The Great Geek Manual

1684
Giovanni Domenico Cassini discovers Tethys and Dione, two moons of Saturn with a refractor telescope.

1859
The first Zoological Society is incorporated in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Following the disruption of the Civil War, the society will establish the country’s first Zoo.

1925
Wolfgang Pauli publishes his “exclusion principle” at the young age of twenty-four, in an article in the journal Zeitschrift für Physik. The Pauli exclusion principle states that two fermions, such as electrons, cannot be in the same quantum state at the same time. In 1945, Pauli will be awarded a Nobel Prize for this fundamental contribution to the science of quantum mechanics.
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In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their “large loves and heavenly charities.”

The Story of My Life by Helen Keller, 1903.

Watch the whole thing before you close it! The last half is really poetic.

According to the sidebar, this video was prepared by the UK branch of Dorling Kindersley Books for a DK Publishing sales conference a few weeks back, but then, it went viral. You can read an interview with the creator of the video on the Penguin Blog.

1800
In a letter, Alessandro Volta announces his invention of the voltaic pile, the earliest battery, to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society in London, England.

1841
The short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe, which will later come to be widely considered the first detective story in history, is published in Graham’s Magazine. The story establishes many literary devices and motifs later seen in the mystery genre.

1886
An alternating-current (AC) electrical system is demonstrated by lighting Main Street in Great Barrington, Massachusetts with electricity generated by the power planet of George Westinghouse.

1900
Nikola Tesla receives a patent for the wireless transmission of electric power. (US No. 645,576) View the patent online.

1916
Albert Einstein publishes an academic paper on his Theory of General Relativity entitled “Die Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitästheorie” in the journal Annalen der Physik. Einstein’s theory accounts for the slow rotation of the elliptical orbit of Mercury, which Newtonian gravitational theory failed to explain.
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Cyberspace: The realm of pure information, filling like a lake, siphoning the jangle of messages transfiguring the physical world, decontaminating the natural and urban landscapes, redeeming them, saving them from the chain-dragging bulldozers of the paper industry, from the diesel smoke of courier and post office trucks, from jet fuel fumes and clogged airports, from billboards, trashy and pretentious architecture, hour-long freeway commutes, ticket lines, and choked subways…from all the inefficiencies, pollutions (chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to the process of moving information attached to things – from paper to brains – across, over, and under the vast and bumpy surface of the earth rather than letting it fly in the soft hail of electrons that is cyberspace.

- “Cyberspace: First Steps” by Michael Benedikt, July 1, 1992.

Art

• Fandomania has rounded-up a gallery of Dragon Age: Origins fanart.
• If it’s Hip has an image of Crayons carved into the 12 symbols of the Chinese zodiac.
• This may be the most awesome tattoo ever. Clearly, he’s a serious Die Hard fan.

Comics

• Is Harry Potter joining The Guardians? Because that’s what it looks like. [More]

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1474
The Republic of Venice passes the Venetian Patent Statute, the first patent law of its kind in the world. It declares that “each person who will make in this city any new and ingenious contrivance, not made heretofore in our dominion, as soon as it is reduced to perfection… It being forbidden to any other in any territory and place of ours to make any other contrivance in the form and resemblance thereof, without the consent and licence of the author up to ten years.” The law is intended to stimulate the economy by attracting inventors to Venice.

1800
Alexander von Humoldt and Aimé Bonpland capture the first specimen of Electric eels (Electrophorus electricus) during a five-year expedition through the jungles of South America. Humboldt will later write about his discovery in an article entitled, “Observation on the Electric Eel of the New World” in 1808.
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Decoding and interpreting signals, packets, gestures etc. is what we call communication. Since the birth of the computer, that viral mechanism has established a symbiotic relationship with their creators, to the point where humans cannot longer function as a society without them. As we merge and augment our senses, our machinic self takes over a majority of functions that we once considered essential for survival, including memory, the control of vital organs and appendices. Carbon and silicon, en route to the next evolutionary stage, collaborate to bring about the inevitable transformation. Telecommunications and the internet have become mobile. We are the nodes, the packets and the modems. We are still the storytellers, and we wish to share the magic around the digital fire. As we pull the curtain we discover that the Wizard is Us.

- “The Wizard is Us: Symbiogenesis by Networking Part 1” by Arturo Sinclair.