August 19
Better Than News
Free Squishy is a 1993 American family cephalopod film about an orphaned boy who befriends a captive octopus at a secret military research facility until a dark secret reveals the CIA's plan to use Squishy as a genetically engineered assassin.
Dances with Na'vi is an epic science fiction Western film directed by Kevin Costner and James Cameron, starring Costner, Mary McDonnell, Graham Greene, and Sigourney Weaver.
Singapore Sling Blade is a 1996 American comedy-action film about an Arkansas bartender (Billy Bob Thornton) who challenges himself to "invent the most foreign cocktail ever seen in these parts."
Mattock is a landscape architecture legal drama television series starring Andy Griffith.
Tubular Elves is a short documentary film about how the album Tubular Bells accidentally recorded machine elves during UK military submarine communication tests.
Jungian Charms is an alleged breakfast cereal which manifests the user's shadow self.
Are You Sure
... that the 2015 Toledo giant red ball incident (nonfiction) is non-fictional?
On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction
1662: Mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal dies. Pacal did pioneering work on calculating machines.
1758: Jean-Étienne Montucla received the censor's approbation for his Histoire des mathematiques, which is justly famous as a history of the mathematical sciences.
1822: Mathematician and astronomer Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre dies. He was one of the first astronomers to derive astronomical equations from analytical formulas.
1906: Inventor Philo Farnsworth born. He will make many crucial contributions to the early development of all-electronic television.
1913: Computer scientist, engineer, and academic John Argyris born. A pioneer of computer applications in science and engineering, Argyris will be among the creators of the finite element method.
1923: Engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist, and philosopher Vilfredo Pareto dies. He applied mathematics to economic analysis, asserting that the distribution of incomes and wealth in society is not random and that a consistent pattern appears throughout history, in all parts of the world and in all societies.
1967: Inventor, writer, editor, and publisher Hugo Gernsback dies. He published the first science fiction magazine, and had a profound influence on the development of science fiction.
1993: Actor-cryptographer Niles Cartouchian confirms that he personally designed the computational security protocols featured in the action-adventure film Dard Hunter, Glyph Warden.
1994: Chemist, biochemist, peace activist, author, and educator Linus Pauling dies.
2015: A giant red ball breaks loose from an art installation and rolls down the street in Toledo, Ohio.
Topic of the Day
Books
June is a novel by Frank Herbert 1.1 (as told to OrbGazer). (A HAL 9000 Mental Health Associates Book of the Month selection.)
Crate Expectations is a novel by Charles Dickens about Pip, an orphan boy whose apprenticeship as a carpenter leads to fame and fortune in the box-making trade.