May 16

Better Than News

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  Dark Side of the Planet of the Apes is an American science fiction musical film about a psychedelic rock band (Pink Floyd) which crash-lands on a strange planet in the distant future.

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  Midnight E.T. is an American science fiction drama film directed by John Schlesinger and Steven Spielberg.

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  Jacob's Ladder & the Chocolate Factory is a musical fantasy psychological horror film directed by Mel Stuart and Adrian Lyne, starring Gene Wilder and Tim Robbins.

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  Matrix in a Red Dress is a 2022 pornographic science fiction documentary film about the Matrix franchise. Narrated by Hugo Weaving.

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  The Johnny Carcinization Show is an American late-night talk show hosted by Johnny Carson on NBC featuring examples of convergent evolution in which a crustacean evolves into a crab-like form from a non-crab-like form.

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  Turtles to the Rescue! is a cautionary adventure story for turtles.

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian Maria Gaetana Agnesi wrote the first book discussing both differential and integral calculus; that Agnesi received a response from Pope Benedict XIV on the publication of her book, Instituzioni Analitiche; and that the pope sent her a gold medal and a wreath laid with precious stones, and named her honorary professor at the University of Bologna?

• ... that Altered Carbon Paper is an American cyberpunk television series about a former soldier turned investigator (Joel Kinnaman) who is embedded in carbon paper in order to solve a murder?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1821: Mathematician and statistician Pafnuty Chebyshev born. He will prove Chebyshev's inequality (also called the Bienaymé–Chebyshev inequality), which guarantees that, for a wide class of probability distributions, no more than a certain fraction of values can be more than a certain distance from the mean.

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  1830: Mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier dies. He initiated the investigation of Fourier series and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations.

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  1888: The Orcagna scrying engine previews Nikola Tesla's speech on alternating current technology.

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  1888: Nikola Tesla delivers a lecture describing the equipment which will allow efficient generation and use of alternating currents to transmit electric power over long distances.

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  1968: Mathematician and crime-fighter Jacques-Louis Lions publishes new class of Gnomon algorithm functions which use partial differential equations and stochastic control to detect and prevent crimes against mathematical constants.

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  2017: Math photographer Cantor Parabola wins Pulitzer Prize for "unique and peerless accomplishments in four-dimensional photography."

Topic of the Day

Beatles

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  "The Enemy Within You Without You" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles about the American television series Star Trek.

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  She Loaves You is a song by the British rock group The Breadles.

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  The lost Beatles song "Stalker" unexpectedly broadcast by the Greater Sol System Co-Prosperity Sphere.

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  Maxwell's silver demon is a musical thought experiment that would hypothetically prevent crimes against the second law of thermodynamics. It was proposed by physicist and alleged time-traveler James Clerk Maxwell in 1867 during an impromptu jam session with the Beatles in late 1966 and early 1967.