May 15

Better Than News

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  Scannery Row is a science fiction horror-romance film directed by David Cronenberg and starring Nick Nolte and Debra Winger.

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  Animal Bank is a beast fable, in the form of a satirical allegorical novella, by George Orwell. It tells the story of a group of anthropomorphic bank animals who rebel against their human board of directors, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. Ultimately, the rebellion is betrayed and, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon, the bank ends up in a state as bad as it was before.

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  Indiana Jones and the Sands of Arrakis is a 2023 science fiction action adventure film starring Harrison Ford as interstellar archaeologist Indiana Jones.

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  Tron-Mart is a 1982 American science fiction action-shopping film about a computer programmer and video game developer who is transported inside the software world of a corporate retailer where he interacts with virtual consumer goods in his attempt to escape.

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  "You Shook Me Throughout the Anthropocene" is a song by Australian anthropological research team and hard rock band AC/DC.

Are You Sure

• ... that the Baily's Beads phenomenon depends upon the irregular shape of the moon's limb; and that astronomer Francis Bailey observed the Beads during an annular eclipse of the sun on 15 May 1836 at Inch Bonney in Roxburghshire; and that Baily's vivid description of the eclipse heralded widespread interest in eclipse expeditions?

• ... that the science fiction horror-romance film Scannery Row is loosely based on the novel of the same name by John Steibeck?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1618: Johannes Kepler confirms his previously rejected discovery of the third law of planetary motion (he first discovered it on March 8 but soon rejected the idea after some initial calculations were made).

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  1801: Mathematician Joseph Ludwig Raabe born. He will discover Raabe's ratio test, which determines the convergence or divergence of an infinite series, in some cases.

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  1836: Astronomer Francis Baily observes "Baily's beads" during an annular eclipse.

Topic of the Day

Postage Stamps

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  The Inverted Wagon Queen Family Truckster, a spectacular example of stamp misprint resulting from faulty Gnomon algorithm logic.

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  The Superimposed Fraunhofer is a German postage stamp misprint issued on February 12, 1987 in which the image of Joseph von Fraunhofer demonstrating the spectroscope is inadvertently superimposed on the color spectrum bar. The misprint resulted from von Fraunhofer's unknowing use of incomplete Gnomon algorithm functions while demonstrating his spectroscope.

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  The Nicolas Cage Octopus stamp is a well-known misprint featuring actor Nicolas Cage with an octopus. The misprint apparently resulted from Cage getting into character "above and beyond the call of Euclidean space-time" during an unexplained off-camera encounter with an octopus.