Astronauts on the International Space Station seem to float, which leads many people to assume gravity must be absent up there. In fact gravity at the station's altitude is still nearly 90 percent as strong as on the surface. The weightlessness comes from the station and its crew falling continuously around the Earth. Because they are moving sideways fast enough, they keep missing the ground as they fall. Everything inside the station falls together, so nothing presses against anything else. Understanding this shows that orbit is a kind of endless fall.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.