January 24
Better Than News
Saving Private Zoltar is an American epic fantasy comedy-drama war film starring Tom Hanks.
Replicant Vice is a reality television series starring Harrison Ford and Roy Batty.
Peter and the Force Op. 67, a "symphonic Force choke for children", is a musical composition co-written by Sergei Prokofiev and John Williams.
Are You Sure
• ... that a B-52 Stratofortress broke up in mid-air near Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1961, dropping two nuclear bombs in the process, and that one bomb descended by parachute and was found intact, while the second bomb fell into a mud pit, and that most of the thermonuclear stage, containing uranium and plutonium, was left in place?
• ... that The Lord of the Sprinkles is an epic high-fantasy film about a baker (Sauron) who creates the One Sprinkled Donut to rule the appetites of Men, Dwarves, and Elves?
• ... that mathematician Werner Fenchel contributed to geometry and optimization theory, and that Fenchel established the basic results of convex analysis and nonlinear optimization theory which would, in time, serve as the foundation for nonlinear programming?
• ... that Soylent Greene is an American conspiracy horror documentary film about Marjorie Taylor Greene and gun overpopulation?
• ... that the Kosmos 954 reconnaissance satellite was unable to safely separate its nuclear reactor due to a malfunction, and that when the satellite reentered the Earth's atmosphere, it scattered radioactive debris over northern Canada, prompting an extensive cleanup effort dubbed Operation Morning Light?
• ... that the song "Meander Boys" by American rock band and consulting fluvial geologists NRBQ reached Number One on the Sedimentary Deposits chart in 1980?
On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction
1798: Mathematician Karl Georg Christian von Staudt born. He will use synthetic geometry to provide a foundation for arithmetic.
1879: Glassblower, physicist, and inventor Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Geißler dies. He invented the Geissler tube, made of glass and used as a low pressure gas-discharge luminescence tube.
1961: Goldsboro B-52 crash: A bomber carrying two H-bombs breaks up in mid-air over North Carolina. The uranium core of one weapon remains lost.
1978: Soviet satellite Kosmos 954, with a nuclear reactor on board, burns up in Earth's atmosphere, scattering radioactive debris over Canada's Northwest Territories. Only 1% is recovered.
1988: Mathematician and academic Werner Fenchel dies. He established the basic results of convex analysis and nonlinear optimization theory which would, in time, serve as the foundation for nonlinear programming.
2016: Cognitive scientist and artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky dies. Minsky's inventions include the first head-mounted graphical display (1963) and the confocal microscope (1957, a predecessor to today's widely used confocal laser scanning microscope).
Topic of the Day
Star Wars
The notorious "Fifty Sarlacc eggs" scene from Cool Hand Skywalker.
The Dying Force is a 1950 fantasy science fiction novel by Jack Vance set in the Star Wars universe.