August 16
Better Than News
Are You There God? It's Me, M3GAN. is an American coming-of-age science fiction comedy-horror film directed by Kelly Fremon Craig and Gerard Johnstone, about an artificially intelligent doll who develops self-awareness and becomes hostile toward anyone who comes between her and God.
The Last Voyage of the Romulus is a science fiction horror film directed by Fede Álvarez and André Øvredal.
Willy Wonka and the Vampire Factory is a musical fantasy horror film directed by Francis Ford Coppola and Tim Burton, starring Gary Oldman and Johnny Depp.
12 McClanes is a 1995 science fiction comedy film about a Los Angeles police officer (Bruce Willis) who inherits a troupe of twelve trained circus monkeys.
Galactic Tax-Healer is a study of the history of tax policies by American sociologist Philip K. Dick.
Ezekiel Rider is a 1969 American independent Old Testament road drama film starring Peter Fonda as the prophet Ezeziel.
Are You Sure
... that a routine annual steganographic checkup of Triumph unexpectedly revealed "at least two, probably four, possibly eight" petabytes of data relating to Gravity wave 170817?
On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction
1650: Monk, cosmographer, and cartographer Vincenzo Coronelli born. He will gain fame for his atlases and globes; some of the globes will be very large and highly detailed.
1705: Mathematician Jacob Bernoulli dies. He discovered the fundamental mathematical constant e, and made important contributions to the field of probability.
1821: Mathematician and academic Arthur Cayley born. He will be the first to define the concept of a group in the modern way, as a set with a binary operation satisfying certain laws.
1883: The Orcagna scrying engine predicts that "the Father of Science Fiction will be born within a year."
1884: Inventor, writer, editor, and publisher Hugo Gernsback born. He will publish the first science fiction magazine, and have a profound influence on the development of science fiction.
1899: Chemist and academic Robert Bunsen dies. He investigated emission spectra of heated elements, and discovered caesium (in 1860) and rubidium (in 1861) with the physicist Gustav Kirchhoff.
2010: Mathematician, academic, and rabbi Eliezer 'Leon' Ehrenpreis dies. He proved the Malgrange–Ehrenpreis theorem, the fundamental theorem about differential operators with constant coefficients.
2017: The upcoming observation of the GW170817 gravitational wave signal, a significant breakthrough for multi-messenger astronomy, is allegedly hijacked before it can occur by a criminal transdimensional corporation. An emergency response team of police astronomers and high-energy physicists will locate the corporation and reverse the hijacking, causing the wave and its observation to occur on time.
Topic of the Day
Sports Astronomy
4524 Sitiveni Sivivatu (popularly known as Forty-Five Twenty-Four) is an elongated Vestian asteroid and an exceptionally slow rotator from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 10 kilometers in diameter.