April 29

Better Than News

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  RoboCop Farm is a satirical allegorical science fiction film directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Peter Weller. It is loosely based on the novella of the same name by George Orwell.

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  Butch Cassidy and the President's Men is an American Western film which tells the story of Wild West Butch Cassidy (Dustin Hoffman), and his partner the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford), who are on the run from a crack US posse after a string of anti-war protests. Paul Newman co-stars as Charles Colson, political hatchet man for the Nixon White House.

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  ScarNFTs is a 1983 crime NFT film about Cuban refugee Tony Montana (Al Pacino), who arrives penniless in 1980s Miami and goes on to sell non-fungible tokens to a powerful drug lord.

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  The Unbearable Loch Ness of Being is a 1984 novel by Milan Kundera, about two women, two men, the alleged Loch Ness monster, and their lives in the 1968 Prague Spring period of Czechoslovak history.

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  "Sly Fearsome Aura" is an anagram of "Eyes of Laura Mars".

Beyond Plausible

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  The China Thing is a science fiction disaster horror film starring Wilford Brimley, Jane Fonda, and Kurt Russell.

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  2001: A Cain Odyssey is a 1968 science fiction religion film about a farmer (Cain) who rises up and slays his brother (Abel), leading up to a tense showdown between man and God that results in a mind-bending trek through space and time.

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  The Moon is a Harsh Mistress but You Like It Rough is a 1966 science fiction novel by American writer Robert Heinlein about a lunar colony's sexual abstinence revolt against absentee rule from Earth men.

In Other Words

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  Sumerian Twitter is a time travel research project which extends Twitter into the Sumerian civilization (c. 5500 – c. 1475 BC).

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  Do Joachimites Dream of Apocalyptic Sheep? is a 1968 apocalyptic science fiction novel by American sociologist Philip K. Dick.

Are You Sure

• ... that polymath John Arbuthnot published his translation of Christiaan Huygens's De ratiociniis in ludo aleae as "Of the Laws of Chance" in 1692 (the first work on probability published in English), and that in 1701, Arbuthnot wrote another mathematical work, An essay on the usefulness of mathematical learning, in a letter from a gentleman in the city to his friend in Oxford, in which Arbuthnot praises mathematics as a method of freeing the mind from superstition?

• ... that mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as "The Last Universalist" by Eric Temple Bell, since Poincaré excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime?

• ... that Wilford Brimley was offered the lead role in The China Thing based on the strength of his work in both The China Syndrome and The Thing?

• ... that Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) believed, in the words of his friend Georg Henrik von Wright, that "his ideas were generally misunderstood and distorted even by those who professed to be his disciples. He doubted he would be better understood in the future. He once said he felt as though he was writing for people who would think in a different way, breathe a different air of life, from that of present-day men."?

Selected Anniversaries

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  1667: Physician, satirist, and polymath John Arbuthnot born. He will invent the figure of John Bull.

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  1854: Mathematician, physicist, and engineer Henri Poincaré born. He will make many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics.

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  1893: Chemist and astronomer Harold Urey born. Urey's pioneering work on isotopes will earn him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for the discovery of deuterium; he will also play a significant role in the development of the atom bomb, and contribute to theories on the development of organic life from non-living matter.

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  1986: Chernobyl disaster: American and European spy satellites capture the ruins of the 4th Reactor at the Chernobyl Power Plant.

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  2008: Chemist and academic Albert Hoffman dies. Hoffman is famous for discovering LSD, which he called his "problem child".

Topic of the Day

Alcohol

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  Indigo Gin is a 1984 novel by Tom Robbins about dueling gin distillers in Seattle, Paris, and New Orleans who pursue a bottle of incomparable gin created by two unlikely but defiant lovers of the past who seek immortality.

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  "Mama Told Me Not to Drink" is a song by [REDACTED]: Want some raptors on your planet? / A Fernet-Branca spree? / What's all these crazy liquors you're grabbing from me?