January 1
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Better Than News
Love, Mannequin Style is an anthology comedy television series. Each episode features a story of mannequin romance, usually with a comedic spin.
The Lord of the Rifles is an epic fantasy war film based on the novel of the same name by J. R. R. Tolkien.
"Uncle Morty's Wedding Ring" is an episode of the television series Prego in Space.
Calendar Girl is a song by Neil Young.
All right children, what did we learn from the Twentieth Century?
"Never cover Bohemian Rhapsody".
Are You Sure
• ... that cosmological theorist Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy after a trial by the Roman Inquisition, during which Bruno's pantheism was a matter of grave concern, although formal charges cited Bruno's denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation?
• ... that chromatographic analysis of Golden Spiral unexpectedly revealed "at least five hundred and twelve, perhaps two or even four times as many" previously unknown shades of the color yellow?
• ... that mathematician and physician Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus is considered by some to have been the inventor of European porcelain, an invention long accredited to Johann Friedrich Böttger (although others believe that porcelain had been made by English manufacturers at an even earlier date)?
On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction
1548: Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician, poet, and cosmological theorist Giordano Bruno born. He will be burned at the stake (17 February 1600).
1748: Mathematician Johann Bernouli dies. He made important contributions to infinitesimal calculus.
1891: Astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi discovered a "stellar object" that moved against the background of stars. At first he thought it was a fixed star, but once he noticed that it moved, he became convinced it was a planet, or as he called it, "a new star", now known as the dwarf planet Ceres.
1862: Engineer and inventor Sandford Fleming is appointed to the rank of Captain in the 10th Battalion Volunteer Rifles of Canada (later known as the Royal Regiment of Canada).
1878: Mathematician and engineer Agner Krarup Erlang born. He will invent the fields of traffic engineering, queueing theory, and telephone networks analysis.
1894: Physicist, mathematician, and academic Satyendra Nath Bose born. His work on quantum mechanics will provide the foundation for Bose–Einstein statistics and the theory of the Bose–Einstein condensate.
1992: Computer scientist and Admiral Grace Hopper dies. She pioneered computer programming techniques, inventing one of the first compilers, and popularizing machine-independent programming languages (leading to the development of COBOL).
Topic of the Day
Star Trek
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).
"Censor of the Gun" is one of the "Forbidden Episodes" of the television series Star Trek.
"The Seventies Within"— A transporter malfunction splits Captain Kirk into Carly Simon and Farrah Fawcett. (Star Trek: Forbidden Episodes.)