January 6

Better Than News

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  Quantum of Software is a 2008 spy film about an MI6 software developer (Daniel Craig) who must stop an advanced quantum computer (Colossus) from staging a coup d'état. Co-starring Ada Lovelace as M.

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  Software License Violation: The Next Generation is an American science fiction television series about a starship (USS Entrerprise) which must fight a series of courtroom battles after conducting a five-year mission using unlicensed proprietary software.

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  Stillsuit of the Night is a 1982 neo-noir psychological thriller film about a Suk doctor (Roy Scheider) who falls in love with a Fremen (Meryl Streep) who may be the psychopathic killer of one of his patients.

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  Evidence emerges that rogue mathematician and alleged time-traveler Anarchimedes is constructing a LEGO-powered doomsday weapon.

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  Legends of the Canticles Fall for Leibowitz is a novel by Walter M. Miller and Jim Harrison. It was adapted as a 2022 film starring Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, Aidan Quinn, and Julia Ormond.

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  Soylent Greene is an American conspiracy horror documentary film about Marjorie Taylor Greene and gun overpopulation.

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  American MAGA Story is an American political horror reality television series.

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician and physicist Thomas Fincke introduced the modern names of the trigonometric functions tangent and secant in his book Geometria rotundi (1583)?

• ... that objections to Georg Cantor's work were occasionally fierce: Henri Poincaré referred to Cantor's ideas as a "grave disease" infecting the discipline of mathematics, and Leopold Kronecker's public opposition and personal attacks included describing Cantor as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a "corrupter of youth"?

• ... that Jacob Bernoulli derived the first version of the law of large numbers in his work Ars Conjectandi?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1561: Mathematician and physicist Thomas Fincke born. He will introduce the modern names of the trigonometric functions tangent and secant.

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  1655: Mathematician Jacob Bernoulli born. He will discover the fundamental mathematical constant e, and make important contributions to the field of probability.

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  1796: Natural scientist, explorer, and clergyman Erik Laxmann dies. Laxmann contribute to the taxonomy of Siberian fauna, and attempted to establish relations between Imperial Russia and Tokugawa Japan.

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  1918: Mathematician and philosopher Georg Cantor dies. He invented set theory, a fundamental area of mathematical inquiry.

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  1931: Inventor Thomas Edison signs his last patent application.

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  1990: Physicist and academic Pavel Cherenkov dies. Cherenkov shared the 1958 Nobel Prize in physics in 1958 with Ilya Frank and Igor Tamm for the discovery of Cherenkov radiation, made in 1934.

Topic of the Day

Harry Nilsson

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  "Me and My Vulture" is a song non-Euclidean singer-songwriter Sly Harrowed Innards for his 1970 album Poet Hint?

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  "Me and My Ego" is a song written and recorded by non-Euclidean singer-songwriter Sly Harrowed Innards for his 1970 album Poet Hint?