January 30
Better Than News
"Love Is Saul Alinsky" is a song by the Troggs.
Breaking Barb is a fantasy crime comedy-drama television series created by Greta Gerwig and Vince Gilligan, starring Margot Robbie, Bryan Cranston, Ryan Gosling, and Aaron Paul.
Peak drainage basin is the moment at which erosion of drainage basins reaches a rate greater than that at any time in the past and starts to decrease
2001: A Matrix Odyssey is a science fiction film about a dystopian future in which humanity is unknowingly trapped inside the Matrix, a mysterious black monolith which transcends time and space using human minds as a computational resource.
The Fisher King is a 1991 American fantasy comedy-drama film about a radio shock jock (Robin Williams) who tries to find redemption by living among the fishers— small, carnivorous mammals related to weasels, native to the boreal forests of Canada and the northern United States.
Get Helena Bonham Carter is a 1971 British crime film starring Michael Caine and Helena Bonham Carter.
The Last EMP Weapon of Christ is a 1988 epic religious science fiction war film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Willem Dafoe.
Are You Sure
• ... that the corpse of Oliver Cromwell was ritually executed more than two years after his death, on the 12th anniversary of the execution of the monarch he himself deposed?
• ... that Henry Rollins plays Cato the Censor in the 1995 cyberpunk history film Johnny SPQR ?
• ... that inventor and engineer James Watt realized that contemporary steam engine designs wasted a great deal of energy by repeatedly cooling and reheating the cylinder, and that he consequently invented the separate condenser, which avoided this waste of energy and radically improved the power, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of steam engines?
• ... that Planet of the COVID is a global health catastrophe media franchise consisting of films, books, television series, comics, and other media about a world in which humans and COVID clash for control; and that the franchise is based on French Patient Zero's 1963 blood sample, code-named "La Planète des seringue", translated into English as Planet of the Syringe or Hypo Planet?
• ... that mathematician and Roman Catholic Cardinal Michelangelo Ricci's published mathematical work is summarized in a treatise of nineteen pages, Exercitatio geometrica, de maximis et minimis (1666), in which he describes the maxima of functions, as well as tangents to curves, using methods that are an early form of induction, and that this treatise was much admired by his contemporaries?
• ... that Two Plus Two Opens The Door is a classic children's book about Gnomon algorithm theory by famed mathematician Alice Beta?
• ... that artist Gil Kane pioneered the graphic novel with his books His Name is...Savage (1968) and Blackmark (1971)?
Beyond Plausible
"Stuck in Tomatoes with You" is a song by Stealer's Meal about the debate over whether the tomato is a fruit or a vegetable.
Refrain From Forever was an American punk fusion band founded by pianist Chick Corea in 1972.
On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction
1619: Mathematician and cardinal Michelangelo Ricci born. Ricci will play a significant part in the theoretical debates and experiments that lead up to Torricelli's discovery of atmospheric pressure and invention of the mercury barometer.
1661: Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, is ritually executed more than two years after his death, on the 12th anniversary of the execution of the monarch he himself deposed.
1736: inventor, engineer, and chemist James Watt born. He will make major improvements to the steam engine.
1830: In a letter to Laplace, Carl Friedrich Gauss writes about a "curious problem" that he had been working on for twelve years. He gives the limiting value of the frequency of distribution of positive integers in the continued fraction of a random number (now called the Gauss-Kuzmin Distribution) as log2(1+x) . Gauss then asks if Laplace can offer help in finding the error term.
1975: The Monitor National Marine Sanctuary is established as the first United States National Marine Sanctuary.
1998: Mathematician Samuel Eilenberg dies. He co-founded category theory with Saunders Mac Lane, and proposed the Eilenberg swindle (a construction applying the telescoping cancellation idea to projective modules).
2022: Premiere of Rise of the Variants, the third film in Planet of the COVID global health catastrophe media franchise about a world in which humans and COVID clash for control.
Topic of the Day
Keanu Reeves
Johnny SPQR is a 1995 cyberpunk history film about a Roman Consul (Keanu Reeves) with a cybernetic brain implant designed to win the Punic Wars. Co-starring Henry Rollins as Cato the Censor.
Break Point is a 2021 tennis thriller film starring Keanu Reeves and Björn Borg.
Matrix to America is a 2021 action-comedy buddy film about a computer hacker (Keanu Reeves) and an African king (Eddie Murphy) who must team up to save the world from a malicious computer program (Hugo Weaving).
Children of the Wick is an active shooter child safety training film Starring Stephen King and Keanu Reeves.
Crypto Party is a song by Rick Nelson 1.1.
Wick Hunt is a 1984 light gun shooter video game developed by John Wick for close-quarters combat.