January 13

Spiral Rings 3.

Better Than News

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  On the Beach Party is a 1959 beach party cautionary drama starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon.

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  "Wendigo Girls" is a lost episode of the American television series "The Night Stalker" starring Darren McGavin. The episode features guest stars Richard Kiel, Amy Ray, and Emily Saliers.

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  Jar Jar Binks: No Way Homesa is a 2021 American science fiction comedy adventure film.

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  The Shape of Water Bagels is a 2017 American romantic fantasy cooking film about a mute chef at a high-security government bakery who falls in love with a captured humanoid amphibian creature.

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  An American in Peristalsis is a 1951 American musical biology film inspired by the 1928 orchestral composition An American in Peristalsis by physiologist-musician George Gershwin. The story is interspersed with dance numbers which illustrate radially symmetrical contraction and relaxation of muscles that propagates in a wave down a tube, in an anterograde direction, choreographed by Gene Kelly and set to Gershwin's music.

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  The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Constantine is a 2008 fantasy superhero horror film about Caspian (Keanu Reeves), a dispossessed prince who strikes an uneasy bargain with the White Witch (Tilda Swinton).

Are You Sure

• ... that mathematician Kurt Gödel's first incompleteness theorem states that for any self-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (for example Peano arithmetic), there are true propositions about the naturals that cannot be proved from the axioms?

• ... that "Asking for a Friend" is a song by the Rolling Stones?

• ... that mathematicians Hugo Steinhaus, because of his Jewish background, spent the Nazi occupation of Poland in hiding; and that he taught clandestine classes, higher education being forbidden for Poles under the German occupation?

On This Day in Fiction and Nonfiction

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  1867: Artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres dies. He assumed the role of a guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style represented by his nemesis, Eugène Delacroix.

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  1874: Scientist and inventor Johann Philipp Reis dies. He invented the Reis Telephone.

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  1887: Mathematician and academic Hugo Steinhaus born. He will "discover" mathematician Stefan Banach, with whom he will make notable contributions to functional analysis, including the Banach–Steinhaus theorem.

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  1898: Novelist, poet, and mathematician Lewis Carroll dies. He wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass.

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  1901: Mathematician and philosopher Alfred Tarski born. He will be a prolific author, contributing to model theory, metamathematics, algebraic logic, abstract algebra, topology, geometry, measure theory, mathematical logic, set theory, and analytic philosophy.

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  1901: Mathematician Charles Hermite dies. He did research on number theory, quadratic forms, invariant theory, orthogonal polynomials, elliptic functions, and algebra.

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  1978: Mathematician, philosopher, and academic Kurt Gödel dies. His two incompleteness theorems had an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century.

Topic of the Day

Kirk Douglas

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  Flag So Trophy is an anagram of Paths of Glory.

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  Town Without Jetty is a 1961 American/Swiss/West German film about military engineer (Kirk Douglas) who, against his will, must bring about the destruction of a town's Port Authority.

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  "A Verdict in His Soul" is an anagram of "Issur Danielovitch" (better known as Kirk Douglas).