January 5
Better Than News
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.
Dungeons & Surgeons is an American fantasy medical drama-adventure television series starring Freddie Highmore and Eleanor Audley.
Dungeons & Collins is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game set to the music of Phil Collins.
Admissible Now is a 1979 American epic legal drama film produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando.
In the role playing game Dungeons & Caterers, a food alignment matrix is a rectangular array of data representing moral, ethical, and causal relationships between food and players.
Beyond Plausible
"O Tropism" is an anagram of "Impostor".
In Other Words
"Turnip Glow" is an anagram of "Uptown Girl".
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
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.
Matrix: The X Factor is a science fiction social media action film directed by Elon Musk and the Wachowskis.
