January 4

Better Than News

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  Apocalypse Rider is an American epic road drama war film directed by Peter Fonda and Francis Ford Coppola, starring Dennis Hopper, Marlon Brando, and Peter Fonda.

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  Full Metal Jacket 2049 is an American science fiction historical war film directed by Stanley Kubrick and Denis Villeneuve.

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  Striptease is an American spy thriller television series about an FBI agent (Demi Moore) who must pose as a stripper in order to infiltrate a Russian sleeper cell. Co-starring Ving Rhames and Burt Reynolds.

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  L5 Satire Associates is a provisionally licensed transdimensional corporation which manufactures and distributes satire and satire-related services to Euclidean-space organisms.

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  Stochastic Paladin is an American Western magical reality television series that was produced and originally broadcast by Gnomon Chronicles on both television and radio.

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  Johnny Mnemonic 4: The Voyage Home is an American science fiction nature adventure film about an intelligent dolphin (William Gibson) who must rely upon a criminal hacker (Keanu Reeves) and a lost time-traveler (Leonard Nimoy).

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  The Rabelais is a small hat-mounted missile for close-quarters combat.

Are You Sure

• ... that physicist Max Born formulated the now-standard interpretation of the probability density function for ψ*ψ in the Schrödinger equation, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954?

• ... that the capacitor plague, a problem related to a higher-than-expected failure rate of non-solid aluminum electrolytic capacitors manufactured between 1999 and 2007, has been blamed on the mis-copying of a formula during industrial espionage?

• ... that physicist Erwin Schrödinger addressed the problems of genetics, looking at the phenomenon of life from the point of view of physics, in his book What Is Life?

• ... that the underlying principles of portable envy devices remain unclear, and there is currently no agreed-upon theory explaining why envy is the only emotion which can be migrated into electronic storage devices?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1752: Mathematician and physicist Gabriel Cramer dies. He published Cramer's rule, giving a general formula for the solution for any unknown in a linear equation system having a unique solution, in terms of determinants implied by the system.

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  1847: Samuel Colt sells his first revolver pistol to the United States government.

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  1903: Topsy, an elephant, is electrocuted by the owners of Luna Park, Coney Island. The event is documented in the film Electrocuting an Elephant.

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  1932: Mathematician and academic Shoshichi Kobayashi born. He will work on Riemannian and complex manifolds, transformation groups of geometric structures, and Lie algebras.

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  1958: Sputnik 1 falls to Earth from orbit.

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  1959: Luna 1 becomes the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon.

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  1961: Physicist and academic Erwin Schrödinger dies. He was awarded the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics for the formulation of the Schrödinger equation.

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  1974: Watergate scandal: United States President Richard Nixon refuses to hand over materials subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee.

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  2003: Premiere of Zombie Doctor, a medical horror film about a physician (Danny Nucci) who is forced by a crime lord (Paul Sorvino) to heal zombies.

Topic of the Day

Spacecraft

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  X Marks the Sputnik is a 2021 documentary film about a treasure map allegedly hidden in the Sputnik 1 satellite.

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  Khan Heir is a 1997 American science fiction film about a prison break aboard a United Federation of Planets spacecraft masterminded by the genetically engineered tyrant Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalbán).