"DVD prices coming down..."

Not very likely. Once they market something to the educational establishment, the prices tend to stay astronomical. One of my very favorite films is "The Race for the Double Helix", an account of Watson and Cricks's unraveling of the structure of DNA. The modestly-produced, but terrific little film, starring Jeff Goldblum as Watson, besides documenting one of the greatest scientific achievements of the 20th century, is one of the few movies I have ever seen that actually captures what it's like to work around real scientists...the human side, warts and all. What could have been a $10 video suddenly jumped to over a hundred bucks after they started marketing it as an "educational resource" to schools and colleges.

The "Mechanical Universe" seems destined to the same fate. Fortunately, you can still watch it on your computer screen for free through the website I linked to.

What I'd like to see is a good Hollywood biopic on Edwin Hubble. Hubble not only discovered the basic architecture of the universe (within the lifetime of some people still alive today!) but was also a fascinating personality in his own right, even outside his professional life. He distinguished himself in his youth as an athlete, was an amateur boxer, achieved the rank of major in the US Army in World War I, and earned degrees in Law and Spanish before becoming an experimental cosmologist. Only his untimely death in 1953 prevented him from winning a Nobel Prize.

So much for the narrow-minded geek stereotype.