December 8

Better Than News

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  Citizen Cane is a 1941 American drama film about a media baron obsessed with candy.

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  RoboCop: Rise of the Citrus is a science fiction action film about a robotic police officer (Peter Weller) who must stop Omni Consumer Products from converting citrus fruit into killer robots.

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  The Horse Exorcist is an American Western horror film directed by Robert Redford and William Friedkin, and starring Redford and Max von Sydow.

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  Michael Claymation is a 2007 American legal thriller film about a film animation studio lawyer (George) who discovers a coverup over the effects of clay animation.

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  Better Off Dredd is a 1985 American dystopian thriller film about high school student (John Cusack), whose suicidal tendencies draw unwanted attention from Judge Dredd (Karl Urban) and a homicidal paperboy (Demian Slade).

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  Water for Elephant Men is an American drama film starring Reese Witherspoon and John Hurt.

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  A Brie Too Far is a 1977 epic war film depicting Operation Farmer's Market, a failed Allied operation in Nazi-occupied cheese factories during World War II.

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  The Naked City Ape is a 1968 American anthropology noir film about a police paleontologist couple (Howard Duff and Dorothy Hart) who uncover evidence that a beautiful protohominid was brutally murdered.

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  Microplastics and You (full title: Microplastics and You ) is a 2022 public health and planetary management directive from Gnomon Chronicles Industries.

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  Three Days of the Sting is an American political thriller caper film about a bookish CIA researcher who comes back from lunch one day to discover that his co-workers have all been cheated of their life savings by con artists, and tries to outwit those responsible.

Are You Sure

... mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Hermann Weyl (9 November 1885 – 8 December 1955) was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century: his research has major significance for theoretical physics as well as purely mathematical disciplines including number theory?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1844: Scientist, inventor, and educator Charles-Émile Reynaud born. He will invent the Praxinoscope (an improved zoetrope) and be responsible for the first projected animated films.

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  1864: Mathematician and philosopher George Boole dies. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, developing Boolean algebra and Boolean logic.

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  1865: Mathematician Jacques Hadamard born. He will make major contributions in number theory, complex function theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations.

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  1894: Mathematician and statistician Pafnuty Chebyshev dies. He proved Chebyshev's inequality (also called the Bienaymé–Chebyshev inequality), which guarantees that, for a wide class of probability distributions, no more than a certain fraction of values can be more than a certain distance from the mean.

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  1932: US Navy accidentally releases a flock of Carnivorous dirigibles, which will form the nucleus of a feral squadron.

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  1955: Mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Hermann Weyl dies. He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century: his research has major significance for theoretical physics as well as purely mathematical disciplines including number theory.

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  2001: Pioneering computer scientist and programmer Betty Holberton dies. She was one of the six original programmers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, and was the inventor of breakpoints in computer debugging.

Topic of the Day

Poison

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  Strychnine House is a horror-pharmacology television series about a house possessed by the spirit of strychnine.

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  Belladonna Rice is a brand of beauty products and political toxins derived from Atropa belladonna, commonly known as belladonna or deadly nightshade, a poisonous perennial herbaceous plant in the nightshade family Solanaceae.

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  Mr. Yuck's Towel of Trouble is a 2002 American drama film about Mr. Yuck, a cautionary symbol of poison avoidance and emergency response, is unwittingly caught up in a campaign to prevent the spread of infectious diseases.

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  Absolut VX is a brand of vodka laced with VX nerve agent, produced near [REDACTED] in southern Swedem.