December 2

Better Than News

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  Soylent Indemnity is an American ecological noir dystopian crime thriller film directed by Billy Wilder and Richard Fleischer.

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  Big Meal is a 1996 American comedy cooking film starring Stanley Tucci, Tony Shalhoub, and Gordon Ramsay.

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  "By the Time I Get to Felix" is a song by Jimmy Webb, Glenn Campbell, Pat Sullivan, and Otto Messmer.

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  "Tribbles for Ichneumon" is one of the "Forbidden Episodes" of the television series Star Trek. The plot involves the Ichneumon, an alien ambassador from the "Spock's Bug" parallel universe. The Ichneumon requires human host or it will die without progeny, threatening the intra-universe treaty between Insects and Humans.

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  Markov chain smoker is a stochastic smoking model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state of a cigarette smoked in the previous event.

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  On Golden Bond is a 1981 drama thriller film about a cantankerous retiree (Henry Fonda), his compliant wife (Katharine Hepburn), and their adult daughter (Jane Fonda), find their lives irrevocably changed by the arrival of a suave British spy (Sean Connery).

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  Parch and Rehydration is an American hydrological satire mockumentary sitcom television series about a perky, mid-level plumber in the Water Department of Drownee, a fictional town in Indiana.

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  Cut the Right Wire is an American comedy-drama action film written and directed by Spike Lee.

Beyond Plausible

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  Darth Twitter is a science fiction social media network funded and administered by the Sith Lords.

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  Bill and Ted's Heinous Matrix is an American science fiction comedy film.

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  Eyes Wide Clockwork is a erotic dystopian crime film directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, and Malcolm McDowell.

In Other Words

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  "I Still Haven't Found What I Shook 'Em For" is a song about games and gambling by Irish rock band U2.1.

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  Stained Glass Dice.

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician, cartographer, and philosopher Gerardus Mercator (5 March 1512 – 2 December 1594) created a world map (1569) based on a new projection which represented sailing courses of constant bearing (rhumb lines) as straight lines, and that this principle is employed in nautical charts to this day?

Selected Anniversaries

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  1409: The University of Leipzig opens. Famous future alumni will include Leibniz, Goethe, Ranke, Nietzsche, Wagner, Angela Merkel, Raila Odinga, and Tycho Brahe.

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  1594: Mathematician, cartographer, and philosopher Gerardus Mercator dies. He is most renowned for creating the 1569 world map based on a new projection which represented sailing courses of constant bearing (rhumb lines) as straight lines—an innovation that is still employed in nautical charts.

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  1831: Mathematician Paul David Gustav du Bois-Reymond born. He will work on the theory of functions and in mathematical physics.

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  1942: During the Manhattan Project, a team led by Enrico Fermi initiates the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

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  1966: Mathematician and philosopher L. E. J. Brouwer dies. He made contributions to topology, set theory, measure theory and complex analysis; and he founded the mathematical philosophy of intuitionism.

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  1987: Physicist, astronomer, and cosmologist Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich dies. He played a crucial role in the development of the Soviet Union's nuclear bomb project, associated closely in nuclear weapons testing to study the effects of nuclear explosion from 1943 until 1963.

Topic of the Day

Pirates

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  Profit-Centers of the Caribbean is a series of lectures on macroeconomic theory produced by The Jerry Bruckheimer Enterprise and based on Walt Disney's balance sheet of the same name.