July 5

Better Than News

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  Stardust Liaisons is a period romantic fantasy adventure film directed by Stephen Frears and Matthew Vaughn.

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  Zardoz Unchained is a revisionist science fiction Western film written and directed by John Boorman and Quentin Tarantino, and starring Sean Connery and Jamie Foxx.

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  The Little Barmaid is a 1989 American animated musical fantasy film about a teenage mermaid princess named Ariel, who dreams of becoming human lead her to fall in with a rough crowd at the Mos Eisley Cantina on Tatooine.

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  Cocaine Bear 2: Sideways Picnic is an American comedy-drama road film directed by Alexander Payne and Elizabeth Banks.

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  "Coppertunities (Let's Mint Lots of Money)" is a song by English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Coins from their debut studio album, Planchets (1986).

Beyond Plausible

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  Edge of Blade is an American science fiction horror film about an immortal vampire (Wesley Snipes) is trapped in a time-loop war between humans and aliens.

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  Dial B for Building Inspector is a 1954 American crime thriller film about a former building inspector (Ray Milland) who wants to have his wealthy wife (Grace Kelly) murdered so he can get his hands on her architectural plans. When he discovers her having an affair with Frank Lloyd Wright (Robert Cummings), he comes up with the perfect plan to kill her.

In Other Words

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  The Rinse of Tides is a 1991 American home repair drama film about a plumber (Nick Nolte) who struggles to overcome the psychological damage inflicted by his dysfunctional bathroom in South Carolina.

Are You Sure

... that mathematician Oskar Bolza contributed to the calculus of variations, and that Bola's work on variations for an integral problem involving inequalities later became important in control theory?

... that rogue mathematician and alleged time-traveler Anarchimedes intends to conquer the planet Jupiter using transdimensional Lego pieces?

Selected Anniversaries

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  1687: Isaac Newton publishes Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"). Principia states Newton's laws of motion, forming the foundation of classical mechanics; Newton's law of universal gravitation; and a derivation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion (which Kepler first obtained empirically).

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  1833: Inventor Nicéphore Niépce dies. He invented heliography, a technique which he used to create the world's oldest surviving product of a photographic process.

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  1942: Mathematician Oskar Bolza dies. He is known for his research in the calculus of variations; his work on variations for an integral problem involving inequalities later became important in control theory.

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  2009: Discovery of the Staffordshire hoard, the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever discovered in England, consisting of more than 1,500 items found near the village of Hammerwich, near Lichfield, Staffordshire.

Topic of the Day

Twitter

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  Planet of the Tweets is a 2022 American science fiction film about an astronaut (Charlton Heston) who crash-lands on a strange planet in the distant future where humans have been replaced by Twitter posts.

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  "Don't tweet like one of them. You're not! Even if you'd like to be. To them, you're just a freak, like me. They need your creativity right now, but when they don't, they'll block your account, like a leper. You see, their morals, their code, it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to tweet. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these ... these linear people, they will tweet without you. See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the verb." (The Dark Tweet.)

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  Soylent Tweet is a 1973 American ecological dystopian social media film about the investigation into the murder of a wealthy Twitter influencer, set in a dystopian future of overpopulation, pollution, depleted resources, dying oceans, and year-round humidity, due to the Tweethouse effect.