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Ecosystem 7

The Gnomon Chronicles is a work of fiction and nonfiction by Karl Jones (nonfiction). Fresh content daily.
April 29

Better Than News

Butch Cassidy and the President's Men is an American Western film which tells the story of Wild West Butch Cassidy (Dustin Hoffman), and his partner the Sundance Kid (Robert Redford), who are on the run from a crack US posse after a string of anti-war protests. Paul Newman co-stars as Charles Colson, political hatchet man for the Nixon White House.
ScarNFTs is a 1983 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.
The Unbearable Loch Ness of Being is a 1984 novel by Milan Kundera, about two women, two men, the alleged Loch Ness monster, and their lives in the 1968 Prague Spring period of Czechoslovak history.
Dead is a 1988 American fantasy horror film about Josh Baskin (Tom Hanks), a boy who is reborn at the moment of his death after striking an unholy bargain with a supernatural fortune telling machine.
"Sly Fearsome Aura" is an anagram of "Eyes of Laura Mars".

Beyond Plausible

2001: A Cain Odyssey is a 1968 science fiction religion film about a farmer (Cain) who rises up and slays his brother (Abel), leading up to a tense showdown between man and God that results in a mind-bending trek through space and time.

In Other Words

Sumerian Twitter is a time travel research project which extends Twitter into the Sumerian civilization (c. 5500 – c. 1475 BC).
Do Joachimites Dream of Apocalyptic Sheep? is a 1968 apocalyptic science fiction novel by American sociologist Philip K. Dick.

Are You Sure ...

• ... that polymath John Arbuthnot published his translation of Christiaan Huygens's De ratiociniis in ludo aleae as "Of the Laws of Chance" in 1692 (the first work on probability published in English), and that in 1701, Arbuthnot wrote another mathematical work, An essay on the usefulness of mathematical learning, in a letter from a gentleman in the city to his friend in Oxford, in which Arbuthnot praises mathematics as a method of freeing the mind from superstition?

• ... that mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as "The Last Universalist" by Eric Temple Bell, since Poincaré excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime?

• ... that Centipede Kane is a quasi-biographical horror film examining the life and legacy of Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles, a composite character based on Greater Sol System Co-Prosperity Sphere plastic surgery barons, as well as aspects of the screenwriters' own lives?

• ... that Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) believed, in the words of his friend Georg Henrik von Wright, that "his ideas were generally misunderstood and distorted even by those who professed to be his disciples. He doubted he would be better understood in the future. He once said he felt as though he was writing for people who would think in a different way, breathe a different air of life, from that of present-day men."?

Selected Anniversaries

1667: Physician, satirist, and polymath John Arbuthnot born. He will invent the figure of John Bull.
1854: Mathematician, physicist, and engineer Henri Poincaré born. He will make many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics.
1893: Chemist and astronomer Harold Urey born. Urey's pioneering work on isotopes will earn him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for the discovery of deuterium; he will also play a significant role in the development of the atom bomb, and contribute to theories on the development of organic life from non-living matter.
1986: Chernobyl disaster: American and European spy satellites capture the ruins of the 4th Reactor at the Chernobyl Power Plant.
2008: Chemist and academic Albert Hoffman dies. Hoffman is famous for discovering LSD, which he called his "problem child".

Topic of the Day

Alcohol

Indigo Gin is a 1984 novel by Tom Robbins about dueling gin distillers in Seattle, Paris, and New Orleans who pursue a bottle of incomparable gin created by two unlikely but defiant lovers of the past who seek immortality.
"Mama Told Me Not to Drink" is a song by [REDACTED]: Want some raptors on your planet? / A Fernet-Branca spree? / What's all these crazy liquors you're grabbing from me?