Henry Kuttner was born on April 7, 1915 in Los Angeles, California, USA. During his career he wrote many science fiction, fantasy and horror storie. In 1940 he married his fellow writer Catherine L. Moore and since then they worked together using pseudonyms, mainly Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O’Donnell. Kuttner died when he was still young following a heart attack on February 4, 1958.
In recent years, IBM has been adapting the technology of its cognitive computing system Watson to many different activities. Lately, it’s also launching Chef Watson, a version of this intelligence artificial that specializes in inventing new recipes. The idea is to get it to recognize people’s tastes to provide customized recipes.
Cognitive computing aims to reproduce human thought. In the case of recipes, the process is called “cognitive cooking”. For the training necessary to make it learn this art, Chef Watson analyzed thousands of recipes including the database of 9,000 recipes of the magazine “Bon Appétit” and studied the Wikipedia files to learn associations among different ingredients and different cuisines.
Robert John Downey, Jr. was born April 4, 1965 in Manhattan, New York, USA. He had roles in many successful movies and occasionally in TV shows. For many years he had drug problems. In the last decade he cleaned up and is have great success especially playing Tony Stark / Iron Man and Sherlock Holmes.
The novel “On the Beach” by Nevil Shute was published for the first time in 1957, first in four parts on the weekly periodical “Sunday Graphic” and later as a book in an expanded version.
After a nuclear war devastated the world, the northern hemisphere has become uninhabitable after the areas that weren’t destroyed by the bombs were struck by the radioactive fallout killing anyone who had survived the attacks. Some areas of the southern hemisphere are still habitable but it seems only a matter of time before the wind currents carry radioactive particles everywhere.
One of the last American nuclear submarines, the USS Scorpion, was made available to the Australian Navy by his commander, Dwight Towers. When in Australia a radio signal in Morse code from the American city of Seattle is picked up, Towers is sent to investigate. Lieutenant Commander Peter Holmes of the Australian Navy is assigned to the USS Scorpion for the mission but is worried about his wife and little daughter because the news about the winds indicate that Australia won’t be habitable for a long time.
