The Great Geek Manual

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.

- Woody Allen

1903
Richard Pearse of New Zealand reputedly flies a powered, heavier-than-air machine, nine months before the Wright Brothers make their famous and well-documented flight at Kitty Hawk. Accounts vary, but his flight may have traveled as far as 350 yards through the air before striking a large hedge. If true, the aircraft is the first to use modern ailerons, rather than inferior wing warping system that the Wrights’ early designs will use. Pearse’s machine also has a modern tricycle undercarriage permitting it to takeoff without ramps. Some sources will mark this as the anniversary of his flight, others will claim the event occurred some months later.

1930
The Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) institutes the Motion Pictures Production Code. Also known as the Hays Code or simply the Production Code, the code a set of censorship guidelines concerning crime, religion, sex, and violence in films.

John Logie Baird achieves the synchronization of sound with television pictures.

1939
Harvard and International Business Machines (IBM) sign an agreement for the construction of the Mark I, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). The computer will weigh nearly five tons and contain more than 750,000 separate components. The system will read instructions from paper tape and data from punch cards.
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Film

• Actor Dustin Hoffman is to spearhead an initiative to put real science into Hollywood science fiction blockbusters.
• Is there really going to be another LOTR film titled The Hunt for Gollum, or is this an elaborate April Fools joke?
• SciFi Watch explains 5 Reasons Why the Star Trek Trailer Doesn’t Live Up to the Franchise.

Internet

• Listverse runs down 10 Fascinating Fictional Languages.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Read “Shakespeare in Hell” by Amy Sterling Casil at Elysian Fiction.
• Ian Sales offers up a scathing review of this year’s Hugo short story nominees.

Television

• The MythBusters’ Adam Savage Talks Tech, Obsessions, and Science. (Don’t forget that the new season starting April 1!)
• SFX names the The Best And Worst TV Episode Titles, but, surprisingly, omits any mention of Babylon 5 from the list of the best titles. Come on! How does one of these NOT make the list: “All Alone in the Night,” “Confessions and Lamentations,” “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars,” “The Geometry of Shadows,” “Shadow Dancing,” “Whatever Happened to Mr. Garibaldi?”
• Time Online welcomes the Death of Broadcast television.
• The Zeray Gazette briefly ponders the ramifications of the Economics of the Star Trek.

Video Games

• The free-to-play MMO Runes of Magic is a World of Warcraft clone. Like the Diablo II clone Dungeon Siege, Runes not attempts to improve on WoW by employing lessons learned by Blizzard in its design.
• The SciFi Channel’s Fidget suggests 10 Games to help you get over Galactica.

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise,
human science is at a loss.

- Avram Noam Chomsky in a British TV interview, March 30, 1978.

240 BC
Chinese Astronomers record the first confirmed perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet. The account is confirmed by Babylonian, Japanese, and Mesopotamian astronomers.

1791
After a proposal in the journal Académie des sciences by Borda, Condorcet, Lagrange, Laplace, and Monge, the French National Assembly finally decides that a metre will be defined as ten millionth of the distance between the north pole and the equator.

1842
Physician Dr. Crawford W. Long of Jefferson, Georgia first uses ether as an anesthetic in surgery. The patient is James Venable, and the surgery is to remove a tumor from the man’s neck.

1858
Hyman L. Lipman of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is granted the first US patent for a lead pencil with an eraser. (US No. 19,783) One-fourth of the length of the pencil contains a piece of india-rubber, so that cutting one end prepares the pencil for writing and cutting the other end prepares it for erasing.
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Above all watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

- The Minpins by Roald Dahl, 1991

1807
Vesta 4, the only asteroid visible to the naked eye, thus the brightest on record, is first discovered by the amateur astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers from Bremen. Vesta is a main belt asteroid with a diameter of 525km and a rotation period of 5.34 hours. Pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 show Vesta’s complex surface, with a surprisingly diverse geology similar to that of terrestrial worlds, an exposed mantle, ancient lava flows, and impact basins. Though no bigger than the state of Arizona, it had once been a molten interior. This contradicts conventional ideas that asteroids are essentially cold, rocky fragments left behind from the early days of planetary formation.

1886
The first batch of Coca-Cola is brewed over a fire in a backyard in Atlanta, Georgia by Dr. John Pemberton as a cure for hangovers, stomach aches, and headaches. He markets the drink as a “brain tonic and intellectual beverage,” and first sells it to the public a few weeks later on May 8. Coke contains cocaine as an ingredient until 1904, when the drug will be banned by Congress.

1903
The first transatlantic news service begins between New York and London over Marconi’s wireless. On March 30 1903, The Times in London becames the first newspaper to establish an ongoing arrangement with the Marconi Telegraph Company for the regular transmission of news between the United States and the UK. Shortly thereafter, the New York Times requests that it be part of the arrangement. Despite extensive teething problems, the importance of wireless as a cheap form of communication will quickly become obvious

1910
In Monaco, the world’s largest oceanographic museum is opened part of the Oceanographic Institute, which was founded in 1906. The grandiose facade of the museum overlooks the Mediterranean Sea. It is established by donations from Prince Albert I of Monaco.
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Movie: “Knowing”

Rating: Rated PG-13 for disturbing images and brief strong language.
Release: March 20
Running Time: 2 hrs 1 min
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne… IMDB listing

Verdict:
Knowing is a larger than life film that ultimately falls flat in its ending. It’s similar in atmosphere and quality to both the 2002 film The Mothman Prophecies and the 2004 film The Forgotten, but it fails to achieve the eerie quality of the former or to pack the punch of the later. While Knowing is packed with thrilling high-end special effects that were made for the big screen, its failure to deliver thrills at the climax of its slowly ratcheted suspense and its cliche ending make this film one that most people will enjoy far better on a late night at home than on the big screen.

Synopsis:
Recently-widowed MIT astrophysicist John Koestler believes in a deterministic universe in which “shit happens.” When his son, Caleb, is given a mysterious sheet of scribblings out of a fifty-year old time capsule, however, he’s soon caught up in a series of events that leads him to believe otherwise.

The letter, unlike other sunny crayon pictures held by the capsule, is a series of seemingly meaningless numbers. Caleb, intrigued by the letter, brings it home, where, in the grip of a late night epiphany, he begins to suspect that the letter may hide a deeper meaning. His revelation is sparked by recognition of the date of the September 11th attacks on the Twin Towers pairs with the exact number of casualties.

Growing increasingly obsessed with the enigmatic letter, Koestler probes deeper into its meaning, quickly discovering its connection to countless disasters through recent history. As he races to prove the authenticity of the letter and determine whether the disasters it predicts are preventable, tensions mount, and he comes to fear that the fate of the world may be inevitable.
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