The Great Geek Manual

Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.

- Linus Torvalds, in a message on the Linux kernel mailing list, March 25, 2009.

1790
Acting on a motion made by Bishop Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the French National Assembly decides to create a simple decimal system of measurement units. The earliest metre unit chosen will be the length of a pendulum with a half-period of a second. On March 30, 1791, after a proposal by the Académie des sciences, the Assembly will revise the definition of the metre as one ten millionth of the distance between the north pole and the equator. On April 7, 1795, the Convention decrees that the new “Republican Measures” will become legal measures in France. The metric system will adopt greek prefixes for multiples and latin prefixes for decimal fractions.

1840
The first US photographic patent is issued to Alexander S. Wolcott of New York City. (US No. 1,582) His “method of taking a likeness by means of a concave reflector and plates so prepared that luminous or other rays will act thereon” produced photographs 1.75 x 2.5 inches in size. The photographs weren’t reversed as were daguerrotype which used refracting lenses.

1886
Coca-Cola is first sold to the public at the soda fountain in Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia. It was invented by pharmacist, John Stith Pemberton, who mixed it in a thirty gallon brass kettle hung over a backyard fire. Until 1905, the drink, marketed as a “brain and nerve tonic,” will contain extracts of cocaine as well as the caffeine-rich kola nut. The name, using two C’s from its ingredients, was suggested by his bookkeeper Frank Robinson, whose excellent penmanship provided the first scripted “Coca-Cola” letters as the famous logo. Read more about Pemberton at the New Georgia Encyclopedia.
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It’s all too true. Being a dinosaur would have been far more interesting career path for me, as would have being a choo-choo train astronaut (i.e. the pilot of a space train).

Luckily, while I’ll never be as cool (or ferocious) as my past self might have wished, the sentiment still makes a great conversation starter. You can get yours now over at Threadless in sizes ranging from X-Small to 3X-Large in a male or female cut for just twelve dollars. They all come in white.

Source: Threadless

1895
Otto Steiger is issued a patent for the “Millionaire calculating machine”. Four thousand seven hundred of the 120 pound machines will be built over the next forty years, by Switzerland’s Hans Egli. The calculating machine’s main selling point is its ability to easily perform multiplication calculations.

1946
Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, which will later be renamed Sony in 1958, is founded with about twenty employees. Read more at Sony’s website.

1952
The concept of the integrated circuit is first presented at a symposium on “Progress in Quality Electronic Components” in Washington, D.C. by radar scientist Geoffrey W.A. Dummer. He and his team of researchers at the Royal Radar Establishment of the British Ministry of Defense work towards developing methods of improving the reliability of the Royal Air Force’s radar systems. Dummer was working from a theory that it is possible to fabricate multiple circuits onto a single half-inch square of silicon, however, by 1956, his attempts to create such a functional circuit will fail.
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Software is like sex; it’s better when it’s free.

- Linus Torvalds, at the 1996 Free Software Foundation conference.

Art

• Over at The Hotel Fred, artist Roger Langridge announces that he’ll be a guest at the Bristol Comic Expo and show off some art he did for the Heroes Con.

Comics

• Hollywood.com asked fans to rank Wolverine’s Top 5 Villains.

Film

• Cinematical has a list of the Seven Coolest Star Trek Moments, but miffs the project by forgetting Star Trek IV’s “Double Dumbass on you.”
• Hugh Jackman is already discussing the possibility of a Sequel to Wolverine set in Japan.
• Surprisingly, Star Trek starts out the week 100% Fresh over at Rotten Tomatoes, but it can’t hold out forever. Star Trek hits screens Thursday night.

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1896
The Aerodrome No. 5 makes the first successful flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven, heavier-than-air craft of substantial size. Its inventor, Samuel Pierpont Langley, launches the craft using a spring-actuated catapult mounted on top of a houseboat on the Potomac River, near Quantico, Virginia. In its first flight it travels 3,300 feet (1,005 meters), in its second flight, later the same afternoon, it travels 2,300 feet (700 meters). In both instances, it travels at a speed of about 25mph.

1925
John Logie Baird is granted a British patent for a spiral scanning disc which makes his mechanical television possible.

1949
The Electronic Delayed Storage Automatic Computer (EDSAC), the first practical stored-program computer, runs its first program and performs its first calculation. EDSAC was assembled by Maurice Wilkes of Cambridge University in England. It features a paper tape I/O, has a high-speed memory (mercury delay lines), three thousand vacuum tubes, and will be the first stored-program computer to operate a regular computing service. For programming the EDSAC, Wilkes established a library of short programs called subroutines stored on punched paper tapes. It performs 714 operations per second.
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It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

- “A Few Maxims For The Instruction Of The Over-Educated” by Oscar Wilde, first published in the Saturday Review, November 17, 1894.