June 17
Better Than News
The African Queen and I is an American musical adventure film directed by John Huston and Walter Lang, starring Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Deborah Kerr, and Yul Brynner.
Barbrella is a science fiction romantic musical drama film directed, co-written, co-produced by, and starring American entertainer Barbra Streisand.
Apoptosis Now is a combat medical research film about programmed cell death directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola and funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute.
THX 1138: Rise of the Donuts is an American social science fiction film about a dystopian future in which the citizens are controlled by android donuts and mandatory use of drugs that cause sugar cravings.
Tick and Ticker is a 1994 American buddy comedy film about two dumb but well-meaning friends who set out on a cross-country trip to Aspen, Colorado, to locate The Tick, a large blue superhero.
Henlo is an American detective television series starring Andy Serkis as Henlo, a psychic dog who aids the police in solving mysterious crimes.
Beyond Plausible
"The Real Domain Knowledge" is a poem by American physician and information theory poet William Carlos Williams (1883–1963).
"The Clouded Minders" is one of the Forbidden Episodes of the television series Star Trek guest starring Kenny Rogers.
In Other Words
Alka-Seltzer for Venus is a proposal to terraform Venus using enormous Alka-Seltzer tablets.
Are You Sure
... that pharmacologist and chemist Alexander Shulgin discovered, synthesized, and personally bioassayed over 230 psychoactive compounds for their psychedelic and entactogenic potential?
... that electrical engineer and crime-fighter Nikola Tesla used ultra-low-frequency electrical current to detect and prevent crimes against mathematical constants, and that Tesla's work was later used by APTO field mathematicians to detect and remove the Watergate scandal virus?
Selected Anniversaries
1714: Astronomer and cartographer César-François Cassini de Thury born. In 1744, he will begin the construction of a great topographical map of France, one of the landmarks in the history of cartography. Completed by his son Jean-Dominique, Cassini IV and published by the Académie des Sciences from 1744 to 1793, its 180 plates will be known as the Cassini map.
1832: Chemist and physicist William Crookes born. Crookes will be a pioneer of vacuum tube technology, developing the partially evacuated Crookes tube circa 1869-1875.
1925: Pharmacologist and chemist Alexander Shulgin born. He will discover, synthesize, and personally bioassay over 230 psychoactive compounds for their psychedelic and entactogenic potential.
1932: Bonus Army: Around a thousand World War I veterans amass at the United States Capitol as the U.S. Senate considers a bill that would give them certain benefits.
1972: Watergate scandal (nonfiction): Five White House operatives are arrested for burgling the offices of the Democratic National Committee, in an attempt by some members of the Republican party to illegally wiretap the opposition.
2022: Self portrait.
Topic of the Day
Spheres
"All we have to sphere is sphere itself" is popular catch-phrase from the mid-1930s, widely but incorrectly attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Bucky Fuller, Orb King is a 2021 fantasy engineering film about a brilliant wizard (Buckminster Fuller) who uses tensegrity principles to construct a glowing blue orb.
The San Francisco sphere is an unnatural feature of San Francisco Bay, known since at least 2022.
"All we have to sphere is sphere itself" is popular catch-phrase from the mid-1930s, widely but incorrectly attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Sphere and circumscribed cylinder, demonstrating how only the sphere is not a phallic symbol.
The Salem orb trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of orbcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than two hundred people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging (fourteen women and five men). One other man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death for refusing to plead, and at least five people died in jail.
The Dyson Sphere War is an ongoing military and paradigmatic conflict between Earth-based civilizations and Dyson sphere civilizations.