The Great Geek Manual

I cannot live without books: but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

- Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 1815.

1492
The Ensisheim Meteorite, the first meteorite with a known date of impact, strikes the Earth in a wheat field outside the village of Ensisheim, Alsace, France at near noon.

1631
Pierre Gassendi first observes the transit of a planet. Johannes Kepler had predicted a transit of Mercury would occur in 1631. When Gassendi observed the dot of Mercury passing across the face of the Sun with a Galilean telescope by projecting the sun’s image on a screen of paper. He will recount the observation in Mercurius in sole visus (”Mercury in the Face of the Sun”) in 1632.

1903
Léon Gaumont screens his first sound film for the Société de Photographie in Paris, France.

1908
Professor Ernest Rutherford announces in London that he had isolated a single atom of matter.

1911
Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, in his presidential address to the Röntgen Society in London, suggests that high-definition television is possible with cathode ray tubes. The paper won’t be published until April 1924 in the magazine Wireless World.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

- Mark Twain

1572
A supernova is observed in the constellation known as Cassiopeia by Wolfgang Schüler. It appears as a new star, adjacent to the fainter star seen in the middle of the constellation. Although Schüler isn’t the first one to see it, he will later gain a measure of fame when he publishes Stella Nova (Latin: “New Star”). However, it will ultimately be dubbed “Tycho’s Nova” after the better known Tycho Brahe, though he didn’t notice the new star until November 11. For about two weeks, the supernova will be brighter than any other star in the sky and visible during the day, and it will remain faintly visible to the naked eye for about sixteen months, until March 1574.

1862
A direct telegraphic link between New York and San Francisco is established.

1935
Edwin Armstrong presents his paper “A Method of Reducing Disturbances in Radio Signaling by a System of Frequency Modulation,” in which he first proposes FM radio to the New York chapter of the Institute of Radio Engineers,

1944
The Hanford Atomic Facility first produces plutonium. The facility will eventually produce the plutonium used in construction of Fat Man, the atomic bomb that will be detonated over Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

For four minutes, I wanted to shut this video off. I just couldn’t. It was too bad – like a car accident you can’t stop staring at. It’s absolutely mind-blowing how bad this video is.

Enjoy.

Art

• Sci Fi Wire offers a gallery of 10 Great Sci-Fi Obama Poster Mash-Ups, starting with Optimus Prime.

Film

• DailyFill names 10 Unintentionally Creepy Animated Films, starting with Watership Down.
• John Scalzi picks Ten Directors Who Really Need to Make a SciFi Movie.
• Pop Eater looks back at the Best Alien Movie and Television Invasions.
• PopMatters rants that The Fourth Kind is NOT the truth. It is a piece of fiction using other pieces of fiction to verify its already fake plotline. io9 also warns that The Fourth Kind Is A Hoax.
• Sci Fi Wire explains Why the Stargate movie still holds up 15 years later.
• The Terminator franchise is doomed. Den of Geek explains why.

Internet

• CHICK is a new webseries that follows a woman who trains to become a superhero at a Los Angeles academy. When she catches her boyfriend cheating on her, she goes over the edge.
• The Internet continues to buzz about the secretive Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that would put every ISP on a three-strike system.

Read the rest of this entry » » »

The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

- Edward R. Murrow, upon receiving the “Family of Man” Award, 1964.

1824
Stephen van Renssalaer founds the first engineering college in the United States, the Renssalaer School in Troy, New York. It will open on January 3, 1825, and the first class will graduate with ten students April 26, 1826.

1852
The first US national civil engineering society, the American Society of Civil Engineers and Architects, is founded. Twelve engineers attend the event at which the society was founded, though an invitation had been extended to all civil engineers in New York. The purpose of the society is “the advancement of the sciences of engineering and architecture in their several branches, the professional improvement of its members, the encouragement of intercourse between men of practical science, and the establishment of a central point of reference and union for its members.” The organization’s architects will later split off into their own organization, and the organization will be retitled the “American Society of Civil Engineers” (ASCE). Visit the official ASCE website.

1895
George B. Selden of Rochester, New York, receives the first US patent for a gasoline-driven automobile. (US No. 549,160) In the patent, he describes the complete automobile incorporating such a clutch, a compressed air self-starter, and a steering system. As a patent attorney, he knows to delay the contention over the patent by sending amendments and other communications every two years. Meanwhile, others develop the actual working of the automobile, increasing the value of his patents, and making him one of the earliest successful “patent trolls.”
Read the rest of this entry » » »