October 4

Better Than News

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  Soprano Todd: The Barber-Surgeon of Fleet Street is a 2007 American barbershop quartet medical slasher film starring Johnny Depp.

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  Psycho: Rise of the Psychologists is an American psychological horror film starring Janet Leigh and Jordan Peterson.

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  Wedding Crashers 2: The Wrath of God is an epic historical romantic comedy film directed by David Dobkin and Werner Herzog, and starring Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, and Klaus Kinski.

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  X Marks the Sputnik is a 2021 documentary film about a treasure map allegedly hidden in the Sputnik 1 satellite.

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  "Tiny Antlers" is a song by Elton John.

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  Ascension Island is a jazz album by John Coltrane recorded in June 1965 and released in 1966. It is considered a watershed in Coltrane's work, with the albums recorded before it being more conventional in structure and the albums recorded after it being concerned with geography and navigation.

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  Dirty HAL 9000 is a 1971 American neo-noir science fiction action thriller film about San Francisco Police Department Homicide Division Computer "Dirty" HAL 9000, who is notorious for his unorthodox, violent and ruthless methods against the criminals and killers he is assigned to detect and report.

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  The Babysitter 2 is a 1980 American made-for-television drama horror comedy film about a young girl hired as a live-in nanny who is destroyed by a suburban Seattle family.

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  "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Tweet" is a 1957 folk song written by British social media singer/songwriter Ewan MacColl. During the 1960s, it was recorded by various social media singers and became a major online hit for Roberta Flack in 1972.

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  Savoy Ruffles is a brand of chocolate ganache potato chips.

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  The Rider-Waite Space Elevator is a space elevator based on the Rider-Waite tarot deck. Hashtag: #AsBelowSoAbove.

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  "Red Frap Axiom" is an anagram of "Fermi paradox".

Are You Sure

Do you remember when the United States was no longer the most powerful nation on Earth? Sputnik 1 remembers.

• ... that Sputnik 1 (Простейший Спутник-1, "Elementary Satellite One") was the first artificial Earth satellite; that Sputnik was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957; and that its batteries died three weeks later, after which Sputnik orbited silently for two months before falling into the atmosphere?

• ... that physicist and inventor John Vincent Atanasoff (4 October 1903 – 15 June 1995) invented a pioneering electronic digital computer in the 1930s, and that challenges to his legal claim were resolved in 1973 when the Honeywell v. Sperry Rand lawsuit ruled that Atanasoff was the inventor of what is now called the Atanasoff–Berry computer?

• ... that mathematician and actuary Harald Cramér (25 September 1893 – 5 October 1985) became interested in the field of probability before it was accepted branch of mathematics, and that Cramér wrote, in a 1926 paper: "The probability concept should be introduced by a purely mathematical definition, from which its fundamental properties and the classical theorems are deduced by purely mathematical operations."?

• ... that theoretical physicist Max Planck (23 April 1858 – 4 October 1947) lost much of his will to live after his son Erwin was arrested by and died at the hands of the Gestapo?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1903: Physicist, inventor, and academic John Vincent Atanasoff born. He will invent the Atanasoff–Berry computer, the first electronic digital computer.

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  1947: Physicist and academic Max Planck dies. He made many contributions to theoretical physics, and earned fame as the originator of quantum theory.

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  1957: Clock Head 2 stops math criminals from interfering with the launch of Sputnik 1.

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  1957: Space Race: Launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth.

Topic of the Day

Dolphins

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  Flipper 2049 is a science fiction nature film about A young Film Runner who discovers a long-buried chromatographic secret which leads him to track down Flipper the Dolphin.