoretically ice should sink, it is the solid form for water, and it technically should have a larger density.  When tossing rocks into water they sink, the rocks are able to displace the water around it and sink to the bottom. According to Anne Marie Helmenstine, who has her doctorate in philosophy in biomedical sciences from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville with a bachelor of arts degrees in physics and mathematics with a minor in chemistry from Hastings College in Nebraska, in her article “Why Does Ice Float? Ice and the Density of Water”.

            Dr. Helmenstine explains that water becomes the most dense at about 40^o Fahrenheit and as it gets colder and starts to become frozen, it actually loses its density.

            Wouldn’t it make sense that when water is frozen its particles would stop moving and stack closer together? That doesn’t happen because of Hydrogen Bonding.  Dr. Helmenstine explained that hydrogen bonding is when a positively charged hydrogen atom from a water molecule meets a negatively charged oxygen atom from a neighboring water molecule and they form a bond.

            According to George Zaidan, a science communicator who created, wrote, and hosted National Geographic’s webseries Ingredients; and co-wrote and directed MIT’s webseries Science Out Loud, also, he has several viral TED-Ed videos, in one of his TED-Ed videos he says that Hydrogen bonds form all the time even in waters liquid states.

            Zaiden says that in liquid form however the hydrogen bonds form and break every second with the water molecules moving around forming a new bond each time.  This causes the molecules to seem more compact because they are always moving and connecting with each other.

            Zaiden continues by showing a diagram in the TED video that shows the difference between the liquid molecules and solid ones.  The liquid molecules move around, attach and detach in a more compact way, while when ice is formed the molecules attach forming a hexagonal spacious look, causing there to be more molecules per cm³ in the liquid form than the solid form.

            Dr. Helmenstine explains that in conclusion Ice floats because it is about 9% less dense than water, or ice takes up 9% more space than water.  The heavier water displaces the lighter ice causing it to float to the top.