The Great Geek Manual

1785
The University of Georgia, the first public university in the United States, is founded. Visit the official University of Georgia website.

1880
Thomas Edison receives a patent for “an electric lamp for giving light by incandescence” which he first invented on November 21, 1879. (US No. 223,898) Edison’s invention will have a tremendous impact on the electronics industry. In the course of developing the light bulb, one of Edison’s assistants discovered the flow of energy from one electrode to another in what will later come to be known as the “Edison effect,” which will later be fundamental principal of the electron tube, which will be, in turn, the foundation of electronics industry. To view a high resolution scan of the patent application, or to read a transcript of the patent application, visit US News online.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Listen to “All the Painted Stars” by Gwendolyn Clare at Clarkesworld.
• Listen to “The Ballad of Delphinium Blue” by Samantha Henderson.
• Listen to “Beautiful Dreamer” by Edward McKeown (Part 2) at Beam Me Up.
• Listen to “Biba Jibun” by Eugie Foster at Pseudopod.
• Listen to “Fruit Jar Drinkin’, Cheatin’ Heart Blues” by Patty Templeton.
• Listen to “Martian V F W” by Vandenburg at The Drama Pod.
• Listen to “Scattered Along the River of Heaven” by Aliette de Bodard.
• Listen to “Surviving the eBookalypse” by Randy Henderson at Escape Pod.
• Listen to “What Everyone Remembers” by Rahul Kanakia at Clarkesworld.

Read the rest of this entry » » »

1697
Isaac Newton receives and solves Jean Bernoulli’s brachistochrone problem. The swiss mathematician Bernouilli had challenged his colleagues to solve it within six months. Newton not only solved the problem before going to bed the night after the challenge had been issued, but in doing so, he invented the new branch of mathematics called “calculus of variations.” Newton will publish the solution anonymously, but the brilliant work makes his identity obvious, and when Bernoulli saw the solution he is famously quoted as saying, “We recognize the lion by his claw.”

1886
Karl Benz patents the first automobile powered by an internal combustion engine. The first public test-drive of the actual vehicle will be on July 3, 1886 in Mannheim, Germany. The one-cylinder engine has a top speed of 10 mph (16km/h).
Read the rest of this entry » » »

1881
Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell found the Oriental Telephone Company, the world’s first telephone company.

1915
Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates the first transcontinental telephone service in the United States with a phone call placed from New York City to his colleague Dr. Thomas Watson in San Francisco, California. Bell, age 68, makes the ceremonial first call and speaks the first complete sentence transmitted by telephone across a continent, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you!” The circuit consists of 2,500 tons of copper wire, 130,000 poles, and three vacuum tube repeaters.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

1925
A two minute long motion picture of a solar eclipse is recorded by the United States Navy from the dirigible Los Angeles from an elevation of about 4,500 feet, about nineteen miles east of Montauk Point, Long Island, New York. It is the first time a dirigible has been used for astronomical observations in the U.S.

1948
International Business Machines (IBM) dedicates the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), also known as the Poppa, at the company’s world headquarters in New York City. The SSEC is the first computer to combine electronic computation with stored instructions, and it will be the first computer to run a stored program and the last large electromechanical computers to be built. It contains 13,500 vacuum tubes and 21,000 relays and occupies three sides of a 1,800 square foot room. Among it’s most notable accomplishments will be the calculation of a table of the Moon’s positions which will be used to plot the course of the 1969 Apollo flight.
It will be decommissioned in 1952.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

Art

• 50 Weird Examples Of Harry Potter Fan Art
• Archetype is a low budget sci-fi short film featuring Hollywood-level special effects.
• Duct Tape Bowser
• Futuristic Solar Radiation Gel Pills for the basement-bound nerds
• Rule 63 Princess Of Persia cosplay
• Nothing completes a costume like a badass pair of Dragon Claw Gauntlets
• Where have all the book illustrators gone? Charles Dickens enjoyed close collaborative relationships with the illustrators of his novels, but now it’s rare to find a picture outside the world of children’s books. Is drawing a lost art, or could we be on the brink of a new golden age?

Read the rest of this entry » » »

1959
Robert Noyce of Texas Instruments conceives the idea of an integrated circuit. In 1968, Noyce will found Intel with Gordon Moore and Andy Grove.

1983
According to Twin Galaxies, Ed O’Neil scores a record-setting 252,114,350 points playing the Williams Electronics arcade game Robotron at the Outer Limits arcade in Durham, North Carolina. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

The action television series The A-Team premieres on the NBC network with the episode “Mexican Slayride.” The series will become a cultural icon of the eighties, garnering a significant cult following. The series will run for ninety-eight episodes over five seasons. TV.com entry
Read the rest of this entry » » »

What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that’s not true.

Obviously it doesn’t matter that much if you’re a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there’s a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence.

- “What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology” by Tim Maudlin, January 2012.
Originally published by The Atlantic.