February 14

Yellow Spiral.

Better Than News

Heart You.
Hovering Hearts Conjugal Hotel provides intimate aerial meeting places for elevated erotic encounters. Shown here: Two BASE jumpers fly-falling to a daring aerial tryst on a gravity-free heart bed.
"Do You Know the Way to San Tropez" is a song written by Burt Bacharach and Pink Floyd for Dionne Warwick, with lyrics by Hal David and Pink Floyd.
"A Taste of Money" is a song by The Pinkles from their album The Dark Side of the Beat.
The Dragons of NFT is a 1977 book by Carl Sagan, which combines anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychology, and computer science to give a perspective on how intelligent non-fungible tokens may have evolved.
"Luck Be a Bay Leaf" is a song about a sous chef, Earther Server, who hopes that he will win a bet, the outcome of which will decide whether or not he is able to prepare his signature dish with the garnish of his dreams.
Coriolis is a 2011 American action-Shakespeare film loosely based on William Shakespeare's physics textbook Coriolis about an inertial or fictitious force that acts on objects in motion within a frame of reference that rotates with respect to an inertial frame.

Are You Sure

• ... that Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe as part of the Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System, and that Voyager 1, which had completed its primary mission and was leaving the Solar System, was commanded by NASA to turn its camera around and take one last photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space at the request of astronomer and author Carl Sagan?

• ... that engineer and inventor Charles William Oatley developed one of the first commercial scanning electron microscopes?

• ... that "Have You Never Been Holden?" is a song by Oliva Newton-John and J.D. Salinger?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

1404: Polymath Leon Battista Alberti born. Alberti will epitomize the Renaissance man: humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, cryptographer.
1744: Mathematician John Hadley dies. Hadley laid claim to the invention of the octant, two years after Thomas Godfrey claimed the same. Hadley also developed ways to make precision aspheric and parabolic objective mirrors for reflecting telescopes.
1855: Texas is linked by telegraph to the rest of the United States, with the completion of a connection between New Orleans and Marshall, Texas.
1876: Alexander Graham Bell applies for a patent for the telephone, as does Elisha Gray.
1904: Engineer and inventor Charles William Oatley born. He will develop of one of the first commercial scanning electron microscopes.
1943: Mathematician David Hilbert dies. He discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many areas, including invariant theory and the axiomatization of geometry.
1950: Physicist and engineer Karl Guthe Jansky dies. Jansky discovered radio waves emanating from the Milky Way while investigating sources of static that might interfere with radio voice transmissions, and is considered one of the founding figures of radio astronomy.
1990: The Voyager 1 spacecraft takes the Pale Blue Dot photograph of planet Earth from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU). Earth's apparent size is less than a pixel.
2017: Routine annual steganographic analysis of famed illustration Alice and Niles Dancing unexpectedly reveals "at least a megabyte" of love letters between Gnomon algorithm engineers Alice Beta and Niles Cartouchian.