May 19

Better Than News

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  Napoleon: Rise of the Machines is an epic science fiction historical thriller film starring Joaquin Phoenix, Linda Hamilton, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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  Matrix of Dreams is a 1989 science fiction sports fantasy film starring Kevin Costner.

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  Quantum of Sawdust is a 2008 British spy film about an MI6 quartermaster (Daniel Craig) who must stop a document shredding corporation from stealing the Strategic Pulp Reserve at Fort Knox.

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  "The Trouble With Triffids" wins the Caldecott Medal for Children's literature.

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  The Fleeing Nun is an American animated religion-comedy television series about Sister Bertrille (Sally Field), a Catholic nun who is relentless wooed by an atheist coyote.

Are You Sure

• ... that the Soviet Union's Mars 2 unmanned space probe reached Mars and entered its atmosphere on November 27, 1971, but the module crashed on the surface of Mars and all contact was lost after its parachute failed to deploy?

• ... that Napoleon Bonaparte actually played chess against the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing machine, as depicted in the historical drama film Napoleon: Rise of the Machines?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1743: Physicist, mathematician, and astronomer Jean-Pierre Christin publishes the design of a mercury thermometer based on the Celsius scale. The Thermometer of Lyon will be built by the craftsman Pierre Casati using this design.

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  1903: Bacteriologist Ruth Ella Moore born. She will research tuberculosis, immunology and dental caries, the response of gut microorganisms to antibiotics, and the blood type of African-Americans.

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  1918: Physicist, historian, and academic Abraham Pais born. Pais will be an assistant to Niels Bohr, and a colleague of Albert Einstein, and later write books documenting the lives of these two great physicists and the contributions they and others made to modern physics.

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  1961: Venera 1 becomes the first man-made object to fly-by another planet by passing Venus (the probe had lost contact with Earth a month earlier and did not send back any data).

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  1971: The Soviet Union launches the Mars 2 spacecraft. The spacecraft will reach Mars, but the landing module will crash after failing to deploy its parachute.

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  2017: Soviet Air Defense office Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov dies. Petrov became known as "the man who single-handedly saved the world from nuclear war" for his role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident.

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  2017: Dennis Paulson of Mars remembers the forty-sixth anniversary of the Mars 2 launch, observing a moment of silence for the failure of the mission.

Topic of the Day

Books

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  A Game of Hustlers is a 1959 novel by Walter Tevis and George R.R. Martin about Daenerys Targaryen, a young pool hustler who challenges Baratheon Fats for the Westeros Championship Tournament.

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  Charlotte's Animal Farm is an allegorical novel by George Orwell and E.B. White.