The Great Geek Manual

All week I’ve been looking for a Christmas t-shirt. Checked the local Wal-Mart. Checked the mall. Checked the local Wal-mart clones. Got sick as hell of fighting through the holiday mobs. Then I stumbled across this t-shirt. And know what? It perfectly embodies the spirit of the season that I’m experiencing.

Why the hell would I ever wade through the deranged mobs of clawing, freenzied holiday shoppers again when I could just buy my shirts online? Get your heart-warming red-and-green t-shirt of holiday horror in sizes ranging from small to xx-large from Split Reason. Price: US$18.95

Source: Split Reason

1880
The Edison Electric Illuminating Company is incorporated to provide electric light to New York City with one million dollars in capital. Within fourteen months, the service will have 508 subscribers and power 12,732 bulbs. The company will become the prototype for all other local illuminating companies established in the eighties.

1903
The first powered flight is made by the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright on the sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina using a gasoline engine. The flight, made in the in the Wright Flyer lasts twelve seconds and spans a distance of 120 feet (or 36.5 meters.)

1953
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approves the revised RCA all-electronic colour television system and discontinues the CBS sequential color system. Color broadcasts will begin thirty days later. Radio Corporation of America (RCA) transmits its new NBC Chimes logo at 5:32pm to celebrate.

1958
Universal Pictures releases the science fiction film Monster on the Campus, directed by Jack Arnold and starring Arthur Franz and Joanna Cook Moore, to US theaters. IMDB listing
Read the rest of this entry » » »

Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

- Cosmos by Carl Sagan, 1980.

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations.
What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, 1988.

While I don’t normally list births in “This Day in Geek History,” today’s births are so amazingly coincidental that they deserve a mention. December 16th is the birthday of renowned science fiction authors Arthur C. Clarke (1917) and Philip K. Dick (1928). Peter Dickinson (1927) and Randall Garrett (1927) also share this birthday.

1897
The first US submarine with an internal combustion engine, the Argonaut, is demonstrated on the Patapsco River. During the demonstration, twenty-two members of the press made descents up to four hours long. It was built in 1897 at the Columbian Iron Works and Dry Dock Company of Baltimore, Maryland for its inventor, Simon Lake. The submarine is thirty-six feet (11m) long and nine feet (2.7m) in diameter with wheels to travel on the sea floor. Lake was issued patents for the submarine on April 7, 1896 (US No. 557,835) and on April 20, 1897 (US No. 581,213).

1907
The first radio broadcast of a singer in the US, featuring Eugenia H. Farrar, is transmitted by Lee De Forest from the Brooklyn Naval Yard in Brooklyn, New York to mark the departure of Admiral Robley Dunglison Evans (“Fighting Bob Evans”), commanded the US Navy’s “Great White Fleet,” on its world-wide cruise.

1915
Albert Einstein publishes the definitive form of the General Theory of Relativity.

1925
The silent film Wolf Blood, also known as Wolfblood: A Tale of the Forest, is released in the US. It is one of the earliest werewolf films. In it, a grievously injured logger must accept a blood transfusion from a Wolf, and after his recovery, he and his fellow lumberjacks believe that he is transforming into a werewolf. IMDB profile Running time: 1 hr 8 mins
Read the rest of this entry » » »

Fantasy, if it’s really convincing, can’t be-come dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time.

- Walt Disney in an interview in the April 1960 issue of Reader’s Digest.

1612
Simon Marius becomes the first person to observe the Andromeda galaxy through a telescope. He will describe his discovery in the preface to his Mundus Jovialis as, “like the flame of a candle seen through horn.”

1877
Thomas Alva Edison files for a patent on the phonograph.

1958
Arthur L. Schawlow and Charles H. Townes publishes “Infrared and Optical Masers” describing what will later be known as the laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) while employed at Bell Labs. Read the original document here.

1964
The first Italian satellite, San Marco 1, is launched.

1965
Gemini 6A, crewed by Wally Schirra and Thomas Stafford, is launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida. Four orbits later, it achieves the first space rendezvous with Gemini 7. The two crafts orbit the Earth together for over five hours.
Read the rest of this entry » » »