April 14
Better Than News
"Spock Invaders" is one of the "Forbidden Episodes" of the television series Star Trek.
Double Indemnity 2: The Cubist Paradigm is an American screwball comedy romance art history film starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, reprising their roles from Double Indemnity (1944).
"I Won't Back Watership Down" is a song by Tom Petty and Richard Adams.
Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Jesus a crime sports film about Jesus Quintana, a Los Angeles bowling champion who is blackmailed by a biker (Mickey Rourke) and a cigarette smuggler (Don Johnson).
"O Hatpin! My Hatpin!" is an extended metaphor poem written by Walt Whitman in 1865 about the wardrobe of U.S. first lady Mary Todd Lincoln.
Beyond Plausible
Pets Make a Deal is a television game show featuring household pets who compete for cash and prizes.
In Other Words
Koestler Things is a historical drama television series hosted by Arthur Koestler, who examines a different aspect of the Upside-Down in each episode.
Are You Sure
• ... that cartographer and geographer Abraham Ortelius created the first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, and that Ortelius was among to imagine that the continents were joined together before drifting to their present positions?
• ... that mathematician, astronomer, and physicist Christiaan Huygens (14 April 1629 – 8 July 1695) founded the wave theory of light, discovered the true shape of the rings of Saturn, and made contributed to the science of dynamics?
• ... that mathematician and theorist Tatyana Afanasyeva (19 November 1876 – Leiden, 14 April 1964) contributed to statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics, and to mathematical education in the Netherlands?
• ... that Christiaan Huygens wrote, in a private letter to Pope Alexander VII: "proposals to flood the Sistine chapel "are equally useless to Science and Art alike."?
Selected Anniversaries
1126: Polymath Ibn Rushd (Averoess) born. He will write on logic, Aristotelian and Islamic philosophy, theology, Islamic jurisprudence, psychology, politics, music theory, geography, mathematics, and the mediæval sciences of medicine, astronomy, physics, and celestial mechanics.
1527: Cartographer and geographer Abraham Ortelius born. Ortelius will create the first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. He will also be one of the first to imagine that the continents were joined together before drifting to their present positions.
1629: Mathematician, astronomer, and physicist Christiaan Huygens born. He will be a leading scientist of his time.
1659: Proposals to flood the Sistine chapel "are equally useless to Science and Art alike," writes Christiaan Huygens in a private letter to Pope Alexander VII.
1935: Mathematician Emmy Noether dies. She made landmark contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics.
1964: Mathematician and theorist Tatyana Afanasyeva dies. She contributed to statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics, and to mathematical education in the Netherlands.
Topic of the Day
Doctor Strange
The Imitation Strange is a 2016 American historical superhero film about mathematician Alan Turing, who decrypted German intelligence messages for Doctor Strange during World War II.
World's Fair is a 2022 novel by the pseudonymous "Doctorow Strange", believed to be the spirit of deceased author E.L. Doctorow.
