August 16

Better Than News

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  Are You There God? It's Me, M3GAN. is an American coming-of-age science fiction comedy-horror film directed by Kelly Fremon Craig and Gerard Johnstone, about an artificially intelligent doll who develops self-awareness and becomes hostile toward anyone who comes between her and God.

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  Infinity Skein is a British science fiction knitting television series about a Time Lord (Tom Baker) who investigates a mysterious scarf which seems infinitely long.

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  Galactic Tax-Healer is a study of the history of tax policies by American sociologist Philip K. Dick.

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  Ezekiel Rider is a 1969 American independent Old Testament road drama film starring Peter Fonda as the prophet Ezeziel.

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  Saruman House is a fortress commissioned by the corrupt wizard Saruman, currently available for rent as a conference center or secret lair.

Are You Sure

... that a routine annual steganographic checkup of Triumph unexpectedly revealed "at least two, probably four, possibly eight" petabytes of data relating to Gravity wave 170817?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1650: Monk, cosmographer, and cartographer Vincenzo Coronelli born. He will gain fame for his atlases and globes; some of the globes will be very large and highly detailed.

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  1705: Mathematician Jacob Bernoulli dies. He discovered the fundamental mathematical constant e, and made important contributions to the field of probability.

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  1821: Mathematician and academic Arthur Cayley born. He will be the first to define the concept of a group in the modern way, as a set with a binary operation satisfying certain laws.

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  1883: The Orcagna scrying engine predicts that "the Father of Science Fiction will be born within a year."

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  1884: Inventor, writer, editor, and publisher Hugo Gernsback born. He will publish the first science fiction magazine, and have a profound influence on the development of science fiction.

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  1899: Chemist and academic Robert Bunsen dies. He investigated emission spectra of heated elements, and discovered caesium (in 1860) and rubidium (in 1861) with the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff.

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  2010: Mathematician, academic, and rabbi Eliezer 'Leon' Ehrenpreis dies. He proved the Malgrange–Ehrenpreis theorem, the fundamental theorem about differential operators with constant coefficients.

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  2017: The upcoming observation of the GW170817 gravitational wave signal, a significant breakthrough for multi-messenger astronomy, is allegedly hijacked before it can occur by a criminal transdimensional corporation. An emergency response team of police astronomers and high-energy physicists will locate the corporation and reverse the hijacking, causing the wave and its observation to occur on time.

Topic of the Day

Sports Astronomy

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  4524 Sitiveni Sivivatu (popularly known as Forty-Five Twenty-Four) is an elongated Vestian asteroid and an exceptionally slow rotator from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 10 kilometers in diameter.