May 1

Better Than News

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  The Secret Life of Walter Cronkite is a 1947 Technicolor comedy film, loosely based on the career of journalist Walter Cronkite. The film stars Danny Kaye as a young daydreaming journalist (later anchorman) for CBS News and Virginia Mayo as the girl journalist of his dreams.

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  Anaïs 9 is an animated science fiction erotic adventure film starring Anaïs Nin.

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  "The Ringworlds of Your Mind" is a song by Larry Niven, first recorded by Noel Harrison for the film The Louis Wu Affair.

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  The Kinski Within is a science fiction psychological thriller film directed by Werner Herzog and starring Klaus Kinski and William Shatner.

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  Morbius XII: So Very Anemic is an American science fiction horror-comedy buddy film about an aging starship captain (William Shatner) who befriends a deranged biochemist (Jared Leto).

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  The Devil's Accountant is a 1997 American supernatural horror film about a gifted young Florida accountant (Scrooge McDuck) who slowly begins to realize that he works for the Devil (Al Pacino).

Beyond Plausible

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  The Man from P.U.T.T.E.R. is a golf technothriller television series about P.U.T.T.E.R., a secret organization using golf as a cover for international counter-espionage operations.

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  The Last King of Arrakis is a science fiction historical drama film based on the novel of the same name by Giles Foden and Frank Herbert.

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  The Bonfire of the Paradise is an American rock musical comedy horror drama film written and directed by Brian De Palma, and starring Paul Williams, Tom Hanks, and Melanie Griffith.

In Other Words

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  Seaview Relationship Counselors is a couples counseling agency founded by Irwin Allen.

File:Two Dogs Fighting - Lambda calculus and e.e. cummings.jpg|link=Two Dogs Fighting: Lambda calculus and e.e. cummings|Inside me there are two dogs fighting: Lambda calculus and e.e. cummings.

Are You Sure

• ... that during the Second World War, British codebreaker and mathematician William Thomas "Bill" Tutte (1917–2002) made a brilliant and fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major Nazi German cipher system which was used for top-secret communications within the Wehrmacht High Command, and that the high-level strategic nature of the intelligence obtained through the subsequent bulk decrypting of Lorenz-enciphered messages contributed greatly, perhaps even decisively, to the defeat of Nazi Germany?

• ... that cryptographic numina were once explained away as St. Elmo's fire, Will-o'-the-wisp, and various other natural phenomena, or perhaps a hybrid phenomenon such as the Hessdalen Valley lights?

Selected Anniversaries

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  1825: Mathematician and physicist Johann Jakob Balmer born. He will develop an empirical formula for the visible spectral lines of the hydrogen atom.

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  1960: Cold War: U-2 incident: Francis Gary Powers, in a Lockheed U-2 spyplane, is shot down over the Soviet Union, sparking a diplomatic crisis.

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  1970: Electronics researcher Ralph Hartley dies. He invented the Hartley oscillator and the Hartley transform, and contributed to the foundations of information theory.

Topic of the Day

Star Trek

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  "The Trouble With Triffids" wins the Caldecott Medal for Children's literature.

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  "Red Frap Axiom" is an anagram of "Fermi paradox".

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  The Pon Farr of the Shrew is a comic stage play written and performed by T'Pring of Vulcan, co-starring her husband, William Shatner.

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  "The Doomsday Calendar" is one of the "Forbidden Episodes" of the television series Star Trek.