April 25

Better Than News

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  Spice Runner is 2021 action-cooking film about synthetic chefs known as replicants which are bio-engineered by the powerful Tyrell Kitchens. When a fugitive group of advanced replicants escapes back to Caladan, burnt-out restauranteur Baron Harkonnen reluctantly agrees to taste-test their food..

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  Pump Up the Jam is a comedy food science film about a company's attempts to make inflatable jam. Shown here: the controversial "human testing" scene.

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  A Few Good Algorithms is a 1992 American legal computational complexity drama film directed by Rob Reiner and Andrey Kolmogorov, starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kevin Bacon.

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  Mission: Impossible – The Master is an American psychological spy drama film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and J. J. Abrams, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix, and Tom Cruise.

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  Steel Pizzas is a romantic comedy-drama film directed by Donald Petrie and Herbert Ross, starring Julia Roberts, Annabeth Gish, Sally Field, Dolly Parton, Lili Taylor, and Olympia Dukakis.

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887–1920) had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, yet he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems considered to be unsolvable; that Ramanujan initially developed his own mathematical research in isolation; and that during his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 results (mostly identities and equations), including many completely novel and highly unconventional results, opening entire new areas of work and inspiring a vast amount of further research; and that nearly all of Ramanujan's theories have now been proven correct?

• ... that physicist and clergyman Jean-Antoine Nollet (1700–1770) investigated electrospray, noting that water flowing from a vessel would aerosolize if the vessel was electrified and placed near electrical ground. He also noted that similarly "a person, electrified by connection to a high-voltage generator, would not bleed normally if he were to cut himself; blood would spray from the wound."?

• ... that the comedy food science film Pump Up the Jam is loosely based on actual attempts to make inflatable jam?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1710: Astronomer, instrument maker, and author James Ferguson born.

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  1817: Printer, bookseller, and inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville born. He will invent the phonoautograph, which records an audio signal as a photographic image.

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  1874: Businessman and inventor Guglielmo Marconi born. He will share the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".

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  1903: Mathematician and academic Andrey Kolmogorov born. He will make significant contributions to the mathematics of probability theory, topology, intuitionistic logic, turbulence, classical mechanics, algorithmic information theory and computational complexity.

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  1960: Mathematician, art critic, and alleged time-traveller The Eel stops aquatic cryptid and alleged supervillain Neptune Slaughter from destroying the United States Navy submarine USS Triton.

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  1960: The United States Navy submarine USS Triton completes Operation Sandblast, the first submerged circumnavigation of the globe.

Topic of the Day

Aliens

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  Midnight E.T. is an American science fiction drama film directed by John Schlesinger and Steven Spielberg.

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  Close Encounters of the Spud Kind is a 1977 supernatural geology film, written and directed by [REDACTED], starring [REDACTED], [REDACTED], [REDACTED], [REDACTED], [REDACTED], and [REDACTED]; and that the film tells the story of [REDACTED], an everyday blue-collar UFO researcher in Indiana, whose life changes after an encounter with the Devil's potato masher.

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  Alien Gourmand is a talk show featuring non-human species discussing food and fine dining. Broadcast live from the Greater Sol System Co-Prosperity Sphere, and available at a discreet yet convenient safe house near you.

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  Sonic vs Aliens: Dawn of Cartoon.

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  Along Comes E.T. is a musical science fiction film about a Sunshine Pop band (The Association) which must help a lost extraterrestrial creature return home.

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  One Day at a Time is a made-for-television documentary film about the 1976 invasion of Indianapolis by as-yet [30 August 2021] unidentified transdimensional actors camouflaged as Bonnie Franklin, Mackenzie Phillips, and Valerie Bertinelli.