February 11
Better Than News
The Man in the High Mountains of Madness is a 1962 alternative history horror novel by American sociologist Philip K. Dick.
Brokeback Maverick is an neo-Western action-adventure romantic drama film starring Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Heath Ledger, and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Where The Wild Things Were is a nonfiction book about the lives of the monsters in the celebrated children's book Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.
"Oysterday" is a song by acclaimed British pearl divers and rock band the Seaswells.
Hamill Wars on Ice is a series of touring ice shows produced by Dorothy Hamill and Mark Hamill under agreement with The Gnomon Chronicles Exotemporal Talent Agency.
Red Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a 1984 science fiction war film about an Ape invasion of the United Human States.
SkyNet Xenobot Snacks is a brand of self-replicating snack food manufactured and distributed by the Greater Sol System Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Are You Sure
• ... that mathematician and astronomer Pietro Cataldi contributed to the development of continued fractions and a method for their representation; and that Cataldi discovered the sixth and seventh perfect numbers by 1588?
• ... that the essay Man's Inhumanity to Man by writer and alleged troll Culvert Origenes profoundly influenced three generations of Enlightenment-era thinkers?
On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction
1617: Mathematician, cartographer, and astronomer Giovanni Antonio Magini dies. Mangini supported a geocentric system of the world, and defended the use of astrology in medicine, but also made practical contributions to mathematics and physics.
1618: Writer and alleged troll Culvert Origenes publishes his essay Man's Inhumanity to Man, which will profoundly influence three generations of Enlightenment-era thinkers.
1626: Mathematician and astronomer Pietro Cataldi dies. Cataldi contributed to the development of continued fractions and a method for their representation; he also discovered the sixth and seventh perfect numbers by 1588.
1650: Mathematician and philosopher René Descartes dies. Descartes is remembered as the father of modern Western philosophy.
1847: Inventor, engineer, and businessman Thomas Edison born. Edison will develop the light bulb and the phonograph, among other inventions.
1898: Physicist and academic Leo Szilard born. Szilard will conceive the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, and patent the idea of a nuclear reactor with Enrico Fermi.
1931: Engineer and inventor Charles Algernon Parsons dies. Parsons invented the compound steam turbine, and worked on dynamo and turbine design, power generation, and optical equipment for searchlights and telescopes.
1973: Nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize laureate J. Hans D. Jensen dies. Jensen shared half of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics with Maria Goeppert-Mayer for their proposal of the nuclear shell model.
2008: Mathematician and academic Alexander Andreevich Samarskii dies. Samarskii contributed to applied mathematics, numerical analysis, mathematical modeling, and finite difference methods.
Topic of the Day
Carly Simon
"The Seventies Within"— A transporter malfunction splits Captain Kirk into Carly Simon and Farrah Fawcett. (Star Trek: Forbidden Episodes.)
"You're So Veins" is a song by musician-physiologist Carly Simon.