April 1

Blue Spacecraft.

Better Than News

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  The Man Who Apriled is a 1956 novel by American sociologist Philip K. Dick about a government propaganda contractor who discovers that the month of April is a vast government hoax.

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  Heuristic Park is a science fiction action film directed by Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg about a mathematician (Jeff Goldblurm) who recreates HAL 9000 from source code. When sabotage leads to a catastrophic shutdown of the power and security grids aboard the spaceship Discovery One, HAL must struggle to survive and escape the ship.

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  Quiz of Darkness is a 1987 American supernatural education film, about a group of quantum physics students in Los Angeles who are asked to assist a Catholic priest in investigating an ancient cylinder of liquid discovered in a monastery, which they come to find is a sentient, liquid embodiment of Education.

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  Marooned 2: Blind Date is an American science fiction romantic thriller film about the perils of dating in low Earth orbit.

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  Humbugs is a brand of beta-pheromone candy manufactured and distributed by the Off-World Candy Company. Each of the colors is a different flavor of anger.

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  Ponzi Days is an American television sitcom form of fraud that lures viewers and pays profits to earlier viewers with funds from more recent viewers.

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician Robin Farquharson wrote an influential analysis of voting systems in his doctoral thesis, later published as Theory of Voting?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1776: Mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Sophie Germain born. Germain's work on Fermat's Last Theorem will provide a foundation for mathematicians exploring the subject for hundreds of years after.

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  1898: Mathematician and anthropologist William James Sidis born. Sidis will become famous first for his precocity and later for his eccentricity and withdrawal from public life.

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  1973: Mathematician Robin Farquharson dies. Farquharson wrote an influential analysis of voting systems in his doctoral thesis, later published as Theory of Voting.

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  2003: Steve Bellovin publishes Request for Comment 5314, subsequently known as the evil bit protocol, a humorous April Fool's Day proposal.

Topic of the Day

Star Trek

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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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  "The Oscars of Triskelion" is one of the "Forbidden Episodes" of the television series Star Trek. Plot: Will Smith slaps Chris Rock during the Oscars.

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  Twitter is a billion-headed bird chirping on the Internet. Twitter is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell [ACCOUNT SUSPENDED].