May 12

Better Than News

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  How Green Was My Green Felt Jungle is a cautionary novel about a Welsh family and the gambling community in which they live: Las Vegas.

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  A Game of Hustlers is a 1959 novel by Walter Tevis and George R.R. Martin about Daenerys Targaryen, a young pool hustler who challenges Baratheon Fats for the Westeros Championship Tournament.

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  A Clockwork Limey is a dystopian noir crime film starring Terence Stamp and Malcolm McDowell.

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  Have You Never Been Kafka is an autobiographical book by Franz Kafka "as told to Olivia Newton-John".

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  Pulp Genesis is a black comedy religion film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino.

Beyond Plausible

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  The Dark NFT is a 2008 superhero NFT film about the Joker (Heath Ledger), a deranged database engineer who threatens to delete all the non-fungible tokens in Gotham City.

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  Prince of Lava is a 1987 American supernatural comedy stoner film about a group of industrial chemistry students who assist a Catholic priest in investigating an ancient lava lamp discovered in a monastery, which they come to find is a sentient, liquid embodiment of chemical polarity.

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  "Runnin' Down a Modern Times" is a song by Tom Petty.

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  "We Built This Twitter" is a 1985 song by American rock band Startweet. It was released as their debut single on their album Retweet in the Hoopla.

In Other Words

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  "Database Database" is an English language computer science nursery rhyme.

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  Planet of the Orcs is a science fiction fantasy film starring Charlton Heston as an astronaut who crash-lands on a distant world ruled by monsters.

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  "Order Up for Socrates" is a prank where I say "Socrates" when the clerk asks what name to call when my order is ready.

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician, philosopher, and logician Stanisław Leśniewski (1886–1939) proposed a logical model comprising three nested formal systems, to which he gave the Greek-derived names of protothetic, ontology, and mereology; and that Leśniewski's writings had limited impact because of their enigmatic style and highly idiosyncratic notation; and that even thought Alfred Tarski was his sole doctoral pupil, Leśniewski nevertheless strongly influenced an entire generation of Polish logicians and mathematicians via his teaching at the University of Warsaw?

• ... that the 1987 American supernatural comedy stoner film Prince of Lava used actual lava lamps to simulate demonic possession?

Selected Anniversaries

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  1803: Chemist and academic Justus von Liebig born. Von Liebeg will make pioneering contributions to organic chemistry, especially agricultural and biological chemistry; he will be known as the "Father of the fertilizer industry".

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  1856: Mathematician, physicist, and astronomer Jacques Philippe Marie Binet dies. He made significant contributions to number theory, and the mathematical foundations of matrix algebra.

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  1857: Mathematician Oskar Bolza born. He will be known for his research in the calculus of variations; his work on variations for an integral problem involving inequalities will later became important in control theory.

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  1941: Engineer, inventor, and pioneering computer scientist Konrad Zuse presents the Z3, the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computer, in Berlin.

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  2014: Painter, sculptor, and set designer H. R. Giger dies. He gained fame for his work on the film Alien.

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  2017: Art critic and alleged supervillain The Eel escapes from The Nacreum using a surfboard controlled by a bespoke gnomon algorithm.

Topic of the Day

Bruce Willis

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  12 McClanes is a 1995 science fiction comedy film about a Los Angeles police officer (Bruce Willis) who inherits a troupe of twelve trained circus monkeys.

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  Dubai Hard is a 2021 Emirati-American action-architecture film written and directed by architect Hayri Atak, and starring Bruce Willis as New York City police architectural engineer John McClane (Willis), who gets caught up in an armed interior designer takeover of a rotating turbine-style Dubai skyscraper while visiting his estranged robot spot-welder in a Dubai prison labor camp.

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  We Were There, Time Was Away is a romantic crime drama film starring Barbara Streisand as a time-traveling assassin who must choose between the man she loves and the career she hates.