November 17

Better Than News

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  Sandfall is a science fiction spy film starring Daniel Craig as a British MI6 agent who must discover the source of Melange, a drug which facilitates interstellar travel.

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  Hellraiser: Adventure Time is a fantasy horror animated television series created by Pendleton Ward and Clive Barker.

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  The Man Who Shot Cat Ballou is an American neo-Western thriller film starring Jane Fonda, James Stewart, John Wayne, and Lee Marvin.

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  Mister Peanut Unchained is a 2012 American revisionist Southern agricultural policy film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino and starring Samuel L. Jackson.

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  Blade Wobegon is a 1982 American science fiction musical film about a police officer (Harrison Ford) who must find and kill a rogue android (Garrison Keillor).

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  Salmon Fishing on Tatooine is a 2011 British romantic science fiction drama film about a Jedi fisheries expert (Ewan McGregor) who is recruited by an Imperial consultant (Emily Blunt) to help realize the Emperor's vision of bringing the sport of fly fishing to the Tatooine desert.

Are You Sure

• ... that physicist and academic Robert Hofstadter (5 February 1915 – 17 November 1990) shared the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics (together with Rudolf Mössbauer) "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his consequent discoveries concerning the structure of nucleons"?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1790: Mathematician and astronomer August Ferdinand Möbius born. He will discover the Möbius strip, a non-orientable two-dimensional surface with only one side when embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space.

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  1776: Astronomer, instrument maker, and author James Ferguson dies.

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  1894: H. H. Holmes, one of the first modern serial killers, is arrested in Boston, Massachusetts.

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  1924: Information scientist Claire Kelly Schultz born. A "documentalist", she was particularly known for her work in thesaurus construction and machine-aided indexing, innovating techniques for punch card information retrieval.

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  1925: Mathematician and social activist Alice Beta interviews famed inventor and data processing pioneer Herman Hollerith.

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  1929: Inventor Herman Hollerith dies. He will later be recognized as a pioneer of data processing.

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  1973: Watergate scandal: In Orlando, Florida, U.S. President Richard Nixon tells 400 Associated Press managing editors "I am not a crook."

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  1990: Physicist and academic Robert Hofstadter dies. He shared the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics (together with Rudolf Mössbauer) "for his pioneering studies of electron scattering in atomic nuclei and for his consequent discoveries concerning the structure of nucleons".

Topic of the Day

Jonathan Swift

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  Jonathan Swift Vineyards is a winery and Dionysery located in the 1667 to 1745 region of the Commonwealth of Virginia in the county of Albemarle. It is among the 23 wineries located on the Prime Number Wine Trail.

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  A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Veterans of the United States Armed Forces from Being a Burthen to their Parents, or the Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick.

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  Black Satire is a 2021 action-satire film starring Jonathan Swift and François Rabelais.