December 27
Better Than News
Invasion of the Birkenstockers is a 1978 horror-fashion film about the "Birkenstock Scare" of the early 1970's starring Leonard Nimoy and Veronica Cartwright.
The Adventures of Baron Harkonnen is a 1988 epic science fiction adventure film directed by Terry Gilliam, starring John Neville, Jonathan Pryce, and Bill Paterson.
Boogie Jedi Knights is a 1997 American science fiction drama film starring Mark Wahlberg, Julianne Moore, Burt Reynolds, and Sir Alec Guinness.
Maleficent Robot is an American drama thriller television series a cybersecurity engineer and hacker with social anxiety disorder and clinical depression (Rami Malek) who must stop an evil fairy and the self-proclaimed "Mistress of All Evil" (Angelina Jolie) from releasing a deadly computer virus.
"People Get Roddy" is a 1968 single by the Evolutions, and the opening track on the Planet of the Naked Apes album. The gospel-influenced track was a Curtis Mayfield composition that displayed the growing sense of cinematic and science fictional awareness in his writing.
HAL 9000 Coding Camp is a summertime educational camp where students learn principles of artificial intelligence in an immersive ChatGPT environment.
Beyond Plausible
"They say he's as intelligent as a thousand of us put together, which isn't really saying much, because when you put a thousand of us together look how stupidly we behave." —John Brunner, "Stand on Zanzibar"
In Other Words
Chemtrail is a pheromone-inflected perfume which causes (at increasing doses) unease, fear, and terror.
Are You Sure
• ... that mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler also incorporated religious arguments and reasoning into his work, motivated by the religious conviction and belief that God had created the world according to an intelligible plan that is accessible through the natural light of reason?
• ... that mathematician and academic Anne Penfold Street was the author of several textbooks, and her work on sum-free sets became a standard reference for its subject matter?
• ... that a spokesperson for the color pink once called Taffy Bomb "undeniably pink"?
Selected Anniversaries
1571: Mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer Johannes Kepler born. He will discover laws of planetary motion.
1773: Engineer George Cayley born. He will do pioneering work in aeronautics, investigating and codifying the dynamics of flight.
1923: Engineer Gustave Eiffel dies. He designed the world-famous Eiffel Tower.
1924: Jean Bartik born. She will be one of the original programmers for the ENIAC computer.
Topic of the Day
Smoking
Tar Trek is one of the "Forbidden Episodes" of the television series Star Trek.
The Dark Lights is a 2008 product placement superhero film about a crusading District Attorney (Aaron Eckhart) who must stop the Smoker (Heath Ledger) from flooding Gotham City with cheap off-brand light cigarettes.
Markov chain smoker is a stochastic smoking model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state of a cigarette smoked in the previous event.
