December 30

Better Than News

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  Blade Runner Galactica is a science fiction television series starring Lorne Greene, Edward James Olmos, and Harrison Ford.

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  I, Rivet is a 2004 American industrial manufacture training film about a highly intelligent robot (Will Smith) who investigates the alleged failure of substandard fasteners.

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  PFAS are Forever is an advertising campaign slogan promoting gem-grade per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

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  Martin Prince Jr.'s Wide Wide World of Video Games is a television series starring gifted child and video game connoisseur Martin Prince Jr.

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  "Respect Along the Watchtower" is a song by Aretha Franklin and Jimi Hendrix.

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  Dawson's Plague is an American teen horror television series about a close-knit group of friends who simultaneously emerge from their comatose state and massacre all the adults of Capeside, Massachusetts.

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician Ludolph van Ceulen spent a major part of his life calculating the numerical value of the mathematical constant pi, using essentially the same methods as those employed by Archimedes some seventeen hundred years earlier?

• ... the Dutch people viewed painter and forger Han van Meegeren as a cunning trickster who had successfully fooled the Dutch art experts and, more importantly, Hermann Göring himself, and that Göring "looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world" when informed that the painting was a forgery?

• ... that mathematician Paul Sally was nicknamed "Professor Pirate" or "The Math Pirate" because he wore an eye patch (actually a cybernetic radar system) and had titanium prosthetic legs with ion thrusters for short-range flight?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1695: Academic, diplomat, spy, inventor and mathematician Samuel Morland dies. Morland contributed to early developments in computing, hydraulics, and steam power.

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  1842: Osman Hamdi Bey born. He will be an administrator, intellectual, art expert, painter, and archaeologist.

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  1850: Publication of Den Overraskende Veludstyrede Lille Kanonbåd ("The Surprisingly Well-Equipped Small Gunboat") by Danish author and military historiographer Hans Christian Andersen.

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  1892: Mathematician Pekka Myrberg born. He will do fundamental work on the iteration of rational functions (especially quadratic functions), developing the concept of period-doubling. Myrberg's research will revive interest in the results of Gaston Julia and Pierre Fatou.

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  1916: Mystic and faith healer Grigori Rasputin dies.

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  1947: Mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead dies. He was a defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy.

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  1947: Painter and forger Han van Meegeren dies. He was one of the most ingenious art forgers of the 20th century.

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  2013: Mathematician and academic Paul Sally dies. He was known as "a legendary math professor at the University of Chicago".

Topic of the Day

Philip K. Dick

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  Martian Pink-Slip is a 1964 book on interplanetary labor history by American sociologist Philip K. Dick 1.1.

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  UBIK-VALIS, a rare mutant hybrid of UBIK and VALIS by Philip K. Dick. (Courtesy Society for the Advancement of VALIS.)

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  The Society for the Advancement of VALIS (SAV) is a provisionally licensed transdimensional corporation which promotes and advances the interests of VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System), representing author and alleged time-traveler Philip K. Dick's gnostic vision of God.

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  How Uncanny Was My Valley is a 1941 film about the Morgans, a hard-working Welsh mining family on Mars, from the point of view of the youngest child Pkd, who lives with his affectionate and kind parents, and his five brothers, in the Valles Marineris during the early modern era. The story chronicles life in the Martian colonies, the widening gaps between the "Cannies" (human colonists) and the "Uncannies" (android-Martian hybrids), and its effects on the family.