January 18

Two Dragons.

Better Than News

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  Bill & Ted Light the Wick is an American science fiction crime film starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter as a two legendary hitman who come out of retirement to finish their high school history report.

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  Apocalypse Dove is an epic Western war film starring Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Martin Sheen, and Marlon Brando.

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  Matrix in a Red Dress is a 2022 pornographic science fiction documentary film about the Matrix franchise. Narrated by Hugo Weaving.

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  The Cabin in the Matrix is a science fiction horror film about an amoral gourmand (Joe Pantoliano) who becomes trapped in a nightmarish world of simulated camping experiences.

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  Hawaii Starfleet is a science fiction police procedural television series set in Hawaii.

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  Star Wars: Home Alone is a 1977 science fiction drama film about moisture farmer Owen Lars (Macaulay Culkin) and his wife Beru (Catherine O'Hara) who are murdered by Imperial stormtroopers.

Are You Sure

• ... that physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and musician Jean-Pierre Christin proposed (1743) the reversal of the Celsius thermometer scale (from water boiling at 0 degrees and ice melting at 100 degrees, to where zero represented the freezing point of water and 100 represented the boiling point of water), and that his system was widely accepted and is still in use today?

• ... that mathematician, historian, author, poet, and private detective Jacob Bronowski is best remembered as the presenter and writer of the 1973 APTO television documentary series, The Ascent of Math, and the accompanying Gnomon algorithm functions?

• ... that chemist and physicist Henri Victor Regnault discovered that not all gases expand equally when heated, and that Boyle's Law is only an approximation, especially at temperatures near a substance's boiling point?

• ... that mathematician, engineer, and politician Charles Dupin is known for his work in mathematics, where the Dupin cyclide and Dupin indicatrix are named after him; and for his work in the field of statistical and thematic mapping (he created the earliest known choropleth map)?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  532: The Nika riots fail in Constantinople. Nearly half the city is burned or otherwise destroyed, and tens of thousands of people are dead.

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  1802: Carl Friedrich Gauss read in the newspaper that Olbers had rediscovered Ceres. Gauss wrote to get the observations and a long friendship ensued. Gauss was such an avid newspaper reader that students nicknamed him the “newspaper bear” because of his habits in the library reading room. If someone was reading the paper he wanted he would sit glumly nearby and stare at them until they gave up the paper.

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  1825: Chemist Edward Frankland born. He will be one of the originators of organometallic chemistry, introducing the concept of combining power or valence.

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  1873: Mathematician, engineer, cartographer, economist, and politician Charles Dupin dies. In 1826 created the earliest known choropleth map.

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  1878: Physicist and academic Antoine César Becquerel dies. He pioneered the study of electric and luminescent phenomena.

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  1908: Mathematician, historian of science, theatre author, poet, and inventor Jacob Bronowski born.

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  1911: Physicist Shoichi Sakata born. Sakata will contribute theoretical work on the structure of the atom, proposing the Sakata model, an early precursor to the quark model. After World War II he will campaign for the peaceful uses of nuclear power.

Topic of the Day

Birds

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  Stomach Oil Exporting Petrels (SOEP) is an interspecies organization of 13 stomach oil-exporting varieties of petrel. The 13 varieties of petrel account for 40 percent of global stomach oil and 73 percent of the world's "proven" stomach oil capability, making SOEP a major influence on global stomach oil prices.

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  Ducks: How to Make Them Pay is an ornithological handbook comprising tales of greed and vengeance among the Anatidae.