April 30

Better Than News

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  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.

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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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  Five Recover Weather Data (full title: Five Recover Weather Data Spanning Over 200 Years) is a children's global issues adventure novel written by English climatologist Enid Blyton.

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  The Day After Barbie is a fantasy disaster film directed by Greta Gerwig and Roland Emmerich, starring Margot Robbie, Dennis Quaid, Ryan Gosling, and Jake Gyllenhaal.

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  Unscanned Halo is an anagram of Claude Shannon.

Are You Sure

• ... that electrical engineer Ralph Hartley (1888–1970) invented the Hartley oscillator and the Hartley transform; and that he and contributed to the foundations of information theory while working at Bell Laboratories, researching repeaters and voice and carrier transmission, formulating the law that "the total amount of information that can be transmitted is proportional to frequency range transmitted and the time of the transmission," and that Hartley's 1928 paper is considered as "the single most important prerequisite" for Claude Shannon's theory of information?

• ... that "Unscanned Halo" is an anagram of "Claude Shannon"?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1777: Mathematician, astronomer, and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss born. He will have an exceptional influence in many fields of mathematics and science and be ranked as one of history's most influential mathematicians.

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  1897: J. J. Thomson of the Cavendish Laboratory announces his discovery of the electron as a subatomic particle, over 1,800 times smaller than a proton (in the atomic nucleus), at a lecture at the Royal Institution in London.

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  1913: Mathematician and cryptanalyst Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein born. Feinstein will work for the Signals Intelligence Service throughout World War II, playing an important role in deciphering the Japanese cryptography machine Purple, and will later work on the Cold War-era Venona project.

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  1916: Mathematician, engineer, and information scientist Claude Shannon born. He will be known as "the father of information theory".

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  1973: Watergate: U.S. President Richard Nixon announces that White House Counsel John Dean has been fired and that other top aides, most notably H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, have resigned.

Topic of the Day

Planets

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  Great Red Spot Cat Toys is an unlicensed transdimensional corporation which manufactures and distributes novelty oversized laser pointer toys for cats.

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  Alka-Seltzer for Venus is a proposal to terraform Venus using enormous Alka-Seltzer tablets.

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  Red Spot Travel Agency is an exoplanetary retailer that provides travel and tourism-related services between Earth and Jupiter.