May 5

Better Than News

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  Fitzcarraldo and the Holy Grail is an epic adventure comedy-drama film written, produced, and directed by Werner Herzog, and starring Klaus Kinski and Monty Python.

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  Repo Man: Love Means Nothing is an American black comedy science fiction tennis film.

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  Indiana Jones and the Fresh Prince of Doom is a 1984 American action-comedy film about a swashbuckling archaeologist (Indiana Jones) who is asked by a desperate Philadelphia family to shield their son (Will Smith) from violent street thugs.

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  Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Scanner Darkly is a 1977 science fiction novel by American sociologist Philip K. Dick. It was adapted for the stage by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

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  The Three Stigmata of Robert Heinlein is a biographical science fiction novel by American sociologist Philip K. Dick, loosely based on the life of author Robert Heinlein.

Beyond Plausible

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  B. J. and the Bear and Doug and LiMu is an American action comedy television series starring Greg Evigan and David Reed Hoffman.

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  I Am Asterix, Hear Me Roar! is a 1997 animated television series voiced by Heath Ledger, Lisa Zane, and David Warner.

In Other Words

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  Avalanche is a brand of meat-flavored snuff manufactured and distributed by the Greater Sol System Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician and academic Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet and his family supported the 1848 revolution; guarding with a rifle the palace of the Prince of Prussia; and that fter the revolution failed, the temporary closure of the Prussian Military Academy causing Dirichlet a large loss of income; and that when the Academy reopened, the environment became more hostile to him, as officers he was teaching would ordinarily be expected to remain loyal to the constituted government; and that portion of the press who were not with the revolution called Dirichlet, as well as Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi and other liberal professors, "the red contingent of the staff"?

Selected Anniversaries

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  1580: Mathematician Johann Faulhaber born. He will discover Faulhaber's formula, which expresses the sum of the p-th powers of the first n positive integers.

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  1859: Mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet dies. He made important contributions to number theory, analysis, and mechanics. Dirichlet was one of the first mathematicians to give the modern formal definition of a function.

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  1868: Inventor, physician, chemist Charles Grafton Page dies. His work had a lasting impact on telegraphy and in the practice and politics of patenting scientific innovation, challenging the rising scientific elitism that maintained 'the scientific do not patent'.

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  1833: Mathematician and academic Lazarus Immanuel Fuchs born. He will contribute important research in the field of linear differential equations. Fuchs will be the eponym of Fuchsian groups and functions, and the Picard–Fuchs equation.

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  1933: The New York Times The New York Times publishes a front-page account of a scientific paper on radio astronomy by Karl Guthe Jansky.

Topic of the Day

Twitter

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  "I Can't Stop Tweeting You" is a popular song written and composed by country singer, songwriter, and musician Don Gibson. It has been recorded by more than 700 artists, including Ray Charles.

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  "You Don't Tweet Me Flowers" is a song written by Neil Diamond 1.1 for the ill-fated reality TV drama All That Twitters.

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  "Everyone just needs to stop tweeting bad stuff and to only make tweets that are so uplifting and healing that they heal everyone in the world until it is perfect. Easy peasy." Will the Joker's gun-buyback program save Gotham City? (The Dark Tweet)