The Great Geek Manual

1847
In Maryland, the first telegraph company is established.

1890
Thomas Alva Edison is issued a patent for the Quadruplex Telegraph. (US No. 420,594) This new telegraph is designed to transmit and receive four independent signals over a single wire, two in one direction and two in the opposite direction. The separate transmitting keys transmit a signal with either a high or low current strength which is then received with sounders that respond only the high or the low strength signal. Read more about the Quadruplex Telegraph at the Edison Papers website.

1902
Thomas Alva Edison is issued a patent for a Reversible Galvanic Battery, a battery with a revolutionarily large capacity for its weight. (US No. 692,507) It makes use of Cadmium as the oxidizable element, an oxide of Cobalt or Nickel as its depolarizer, and flakes of a conducting substance, such as Graphite.

1936
Radium E, the first synthetic radioactive substance, is first produced in the US by Dr. John Jacob Livingood at the University of California at Berkeley by bombarding the element Bismuth with neutrons.
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This video is awesome, but I’m just dying to dump it into an editor in order to try to lay actual audio clips from the films over the the Emperor’s dialogue. I think it could have been done with just a little tweaking of the context of his remarks, but I’m not certain. Whenever I pay attention while watching Star Wars, I’m always surprised by how little the Emperor actually says.

Source: G4 via The World in the Satin Bag

Film

• The Super Bowl spots for G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Star Trek took most fans by surprise, as the former turned out to be way cooler than expected, while the later was barely recognizable.
• William Shatner remembers actor Ricardo Montalban, the “magnificent dancer” we now all remember as KHAAAAAAN!

Internet

• The internet has concluded its broadcast day. Thank you for tuning in. Please join us again tomorrow when the internet resumes it’s regularly scheduled programming.
• Mike Brotherton explains How to Talk with the Mundanes. He begins with the advice that fans should attempt to “Seek some common ground and educate. Some common ground we share with the mundanes includes money, fame, space babes/hunks, and coolness factor.”
• Zombie road signs are soo yesterday. The next big trend is Zombies and cupcakes.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Read “This Must Be the Place” by Elliott Bangs at Strange Horizons.
• DailyCognition makes a fair stab at selecting the Top 15 Great Science Fiction Books, but I have to disagree with any list that doesn’t include the Martian Chronicles or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It may be all together impossible to create a definitive list for such a broad genre.
• Orson Scott Card discusses Ursula Le Guin’s Rocannon’s World at Audible.com.

Television

• Here’s a challenge for you. Find the photo that doesn’t belong. Hint: Look for The Daily Show’s John Hodgman.

Video Games

• Cryptic Studios has released a new batch of Star Trek Online screenshots.

10 lightweight apps to make older PCs fly – If your underpowered PC is slow, put it on an application diet.

CERN Podcast – These lighthearted chats at the CERN laboratory with “a bit of particle physics thrown in” will either relieve your anxiety that the Hadron Collider might be used for evil or leave you sleepless at night worrying about what sort of idiots they let run the thing.

Five Best System Tray Applications – The Windows system tray can be so much more than a parking lot for programs you don’t want cluttering up your task bar. Read on to see the five most popular tray tools readers can’t live without.

Microsoft on Intel’s Anti-Linux – “Please Keep Confidential. This is a Nightmare” Microsoft’s dirty secrets about a fight against GNU/Linux at Intel are finally revealed.

Microsoft Throwing Xbox 360 Tupperware Parties – Social gatherings are used to sell women products of all types, everything from sex toys to botox. Now Microsoft is using “tupperware parties” to expand the market of the Xbox 360.

Softwear by Microsoft – You know that the software industry has fallen on hard times when Microsoft chooses to diversify with its own line of clothes. Insert your own punchline here. (One size fits all, don’t wear until patched.)

The Top 10 Social Networks for Generation-Y – With thousands of social networks globally, only a handful of them cater specifically to a special group of individuals, known as Generation-Y. Also known as Gen-Y or millennials, Generation-Y are individuals born between 1980 and 1995, at a volume of 80 million strong.

Ten Things your Great Grandchildren won’t Remember – IHeartChaos reflects on those things that will be only distant memories to our distant relatives. Kinda like Vaudeville, party lines, and dairy deliveries for us.

Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference – Written by award-winning author Keir Thomas, Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference is a totally unique and concise guide for everyday Ubuntu use. It’s the world’s most popular Ubuntu book, with over 150,000 people already having read it!

YouTube Videos:

1831
The United States Copyright Act is revised to protect printed music. In addition, the term of copyright is extended to twenty-eight years, with a renewal period of fourteen years.

1862
At the age of only fifteen, Thomas Alva Edison, who has been selling candy and newspapers on the train since he was twelve, becomes the first publisher of a newspaper produced and sold on a moving train. He sets up a small press in the baggage car of the Grand Trunk Railroad train that rund between Port Huron and Detroit, Michigan. Obsessed with telegraph technology, he works manages to find a method of getting advance news. His weekly Grand Trunk Herald, a single sheet measuring seven by eight inches, includes local news and advertisements for his father’s store. Before long, Edison becomes renowned as a boy journalist. At its peak, his paper will sell about two hundred copies of his paper a day.

1879
The first demonstration of a practical incandescent filament electric light bulb is given to a seven hundred person audience by its inventor, Joseph Wilson Swan, at the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne. Swan will go on to established the first electric light bulb factory at Benwell in Newcastle.

1966
The United States launches its first operational weather satellite, ESSA-1. The satellite will provide cloud-cover photography to the National Meteorological Center for analysis. The satellite is equipped with solar cells which charge its sixty-three batteries and two cameras were mounted on opposite sides of its cylindrical body.

The unmanned Soviet spacecraft Luna 9 lands safely on the moon in the Ocean of Storms, three days after its launch. It’s the first rocket-assisted soft landing on any celestial body, and it’s the first space craft to successfully transmit photos from the surface of the Moon. It collects valuable data necessary for later manned missions to the Moon, most notably confirming that the surface is solid rather than a dusty quicksand. Upon striking the surface, the Soviet probe ejected a 250lb capsule with the camera that equipped with a revolving mirror system then enabled the spacecraft to take the valuable photos until February 6, when the craft’s batteries ran out.
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I hear you say ‘Why?’ Always ‘Why?’
You see things; and you say ‘Why?’
But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’

- Back to Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw, 1921.

Read the full text of Back to Methuselah at Project Gutenberg.

Film

• Director J.J. Abrams says his reboot is true to the original but also a “completely different experience.” Kinda like Phantom Menace.
• Not a Planet Anymore lists Top 5 most bad-ass Doctor Who Moments, but omits those freaky angels from “Blink.”
• One of the writers behind Eagle Eye has been working on a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Sci-Fi classic Blade Runner. Shit. Hollywood, leave my childhood favorites the hell alone.
• Wired’s Underwire blog has posted preview images of the upcoming Terminator Salvation, including a side-by-side comparison of the various Terminator chassis.

Internet

• io9 has created a Flow Chart from which you can derive your own episode of Star Trek.
• What if the Wrath of Kahn had been an Italian Opera?

Literature

• Are these the Top 15 Greatest Science Fiction Writers of All-Time? Mania.com thinks so. I say it’s a good start, but perhaps it doesn’t tell the whole story.
• Free Fiction: Listen to “The Last Dog” by Mike Resnick at Clonepod.
• Free Fiction: Read “Dragon’s-Eyes” by Margaret Ronald at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
• Free Fiction: Read the flash fiction “The Fallen Angel” by Mike Resnick.
• The Guardian reflects that mainstream literature is content to borrow Sci-Fi’s workings even while scorning the genre on the whole in Science fiction: the genre that dare not speak its name.

There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace-those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves.We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.

- Dune by Frank Herbert, 1965.