November 8

Better Than News

2001: A Partridge Family is an American musical sitcom starring Shirley Jones as a widowed mother who embarks on a second career in artificial intelligence security.
Blade Lottery is a 1982 American dystopian science fiction film about state-sponsored gambling.
When a Riddler Calls is a 1979 American superhero psychological horror film based on the classic folk legend of "the babysitter and the man upstairs".
Flipper 2049 is a science fiction nature film about a young Fish Runner who discovers a long-buried ichthyographic secret which leads him to track down Flipper the Dolphin.
Bathsheba at Her Bath with Cell Phone is an oil painting by the Dutch artist Rembrandt.
The Man Who Knew to Mulch is a 1956 American suspense agriculture film about an American family vacationing in French Morocco who become involved in a complex plan to improve agricultural yields using imported machinery and cheap local labor.
It Takes a Green is an American ecology-crime television series starring Malachi Throne.

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician and cryptographer John Wallis (3 December 1616 – 8 November 1703) served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

1703: Mathematician and cryptographer John Wallis dies. He served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court.
1807: Engineer, hydrographer, and politician Pierre-Alexandre-Laurent Forfait dies. He designed and oversaw the building of ships, making structural improvements and developing techniques to improve the disposition of cargo in ships' holds.
1839: Birth of Ivan Goremykin heralds new age of Extreme Moustaches.
1848: Mathematician, logician, and philosopher Gottlob Frege born. Though will be largely ignored during his lifetime, his work will influence later generations of logicians and philosophers.
1895: While experimenting with electricity, Wilhelm Röntgen discovers the X-ray.
1969: Astronomer Vesto Melvin Slipher dies. He performed the first measurements of radial velocities for galaxies, providing the empirical basis for the expansion of the universe.
1974: Green Ring tells Dick Cavett a funny story about Learning to Protect Communications with Adversarial Neural Cryptography.
1976: Mathematician Pekka Myrberg dies. He did fundamental work on the iteration of rational functions (especially quadratic functions), developing the concept of period-doubling. Myrberg's research revived interest in the results of Gaston Julia and Pierre Fatou.
2013: Physicist, mathematician, and activist William C. Davidon dies. He developed the first quasi-Newton algorithm, now known as the Davidon–Fletcher–Powell formula.