Previously: My brother the physicist explains Futurama and Animorphs. Hey, John Boy. I made you watch The Core with me this week and you were a pretty good sport about it. It's a pretty ridiculous movie -- the basic premise is that the earth's core stops rotating, dissolving the magnetic field surrounding the atmosphere, and a group of astronauts/scientists/Stanley Tucci have to set off nuclear bombs at the center of the earth to get…

My little brother is a physicist who works as a fuel efficiency researcher ("It's like Google Maps, but for shipping companies, and we track typhoons and pirate attacks instead of traffic and road closures"). He's very tall and I call him The Boy and when we were little we had a club that only the two of us belonged to called "The Fun Club" (sorry, Laura). Nowadays I spend a lot of time asking…