The Great Geek Manual

From Around the Web

11 Things You Didn’t Know About Steve Jobs – What makes a great entrepreneur tick? What drives them to go the extra mile to success? These lesser known facts about Steve Jobs might just give you a clue.

50 Great Examples of Data Visualization – Am I the only one who gets excited over infographics? Something about all that organized data sparks the imagination. Of course, I was the kind of kid who alphabetized by alphabet soup so…

Bing vs. Google – A side by side comparison of Bing and Google show a comical bit of bias on the part of Microsoft. [More evidence here] This may be why they registered BingSucks.com before anyone else could get to it.

The Car that Runs on Air and Magnets – Could we all be driving cars that don’t require a single drop of fuel in another decade? One company thinks so, and it’s about damn time.

Cory Doctorow & Charlie Stross Panel – Two popular sci-fi authors discuss privacy and copyright reform at the Open Rights Group’s panel discussion, “Resisting the All-Seeing Eye.” Read the rest of this entry » » »

There’s no point being grown-up if you can’t be childish sometimes.

- The Doctor Who Episode 75, “Robot” by Terrance Dicks, January 18, 1975.
Character: The Doctor

1858
The Donati Comet is first seen named after its discoverer. Giovanni Battista Donati, of Florence, Italy.

1875
Alexander Graham Bell discovers that he can hear the sound of a twanging clock spring transmitted over a wire while working on his experimental “harmonic telegraph.” Bell’s assistant Thomas Watson, was attempting to free a reed from the pole of an electromagnet when it twanged. Bell, working it the telegraph’s receiving room heard the noise and came to realize that transmitting speech should be possible, as the complexity of the twang bore a resemblance to the tones of a human voice.

1891
Thomas A. Edison is issued a patent for his “Sextuplex Telegraph.” (U.S. No. 453,601)

1896
The first radio patent was issued to Guglielmo Marconi in England for his wireless telegraphy apparatus, described as “Improvements in Transmitting Electrical Impulses and Signals, and in Apparatus Therefor.” (UK No. 12,039)
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1831
English navigator and explorer James Clark Ross discovers the North Magnetic Pole on the Boothia Peninsula in the northern Canada while exploring the Arctic.

1869
Thomas Edison of Boston, Massachusetts, is granted his first patent for an “electrographic vote recorder.” (US No. 90,646) The device will enable legislators to register their votes for or against an issue by dialing a switch to the left or right. Before his death, Edison will hold 1,093 US patents, becoming widely known as one of the most prolific inventors in history.

1880
The Connecticut Telephone Company installs the first public pay telephone booth in the United States at its offices in New Haven. To use the phone, customers need to pay a toll to the phone’s attendant.

1886
Thomas A. Edison is issued a patent for a “System of Electrical Distribution.” (US No. 343,017)
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Science develops best when its concepts and conclusions are integrated into the broader human culture and its concerns for ultimate meaning and value. Scientists cannot, therefore, hold themselves entirely aloof from the sorts of issues dealt with by philosophers and theologians. By devoting to these issues something of the energy and care they give to their research in science, they can help others realize more fully the human potentialities of their discoveries. They can also come to appreciate for themselves that these discoveries cannot be a genuine substitute for knowledge of the truly ultimate. Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.

- Pope John Paul II in a Letter to Rev. George V. Coyne, S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory, June 1, 1988.