August 4

Better Than News

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  Where Krakens Dare is a 1968 British-American action adventure war horror spy film directed by Brian G. Hutton and starring Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood and Mary Ure. It follows a Special Operations Executive team of men attempting to recover an ancient Greek artifact from the fictional Schloß Adler fortress, except the mission turns out not to be as it seems.

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  Guadalcanal Diary 2: A Three Hour Tour is a World War II comedy war film about seven castaways who put aside their differences and fight with the United States Marines in the Battle of Guadalcanal.

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  The Red Skullton Show is an American television comedy/variety show hosted by entertainer and alleged supervillian Richard "Red Skull" Skelton.

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  The Courtship of Eddie's Carpenter is an American home improvement psychological thriller television series based on the 1963 "Courtship Carpentry" fad of the same name.

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  McMillan & Ex is an American private detective television series starring Susan Saint James as the owner of a successful private detective agency, and Rock Hudson as her ex-husband and employee.

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  Captain Corelli's Machine Gun is a 2001 romantic comedy-drama war film directed by John Madden, and starring Nicolas Cage, Penélope Cruz, and John Hurt.

Are You Sure

... that Cite Baudrillard or Die is the debut album by American crossover thrash philosophy group Shatterproof Doom Rest, released in August of [REDACTED]?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1805: Physicist, astronomer, and mathematician William Rowan Hamilton born. He will make important contributions to classical mechanics, optics, and algebra, inventing the quaternion.

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  1834: Mathematician and philosopher John Venn born. He will invent the Venn diagram, now widely used set theory, probability, logic, statistics, and computer science.

Topic of the Day

Chemistry

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  Hell Bent for Lanthanum is a 1960 American Western film about an innocent chemist (Carl Gustaf Mosander) who is forced to go on the run to try and clear his name by isolating a new element (Lanthanum) from cerium nitrate.

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  Secret Reagent Man is a British-American television series about a spy (Patrick McGoohan) and a musician (Johnny Rivers) who team up to advance chemistry worldwide. Periodically guest starring Dmitri Mendeleev.

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  Patch Atoms is a 1998 American biographical comedy-drama documentary research project headed by theoretical physicist Robin Williams.

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  "Lipid" is a song by American rock band and industrial chemistry group Devo.

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  The Chromo-Pee Olympics is an international sporting event in which participants attempt to urinate in five contrasting colors.

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  Ionic Bondi Beach is a popular beach and the name of the surrounding suburb in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, famed for its chemical bonding, both the bonding of oppositely charged ions, and the bonding of two atoms with sharply different electronegativities.

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  "Mendelevium on a Jet Plane" is a song by John Denver and a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

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  John Barleycorn Must Titrate is the fourth studio album by English chemical research laboratory and rock band Traffic.

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  The Secret of PERC is a 1982 American animated fantasy industrial chemistry training film about a strain of rats which have been genetically engineered to tolerate high levels of tetrachloroethylene (also known as PERC).

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  Flubber is a 1961 American science-sports documentary film of quantum gravity theorist and amateur athlete Brain Hard, whose spectacular and repeated failures at the Olympics "have set back research into gravity waves at least a generation."