November 8

Better Than News

A History of Dark Knights is an action superhero thriller film directed by David Cronenberg and Christopher Nolan, and starring Viggo Mortenson, Heath Ledger, Maria Bello, and Christian Bale.
When a Riddler Calls is a 1979 American superhero psychological horror film based on the classic folk legend of "the babysitter and the man upstairs".
Puss in Boots: Final Destination is a 2023 American horror-adventure film based on characters from Final Destination (2000) and inspired by Giovanni Francesco Straparola's fairy tale about a swashbuckling cat.
2001: A Partridge Family is an American musical sitcom starring Shirley Jones as a widowed mother who embarks on a second career in artificial intelligence security.
Shaft of the Archer is a 2022 action-bromance fantasy adventure film starring Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom.

Beyond Plausible

Bane Capital is a legal thriller film about a renegade aerospace engineer (Tom Hardy) who blackmails Gotham City into issuing municipal bonds for the upgrade of aging runways at Gotham City International Airport.
"Dream Freeness" is an anagram of "Reefer Madness".

In Other Words

Haste Exit to Brooklyn is a 1989 time management film adapted from Hubert Selby Jr.'s 1964 book of the same title.

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician and cryptographer John Wallis (3 December 1616 – 8 November 1703) served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court?

Selected Anniversaries

1703: Mathematician and cryptographer John Wallis dies. He served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court.
1807: Engineer, hydrographer, and politician Pierre-Alexandre-Laurent Forfait dies. He designed and oversaw the building of ships, making structural improvements and developing techniques to improve the disposition of cargo in ships' holds.
1839: Birth of Ivan Goremykin heralds new age of Extreme Moustaches.
1848: Mathematician, logician, and philosopher Gottlob Frege born. Though will be largely ignored during his lifetime, his work will influence later generations of logicians and philosophers.
1895: While experimenting with electricity, Wilhelm Röntgen discovers the X-ray.
1969: Astronomer Vesto Melvin Slipher dies. He performed the first measurements of radial velocities for galaxies, providing the empirical basis for the expansion of the universe.
1974: Green Ring tells Dick Cavett a funny story about Learning to Protect Communications with Adversarial Neural Cryptography.
1976: Mathematician Pekka Myrberg dies. He did fundamental work on the iteration of rational functions (especially quadratic functions), developing the concept of period-doubling. Myrberg's research revived interest in the results of Gaston Julia and Pierre Fatou.
2013: Physicist, mathematician, and activist William C. Davidon dies. He developed the first quasi-Newton algorithm, now known as the Davidon–Fletcher–Powell formula.