The Great Geek Manual

It’s Towel Day! A day of tribute for fans of the late author Douglas Adams, author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books.

1925
John T. Scopes is indicted for violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which prohibits the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in Tennessee public schools. It marks the beginning of what would become known as the Scopes Trial.

The National Forensics League of America is founded to encourage high school students to participate in the forensic arts: debate, public speaking, and interpretation. Visit the official National Forensics League website.
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I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space program in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

- John F. Kennedy in his speech “Freedom’s Cause: These are Extraordinary Times,” May 25, 1961.

1844
Samuel F. B. Morse demonstrates a magnetic telegraph using his Morse Code to transmit the message, “What hath God wrought!” from the Old Supreme Court courthouse in Washington D.C. to his partner, Alfred Vail, at the Mount Clare Depot of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company in Baltimore, Maryland. Vail responds by retransmitting the same message back to Morse. Thus, Morse formally opens America’s first telegraph line, launching America’s telegraph industry. The biblical text, from Numbers 23:23, was selected by Annie Ellsworth, the teenage daughter of the US Commissioner of Patents. Congress had appropriated US$30,000 in 1843 for a telegraph wire to be strung the eighty miles between Washington and Baltimore.

1913
An article in the journal Moving Picture World coins the term “natural history film,” a full year before the word “documentary” is first used to describe a film.

1927
John Logie Baird demonstrates television transmission by telephone over the 438 miles between London and Glasgow, exceeding the distance covered by AT&T in their April 7th trials.

1954
International Business Machines (IBM) unveils a vacuum tube “electronic” brain that can perform ten million operations an hour.

1960
MIDAS II (Missile Detection Alarm System), the first American surveillance satellite to successfully reach orbit, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Although it is intended to be part of an early missile warning system, circling the earth every ninety-four minutes, its telemetry system will fail two days later, and it will never go into service. On February 26, 1960, the first MIDAS satellite launch failed when its Atlas Agena-A booster malfunctioned, never reaching orbit.
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We can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space.

- War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, 1897.

A scientist strives to understand the work of Nature. But with our insufficient talents as scientists, we do not hit upon the truth all at once. We must content ourselves with tracking it down, enveloped in considerable darkness, which leads us to make new mistakes and errors. By diligent examination, we may at length little by little peel off the thickest layers, but we seldom get the core quite free, so that finally we have to be satisfied with a little incomplete knowledge.

- Torbern Olof Bergman
In a lecture to the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, May 23, 1764.

From Around the Web

Apple’s 11 Most Intriguing Computer Designs – From the first Apple to the MacBook Air, Macs have been regarded as technologically innovative, beautiful in product design and, over time, become just plain cool.

Computer memory to last a billion years – In an attempt to address the problem of a digital dark age engineers at Berkeley have developed a technique called Nanoscale Reversible Mass Transport for Archival Memory that is intended to combine high bit-density and deep-time survival.

How Cyberbullying Prevention Act Could Land You In Prison – The next time you let loose on some asshole online, you’d better make sure that asshole isn’t a kid…

How Silicon Chips Are Made – It may seem an impossible transformation, but these fiendishly complex components are made from nothing more glamorous than sand. Such a transformative feat isn’t simple. The production process requires more than 300 individual steps. However, they can be neatly summed up in just ten…

Lawyer: RIAA must pay back all $100M it has collected – Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson has now gotten involved in two more file-sharing lawsuits, including the Jammie Thomas retrial in Minnesota. But it’s in the other, lesser-known case, that Nesson and a former student demand the RIAA pay back all $100 million it has collected in settlement money over the years.

Plugging In $40 Computers – What would you do with a $40 Linux computer the size of a three-prong plug adapter? It’s a tiny plastic box that you plug into an electric outlet. There’s no display. But there is an Ethernet jack to connect to a home network and a U.S.B. socket for attaching a hard drive, camera or other device.

The TED Commandments – Rules every speaker needs to know – One of the reasons the speeches are so good is that TED’s organizers send upcoming speakers a stone tablet, engraved with the “TED Commandments”. Amy Tan in her TED Talk described the arrival of the TED Commandments as “something that creates a near-death experience; but near-death is good for creativity…”

What 13,500 pages micro-etched into nickel looks like – The good folks over at the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena who organized the Data and Art show that the Rosetta Disk was in, were kind enough to get some really nice photos taken of the micro-etched data side of the disk. What you are looking at is over 13,000 tiny pages describing over 1,500 languages. To see each page you would need a 500x microscope.
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1576
Tycho Brahe is given Hveen Island on which to build the Uraniborg Observatory.

1825
William Sturgeon publishes the first article on an electromagnet in the journal Transactions of the Society of Arts (Vol. XLIII, p.38). The publication features illustrations of his apparatus for electromagnetic experiments, which include one of horse-shoe shaped magnet and one a straight bar magnet.

1903
Paris, France and Rome, Italy are connected by telephone for first time.

1905
Thomas Alva Edison is issued a patent for a “Process of Duplicating Phonographic Records.” (US No. 790,351)
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Comics

• Does anyone else remember Mathnet? (I love XKCD)

Film

• According to director Terry Gilliam, Heath Ledger was brilliant in his last ever role, The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus.
• Ghostbusters 3 is a Go and Will feature the Original Cast.
• J.J. Abrams Responds To ‘Star Trek’ Fans’ Theories, claiming that Beastie Boys song isn’t a jab at William Shatner.
• Sigh. Terminator Salvation is getting rotten reviews almost straight across the board. I’m seriously rethinking whether I want to see it in theaters.
• Topless Robot counts down The 10 Most Blatant Terminator Rip-Offs… most which I’ve never even heard of.
• VideoHound reminds us of 10 Star Trek Movie Moments That Make Us Proud to Be Trekkies.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Read “Night School” by Clayton Emery at the author’s personal website.

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