May 14

Better Than News

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  Weaponizing Spirograph is a short documentary film about the conversion of Spirograph from civilian to military use.

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  "A Scoville in Bohemia" is the first short story, and the third overall work, featuring Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional English chef-detective Sherlock Holmes.

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  The Bounty Whacker is a 2010 American action comedy film about a landscape architect (Gerard Butler) hired to retrieve his ex-wife (Jennifer Aniston), who has skipped bail.

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  Velvet Days and Mondays (Always Get Me Blue) is a musical noir thriller film directed by David Lynch and starring Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, David Lynch, and the Carpenters.

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  Blade Wobegon is a 1982 American science fiction musical film about a police officer (Harrison Ford) who must find and kill a rogue android (Garrison Keillor).

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  The Man Who Replaced His Ears With Orchids is a 1975 floral industry training film about a brilliant but absent-minded surgeon whose obsession with orchids leads to frightening advances in medical botany.

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician John Charles Fields (1863–1932) worked tirelessly throughout his career to promote the professional of mathematics, especially in his native Canada; and that in the late 1920's he began planning the now-prestigious Fields Medal, awarded to two to four mathematicians, under the age of 40, who have made important contributions to the field; but that due to deteriorating health, never saw the implementation of the medal in his lifetime, leaving $47,000 in his will to fund the award?

... that Garrison Keillor played a rogue android in the 1982 science fiction musical film Blade Wobegon?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1678: Writer and philosopher Culvert Origenes publishes Historia Culvertica, which will soon be widely plagiarized, influencing a generation of humanists.

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  1679: Astronomer and mathematician Peder Horrebow born. Horrebow will invent a way to determine a place's latitude from the stars.

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  1863: Mathematician John Charles Fields born. He will found the Fields Medal for outstanding achievement in mathematics.

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  1893: Mathematician Ernst Kummer dies. Kummer contributed to abstract algebra; in ring theory, he introduced the term ideal.

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  1916: Physicist and astrophysicist Robert F. Christy born. Christy will be credited with the insight that a solid sub-critical mass of plutonium can be explosively compressed into supercriticality, a great simplification of earlier concepts of implosion requiring hollow shells.

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  1917: Mathematician, codebreaker, and academic W. T. Tutte born. During the Second World War, he will make a brilliant and fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major Nazi German cipher system.

Topic of the Day

Restaurants

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  1959: The Ham Omelette breakfast cafe and Shakespearean playhouse opens in New Minneapolis, Canada.

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  Sushi Cage is an underwater sushi restaurant.

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  Mesopelagium is a restaurant in New Minneapolis, Canada specializing in seafood from the mesopelagic zone.

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  Last Action Bistro is a 1993 fantasy restaurant management training film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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  Thumper King is an international chain of spiced hamburger fast food restaurants.

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  Nostromo Café is a restaurant located aboard the spaceship Nostromo.

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  Cronenburger is a Canadian-American extreme body modification restaurant chain inspired by David Cronenberg's 1981 film Scanners.

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  Olive Matrix is a science-fiction theme restaurant franchise with indentured franchises throughout the Greater Sol System Co-Prosperity Sphere. Olive Matrix. When you're here, you're virtual.

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  Taconator 2: Judgement Meal.