May 9

Better Than News

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  Harry Potter: Beyond Muggledome is a post-apocalyptic fantasy adventure film starring Daniel Radcliffe, Tina Turner, and Mel Gibson.

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  RoboGodfather is an epic science fiction crime film directed by Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Verhoeven, starring Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Peter Weller, and Kurtwood Smith.

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  Marmaduke: Infinity War is a 2018 American superhero film about the Winslow family and their Great Dane, Marmaduke, drawn by Brad Anderson from June 1954 to 2015.

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  "Like a Kraken" is a song by Madonna.

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  Slothrop's Heroes is a 1973 historical novel by American writer Thomas Pynchon about the design, production, and sabotage of V-2 rockets by Allied agents posing as prisoners of war.

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  "Don't Stop Insurin'" is a song by Journey and Prudential Financial.

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  John Barleycorn Must Titrate is the fourth studio album by English chemical research laboratory and rock band Traffic.

Beyond Plausible

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  Missed Coldplay for You is a 1971 American psychological thriller film about a radio disc jockey (Clint Eastwood) being stalked by an obsessed British rock band (Coldplay).

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  "Denote an Olympian" is an anagram of "Napoleon Dynamite".

In Other Words

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  The Erotic Phaser Cosplay Society is an autonomous cosplay collective dedicated to erotic Star Trek cosplay with an emphasis on fetishistic devotion to the phaser rifle.

Are You Sure

• ... that Jensen's inequality, named after the Danish mathematician Johan Jensen (1859–1925), relates the value of a convex function of an integral to the integral of the convex function; and that in its simplest form the inequality states that the convex transformation of a mean is less than or equal to the mean applied after convex transformation; and that it is a simple corollary that the opposite is true of concave transformations; and that Jensen's inequality generalizes the statement that the secant line of a convex function lies above the graph of the function, which is Jensen's inequality for two points?

• ... that mathematician, cosmographer, and astrologer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (1397–1482) was one of the central figures in the intellectual and cultural history of Renaissance Florence in its early years, and that his circle of friends included Filippo Brunelleschi (architect of the Duomo) and philosopher Marsilio Ficino; and that Toscanelli knew mathematician and architect Leon Battista Alberti; and Toscanelli's closest friend was Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, himself a wide-ranging intellect and early humanist, who dedicated two short mathematical works, both written in 1445, to Toscanelli, and made himself and Toscanelli the interlocutors in a dialogue (1458) entitled De quadratura circuli ("On Squaring the Circle")?

• ... that Thomas Pynchon's 1973 historical novel Slothrop's Heroes is loosely based on Operation Paperclip?

Selected Anniversaries

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  1746: Mathematician and engineer Gaspard Monge born. He will invent descriptive geometry, and do pioneering work in differential geometry.

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  1941: The German submarine U-110 is captured by the Royal Navy. On board is the latest Enigma machine which Allied cryptographers later use to break coded German messages.

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  1963: Project West Ford launches, successfully deploying a ring of 480,000,000 copper needles in orbit, forming an artificial ionospheric radio communication system.

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  1972: Watergate scandal (nonfiction): The United States House Committee on the Judiciary opens formal and public impeachment hearings against President Richard Nixon.

Topic of the Day

Eggs

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  Ham Omelette is a short order breakfast cafe and Shakespearean playhouse.

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  The notorious "Fifty Sarlacc eggs" scene from Cool Hand Skywalker.

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  The Sixth Egg is a 1999 American black comedy foodie thriller film about a celebrity psychologist (Gordon Ramsay) who uses radical cooking therapy with an unstable young chef (Donnie Wahlberg).

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  Donnie Darko 2: Easter Day is a 2023 religious psychological horror film.

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  Savior: Endgame is a 2019 epic religious superhero film starring Josh Brolin.

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  "L'eggs all the way down" is a of infinitely recursive pantyhose, introduced in 1969 by Hanes, which radically changed the recursive hosiery marketplace. The novel developments were the egg-shaped recursive plastic product container, the shift to consignment sales in drug stores and groceries, and the in-store "Matryoshka doll" product racks designed to emphasize the infinitely self-referential egg shape.

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  "When I use Huffman coding," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."