May 8

Better Than News

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  Polenta and You (full title: Polenta and You: The Untold Story of the Niger Polenta Forgeries) is a young adult adventure story about the confusion between harmless polenta and radioactive yellowcake.

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  "The Seventies Within"— A transporter malfunction splits Captain Kirk into Carly Simon and Farrah Fawcett. (Star Trek: Forbidden Episodes.)

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  Heresy is a rock musical about the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathar heretics.

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  "Tweetache Tonight" is a song recorded by American rock band the Eagles about Twitter.

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  The Omega Kiss is a 1971 American post-apocalyptic science fiction romantic comedy film starring Nichelle Nichols, William Shatner, and Charlton Heston.

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  Darth Vader and the Quest for Love is a short autobiographical film by Darth Vader.

Are You Sure

• ... that Antoine Lavoisier played a key role in changing chemistry from a qualitative science to a quantitative science, discovered the role oxygen plays in combustion, helped construct the metric system, wrote the first extensive list of elements, and was executed as a traitor during the French Revolution?

• ... that mathematician John Henry Constantine "Henry" Whitehead (1904–1960) was one of the founders of homotopy theory, which originated in algebraic topology as a systematic study of situations in which maps come with homotopies between them; and that J.J. Rotman, in his book on algebraic topology, as a tribute to Whitehead's intellect, stated: "There is a canard that every textbook of algebraic topology either ends with the definition of the Klein bottle or is a personal communication to J. H. C. Whitehead."?

• ... that the book Polenta and You: The Untold Story of the Niger Polenta Forgeries describes the differences between harmless polenta and radioactive yellowcake?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1788: Physician, geologist, and botanist Giovanni Antonio Scopoli dies. He has been called the "first anational European" and the "Linnaeus of the Austrian Empire".

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  1794: Branded a traitor during the Reign of Terror by revolutionists, French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, who was also a tax collector with the Ferme générale, is tried, convicted and guillotined in one day in Paris.

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  1873: Economist, civil servant, and philosopher John Stuart Mill dies. He was one of the most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism, and the first Member of Parliament to call for women's suffrage.

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  1959: Mathematician Renato Caccioppoli takes his own life. Caccioppoli contributed to mathematical analysis, including the theory of functions of several complex variables, functional analysis, and measure theory.

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  1960: Mathematician and academic J. H. C. Whitehead dies. During the Second World War, he worked with the codebreakers at Bletchley Park.

Topic of the Day

Titanic

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  Titanic Cabaret is an epic historical romance and comedy disaster film directed by Bob Fosse and James Cameron, and starring Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Liza Minnelli.

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  Titanic 2: Under the Sea is a 2023 comedy action-romance film starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio.

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  Titanic 2: The Way of Water is a romantic science fiction drama film by James Cameron about a human couple who crash-land on an alien planet (Pandora).

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  The Titanic Strain (originally A Strain to Remember) is a science fiction historical disaster thriller film about a deadly alien organism aboard the ocean liner Titanic.

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  A million monkeys. A million deck chairs. Sooner or later the Titanic will arrive in New York City.