The Great Geek Manual

Caution: Vulgar (if hilarious) language.

Today is Hinamatsuri, the Japanese Doll Festival, which is a holiday for girls.

1863
United States President Abraham Lincoln approves an Act of Congress (12 Stat. L. 806) which charters The National Academy of Sciences. The Act stipulates that the Academy will “whenever called upon by any department of the Government, investigate, examine, experiment or report upon any subject of science or art.” Members of the Academy will serve pro bono, without compensation, but the actual expenses incurred for the Government’s requirements are to be paid from appropriations.

1865
Provisions for photographs are included in the United States Copyright Act.

1873
The US Congress enacts the Comstock Law, making it illegal to send any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” books through the mail. Read the law. Read more about the history of the Comstock laws at About.com.

1883
The first steel vessels for the US Navy are authorized by Congress. Four ships are authorized in total: the cruisers Atlanta, Boston, and Chicago, and the dispatch boat, the Dolphin. Of these, the Chicago will be the largest, with a length of 325 feet and width of 48 feet. The Atlanta and the Boston will be 270 feet long and 42 feet wide.
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Anyone can get into space, if he wants to hard enough. The ticket is a dream.

- The Beat Cluster by Fritz Leiber, 1961.

Art

• They make the rounds of the internet every few months, but they’re always worth another gawk. Check out the My Little Pony Sculptures of Mari Kasurinen.

Film

• Entertainment Weekly has posted photos of the upcoming The Book of Eli staring Denzel Washington.
• Geek Tyrant reviews the upcoming Watchmen film, concluding that “I could not have asked for a better adaptation of ‘Watchmen’. The spirit of the graphic novel lives in this movie.”
• Screenwriter David Hayter explains that the ending of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen is different from the graphic novel because of September 11th. (Dun Dun Dun… is there a reason they’ve not told us this until the last minute?)
• Warner Brothers has announced an animated Green Lantern film.

Internet

• The Star Trek: The Experience has been granted a last minute reprieve! Book your vacation now, because there’s no telling how long it will last.
• The Winter 2009 issue of Comic-Con Magazine, the new official publication of the San Diego Comic-Con International, WonderCon, and APE, the Alternative Press Expo is available online now.

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Haha… iPhone’s a douche.

1908
Gabriel Lippman introduces the new three-dimensional color photography to the Academy of Sciences.

1933
RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. releases the great-granddaddy of all monster movies, King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Bruce Cabot, premieres in New York City. The film was produced on a budget of US$650,000. Visit the film’s official website. IMDB listing Running Time: 1 hr 44 mins

1948
William “Willy” A. Higinbotham is issued a patent for an “An Electronic Circuit for Differentiating Voltage Waveforms.” (US No. 2,436,891) The invention was originally built in 1942 for a radar bombsight, but the circuit will eventually come to be used in all analog computers.

1959
An experimental push-button phone is tested by the Southern New England Telephone Company in New Haven, Connecticut to see if customers dial fewer wrong numbers using buttons rather than a dial.
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Privacy is as necessary as company; you can drive a man crazy by depriving him of either.

- Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein, 1973.

Without loneliness and strangeness this world would not be this world at all and maybe not worth having.

- The Children’s Crusade by Edgar Pangborn, 1974.