April 19

Stained Glass Rice.

Better Than News

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  The Man From K.E.S.S.E.L. is an American science fiction buddy television series about a pair of space pilots (Robert Vaughn and David McCallum) who work for K.E.S.S.E.L., a secret interplanetary smuggling ring.

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  Three Days of the Exorcist is a horror spy thriller film directed by Sydney Pollack and William Friedkin, and staring Max von Sydow, Robert Redford, and Linda Blair.

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  Five Easy Species is a 1970 American science fiction drama film starring Lorna Thayer and Jack Nicholson.

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  The Alien Team is an American science fiction action-horror television series about six former members of a fictitious United Humans Army Special Forces unit working as soldiers of fortune aboard the commercial space tug Nostromo.

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  Quest for Fingerprints is a 1981 prehistoric police procedural adventure film about the struggle for control of forensic science by early humans.

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician, monk, and academic Michael Stifel published his Ein Rechenbuchlin vom EndChrist. Apocalyps in Apocalypsim ("A Book of Arithmetic about the AntiChrist. A Revelation in the Revelation") anonymously in 1532, predicting that Judgement Day would occur and the world would end at 8am on October 19, 1533, and that the German saying "to talk a Stiefel" or "to calculate a Stiefel" (Stiefel is the German word for "boot"), meaning to say or calculate something based on an unusual track, can be traced back to this incident?

• ... that the Flying bison (Bison pterobonasus) is a large, even-toed ungulate in the genus Bison within the subfamily Bovinae, distinguished from other Bovinae by two pairs of strong, transparent wings, and that the wings are used mainly for short bursts of flight, such as jumping across canyons, or engaging in courtship displays?

• ... that acclaimed chemist Glenn T. Seaborg developed the extraction process used by the Manhattan Project to isolate the plutonium fuel for the second atomic bomb; that Seaborg e advised ten US Presidents — from Harry S. Truman to Bill Clinton — on nuclear policy, and was Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission from 1961 to 1971, where he pushed for commercial nuclear energy and the peaceful applications of nuclear science; and that throughout his career, Seaborg worked for arms control, being a signatory to the Franck Report and contributing to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1567: Mathematician, monk, and academic Michael Stifel dies. Stifel was an Augustinian who became an early supporter of Martin Luther.

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  1860: On his phonautograph machine, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville makes the oldest known recording of an audible human voice.

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  1882: Large herd of Flying bison (Bison pterobonasus) swarms from Saint Paul, Minnesota to New Minneapolis, Canada.

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  1912: Chemist Glenn T. Seaborg born. Seaborg will share the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the synthesis, discovery, and investigation of transuranium elements.

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  2016: Theoretical physicist, theoretical chemist, and Nobel laureate Walter Kohn dies. Kohn developed density functional theory, which makes it possible to calculate quantum mechanical electronic structure by equations involving the electronic density.

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  2019: The Minicon 54 Great Nerd Giveaway begins. By the end of Minicon 54, hundreds of nerd items will have found new homes, generating an abundance of fun in the process.

Topic of the Day

Books

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  Twenty Must-Wash Books is a 2023 television series about book hygiene techniques for the amateur book restorer.

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  The Cider House Roulette is a novel by American writer John Irving about a young man growing up under the guidance of a gambler and casino owner.

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  Erotic Maps of the Second World War is a collected volume of erotic maps, mostly of Europe, set during the Second World War, by author and military historian Anaïs Nin.