Main Page

The Gnomon Chronicles is a work of fiction and nonfiction by Karl Jones (nonfiction). Fresh content daily.
January 5

Better Than News

Blade Recall is a science fiction thriller film directed by Ridley Scott and Paul Verhoeven, starring Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenneger.
Dungeonville is a 1998 American teen fantasy horror film about two siblings who become trapped in a 1950s TV show, set in a small Midwest town, where residents must obey a mysterious, all-powerful Dungeonmaster (Don Knotts).
Secret Stigmata is a supernatural political horror television series directed by Ed Fraiman and Rupert Wainwright.
The Little Barmaid is a 1989 American animated musical fantasy film about a teenage mermaid princess named Ariel, who dreams of becoming human lead her to fall in with a rough crowd at the Mos Eisley Cantina on Tatooine.
Goodbye, Mr. Pibb is a 1969 soft drink comedy film starring Peter O'Toole, Petula Clark, and Dr. Pepper.
Admissible Now is a 1979 American epic legal drama film produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando.
Casino Divine is a 2006 Christian spy film starring Daniel Craig in his first portrayal of fictional British theologian James Bond.

Beyond Plausible

Edge of Blade is an American science fiction horror film about an immortal vampire (Wesley Snipes) is trapped in a time-loop war between humans and aliens.
9½ Psychs is an erotic horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke.

In Other Words

Armageddon Hard is a 1998 American planetary catastrophe heist film about a New York City detective (Bruce Willis) who must stop a rogue splinter asteroid (99942 Apophis-B) from destroying the earth.

Are You Sure ...

calculated the exact time of a solar eclipse that occurred on 1 April 1764, and that she wrote an article in which she gave a map of the eclipse's extent in 15-minute intervals across Europe?

• ... that mathematician Dmitry Mirimanoff made notable contributions to axiomatic set theory, and to number theory relating specifically to Fermat's last theorem, on which he corresponded with Albert Einstein before the First World War?

• ... that the novels of semiotician and crime-fighter Umberto Eco allegedly contain an encrypted "secret history" of crimes against mathematical constants?

• ... that astronomer and mathematician Simon Marius published his work Mundus Iovialis (1614) describing the planet Jupiter and its moons, and asserting that he discovered the planet's four major moons some days before Galileo Galilei?

Selected Anniversaries

1625: Astronomer Simon Marius dies. He discovered the four largest moons of Jupiter, independently of Galileo Galilei.
1723: Astronomer and mathematician Nicole-Reine Lepaute born. She will predict the return of Halley's Comet, calculate the timing of a solar eclipse, and construct a group of catalogs for the stars.
1895: French army officer Alfred Dreyfus is stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island.
1932: Novelist, literary critic, and philosopher Umberto Eco born. He will cite James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges as the two modern authors who will have influenced his work the most.
1945: Mathematician Dmitry Mirimanoff dies. In 1917, he introduced (though not as explicitly as John von Neumann later) the cumulative hierarchy of sets and the notion of von Neumann ordinals; although he introduced a notion of regular (and well-founded set) he did not consider regularity as an axiom, but also explored what is now called non-well-founded set theory, and had an emergent idea of what is now called bisimulation.
1970: Physicist and mathematician Max Born dies. He won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his "fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function".
1983: Premiere of ScarNFTs, a crime NFT film about Cuban refugee Tony Montana (Al Pacino), who arrives penniless in 1980s Miami and goes on to sell non-fungible tokens to a powerful drug lord.
2001: Nuclear physicist Arnold Flammersfeld dies. Flammersfeld worked on the German nuclear energy project during World War II.

Topic of the Day

Twitter

The Dark Tweet is a 2008 documentary film directed, produced, and co-written by The Joker. The film follows Bruce Wayne / Tweetman (Bale), Police Lieutenant James Gordon (Oldman) and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Eckhart) as they form an alliance to dismantle twitter bots released by anarchistic mastermind the Ledger (Joker) to undermine Tweetman's influence and throw the city into Facebook.
Tweet Free is a 1966 British drama film about Joy and George Adamson, a couple who raised Elsa the Lioness, an orphaned lion cub, to adulthood, and released her into the wilderness of Kenya with a Twitter-enabled tracking device.