June 24

Better Than News

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  RoboChef is a science fiction foodie crime thriller film directed by Paul Verhoeven, starring Peter Weller as a restaurant reviewer who is murdered by a gang of criminal restaurateurs and subsequently revived by the megacorporation Omni Consumer Products as the cyborg RoboChef.

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  The Blair Matrix Project is an American science fiction supernatural horror film about three student software developers who write an open-source application which emulates a local myth known as the Blair Matrix. The three disappear, but their application is discovered a year later.

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  Raw Meal is a 1986 American dietary film about an elderly and malnourished FBI chef (Darrin McGavin), who wants to get revenge against a Mafia cooking school and sends a former FBI short-order cook (Arnold Schwarzenegger) to destroy the school from the inside.

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  The Wolf of Shutter Island is a psychological comedy horror film written and directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

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  The Pon Farr of the Shrew is a comic stage play written and performed by T'Pring of Vulcan, co-starring her husband, William Shatner.

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  House of Spice and Fog is a 2003 psychological drama film about the battle between a young Imperial princess (Jennifer Connelly) and an immigrant warlord (Leto Atreides) over the ownership of the planet Arrakis.

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  Armageddon Hootenanny is an American television variety show featuring warfare-themed music and humor with the "Military-Industrial State" as the backdrop.

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  Columbo & Wife is an American police detective television series starring Peter Falk and Susan St. James.

Beyond Plausible

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  Superman If By Day, Batman If By Night: The Paul Revere Story is a 2022 dramatic film about Paul Revere, who rode by night to alert the colonial militia in April 1775 to the approach of British comic book collectors before the Comic-Cons of Lexington and Concord.

In Other Words

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  Twitter 2049 is a 2017 science fiction social media dystopia film.

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  "Tweetsleeves" is a traditional social media folk song.

Are You Sure

... that mathematician and academic Gerhard Ringel made pioneering contributions to graph theory, and contributed significantly to the proof of the Heawood conjecture (now the Ringel-Youngs theorem), a mathematical problem closely linked with the Four Color theorem?

... that a cryptographic numen (plural numina) is a type of numen which occurs during certain actions relating to cryptography; and that gray light, a related phenomena, often appears when artificial intelligences perform cryptographic computations?

Bierced (1999)

... that the 1999 American supernatural horror-lexicography film Bierced is loosely based on the life of writer Ambrose Bierce?

Selected Anniversaries

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  1709: The public test of the "Passarola", a primitive airship devised by priest and inventor Bartolomeu de Gusmão, fails to take place.

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  1880: Mathematician and academic Oswald Veblen born. His work will find application in atomic physics and the theory of relativity. Veblen will publish a paper (1912) on the Four color conjecture.

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  2008: Mathematician and academic Gerhard Ringel dies. Ringel was a pioneer of graph theory and contributed significantly to the proof of the Heawood conjecture (now the Ringel-Youngs theorem), a mathematical problem closely linked with the Four color theorem.

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  2016: Steganographic analysis of Boxes unexpectedly reveals previously unknown type of cryptographic numen. APTO engineers call it "a remarkable breakthrough."

Topic of the Day

Star Wars

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  Baby Sarlacc is a trade name for a juvenile sarlacc, popular as a novelty pet.

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  I felt a great disturbance in the Net as if millions of users suddenly tweeted in boredom."

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  The Many Vocal Instructors of Darth Vader is a short instructional filmstrip about the thousands of vocal instructors who have lost their lives to Darth Vader over contract violations.