February 9

Are You Sure ...

• ... that the American home improvement comedy romance television seriesThe Courtship of Eddie's Carpenter is based on the 1963 "Courtship Carpentry" fad of the same name?

• ... that printer and publisher Christian Egenolff was sued in 1533 by publisher Johann Schott for infringement of copyright on Herbarium Vivae Icones, and that Egenolff argued in his defense that nature could not be copyrighted and that plants stood as communal models for any artist?

• ... that physician and philosopher Lucilio Vanini was among the first modern thinkers who viewed the universe as an entity governed by natural laws, and the first literate proponent of the thesis that humans evolved from apes, and that on this day in 1619 the Parliament of Toulouse found Vanini guilty of atheism and blasphemy, cut out his tongue, strangled him, and burned his body?

• ... that electrical engineer and physicist Dennis Gabor's 1963 book Inventing the Future discusses the three major threats Gabor saw to modern society: war, overpopulation, and the Age of Leisure, and that the book contains the now well-known expression that "the future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented"?

• ... that The Woke and the Furious is a 2021 political action film about an undercover liberal who is tasked with discovering the identities of a group of insurrectionists led by Donald Trump?

On This Day in History and Fiction

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  1555: Christian Egenolff dies. He was the first important printer and publisher operating from Frankfurt-am-Main.

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  1619: Physician and philosopher Lucilio Vanini is put to death after being found guilty of atheism and blasphemy. He was the first literate proponent of the thesis that humans evolved from apes.

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  1737: Thomas Paine born. He will author the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and inspire the rebels in 1776 to declare independence from Britain.

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  1907: Mathematician and academic Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter born. He will become of the greatest geometers of the 20th century.

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  1913: A group of meteors is visible across much of the eastern seaboard of North and South America, leading astronomers to conclude the source had been a small, short-lived natural satellite of the Earth.

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  1927: Computer scientist and academic David Wheeler born. He will contribute to the development of the Electronic delay storage automatic calculator (EDSAC) and the Burrows–Wheeler transform (BWT); help develop the subroutine; and gave the first explanation of how to design software libraries.

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  1969: Premiere of The Courtship of Eddie's Carpenter, an American home improvement comedy romance television series based on the 1963 "Courtship Carpentry" fad of the same name.

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  1979: Physicist and engineer Dennis Gabor dies. He invented holography, for which he received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics.

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  2010: Businessman Walter Frederick Morrison dies. Morrison invented the Frisbee. The first version, a cake pan purchased for a nickle and sold for a quarter, was known as the Flyin' Cake Pan.