January 2

Self portrait with water tower (2 January 2022) @ 3:16 p.m. West side of town, view to the west.

Better Than News

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  Mordor, She Wrote is an epic fantasy crime television series starring Angela Lansbury, loosely based on The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.

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  Brubaker: Endgame is an American prison drama science fiction film about prison reformer Henry Brubaker (Robert Redford), the newly appointed secretary of the World Security Council and secretly director of Hydra, who attempts to clean up the corrupt and violent Hydra system.

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  The Blair Matrix Project is an American science fiction supernatural horror film about three student software developers who write an open-source application which emulates a local myth known as the Blair Matrix. The three disappear, but their application is discovered a year later.

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  Steamboat Bennie is an animated horror film about a lonely steamship captain who recruits an army of deadly rodents.

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  Whom Gods Destroy They First Make Mudd is one of the "Forbidden Episodes" of the television series Star Trek.

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  Tide Pod Pop-Tarts is a seasonally available variety of Pop-Tarts flavored with Tide laundry detergent pods.

Are You Sure

• ... that AESOP ("Artificial Expert System of Philosophy"), an alleged autonomous artificial intelligence self-propagating in the Earth's ionosphere, has been known to exchange data between unmanned spacecraft?

• ... that physicist and mathematician Rudolf Clausius' restatement of the Carnot cycle put the theory of heat on a truer and sounder basis?

• ... that Isaac Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1665: Samuel Pepys sees a copy of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia at his bookseller and orders a copy. Pepys writes in his diary: "Thence to my bookseller's and at his binder's saw Hooke's book of the Microscope, which is so pretty that I presently bespoke it."

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  1822: Rudolf Clausius born. He will be one of the central founders of the science of thermodynamics.

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  1892: Mathematician and astronomer George Biddell Airy dies. His achievements include work on planetary orbits, measuring the mean density of the Earth, and, in his role as Astronomer Royal, establishing Greenwich as the location of the prime meridian.

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  1904: Physicist and chemist Walter Heinrich Heitler born. He will make contributions to quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory, bringing chemistry under quantum mechanics through his theory of valence bonding.

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  1905: Mathematician Lev Schnirelmann born. He will prove that any natural number greater than 1 can be written as the sum of not more than C prime numbers, where C is an effectively computable constant.

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  1920: Writer Isaac Asimov born. He will be considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers during his lifetime.

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  1959: Luna 1, the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon and to orbit the Sun, is launched by the Soviet Union.

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  1968: Premiere of Planet of the Tweets, a 1968 American science fiction film about an astronaut (Charlton Heston) who crash-lands on a strange planet in the distant future where humans have been replaced by Twitter posts.

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  2004: The robotic spacecraft Stardust flies by comet Wild 2, collecting dust samples which will return to Earth on 15 January 2006.

Topic of the Day

Neil Young

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  "This Zimmerman Note's For You" is a secret diplomatic communication issued from the German Foreign Office in January 1917 which was later decrypted and popularized by Neil Young. The message proposes a military alliance between Germany and Mexico if the United States entered World War I against Germany.

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  "Knockin'" is a song written and popularized by Young Dylan, the alleged transdimensional musical hive mind from [REDACTED].