The Great Geek Manual

1214
The University of Oxford receives its chartered.

1840
Samuel F.B. Morse receives a patent for his telegraphy signals, known as Morse code. (US No. 1,647)

1877
Alexander Graham Bell installs the world’s first commercial telephone service in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. In the first month, Bell will sell only six telephones. By September, 778 telephones will be in use.

1926
Herr Schaetzle demonstrates a wireless phone for automobiles in Berlin, Germany.

1939
Ernst Heinkel tests the world’s first aircraft to be propelled solely by a liquid-fueled rocket, the He-176 experimental rocket airplane, flies for first time in Peenemunde, Germany. It’s powered by an engine based on Hellmuth Walter’s hydrogen peroxide-based rocket and piloted by Erich Warsitz. It’s a small aircraft, without an enclosed canopy, built almost entirely out of wood with a fixed, tricycle undercarriage. The fifty second flight of the He-176 isn’t spectacular, but it does provide a “proof of concept” for rocket propulsion. Read more at Luft 46.
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…and don’t stop to photograph this sign…

Comics

• Jail sentence for hentai owner raises First Amendment issues. An appeals court ruling that has affirmed that owners of obscene comics like Hentai can be sent to prison has raised troubling questions for aficionados of extreme art.

Film

• Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother has been optioned for film by director Don Murphy of …Natural Born Killers?!
• Girls on Film: A Desire for Varied Female Protagonists is Not a Political Agenda
• It might be overstating matters a BIT, but here’s a great list of the 50 Reasons why GHOSTBUSTERS Just Might be the Greatest Film of all Time.
• Mary Robinette Kowal names Ten Fantasy Fathers Who Really Do Know Best.
• The Movie Blog makes the case for common sense, arguing that The Problem With The Star Wars Prequels Was Not Green Screen
• Proof of the siren-like effectiveness of Pixar’s marketing engine: Colby Curtin said she did not want to die until she saw the new Disney-Pixar movie Up.
• Unreality picks The 10 Most Polarizing Movies of the Last Decade that you have to either love or hate.

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240 BC
Greek astronomer and mathematician Eratosthenes calculates the circumference of the Earth. As director of the great Library of Alexandria, he read in a papyrus book that in Syene, the shadows of temple columns grew shorter as the hour approached noon on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. At noon, the shadows disappeared altogether because the sun was directly overhead. However, on the same day, a stick in Alexandria, to the north of Syene, casts a pronounced shadow. After learning about the shadows in Syene, Eratosthenes realizes that the surface of the Earth couldn’t be flat and that the more its surface curved, the greater the difference in the length of shadows between different locations would be. Eratosthenes calculated that the distance between the two locations was one fiftieth of a full 360-degree circle. He then estimated the distance between the two locations and calculated the planet’s circumference by multiplying the distance by fifty. The calculation would later prove to be remarkably accurate.

1910
The first Father’s Day is celebrated by the city of Spokane, Washington, though it was first observed on a smaller scale on July 5, 1908 by the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church in Fairmont, West Virginia.

1911
The first state film censorship board in the United States is established in Pennsylvania.

1914
A radiotelegraphic link is established between Germany and the United States, and German Emperor Wilhelm II and US President Woodrow Wilson exchange telegrams to mark the event.
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If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

- Albert Einstein

I can’t help but think as I watch this that in that enclosed of a space, the Orc is going to mop the floor with basically any member of the Alliance.

Art

• Galactic Binder has a gallery of the Top 10 Stormtrooper Crossovers for gawking.
• Gorilla Artfare walks through the stages of creating artwork for the Wizards of the Coast, from the thumbnails through the final touches.

Film

• The Architects’ Journal reflects on The architecture of Star Wars.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Bewildering Stories has posted their latest issue online. Contains some decent reading.
• Free Fiction: Download the ebook “The Digital Plague” by Jeff Somers at Hachette Book Group.
• Free Fiction: Read “Mother Scorpion’s House of Fallen Flowers: A Lucifer Jones Story” by Mike Resnick at Subterranean Press.
• The Guardian ponders Science fiction’s vital contribution to the life of English, saying that, “If you measure the health of literature by its impact on language, than there’s no genre in better condition than SF.”
• Gag me with a stick! Book publishers make a move toward mobile to attract teens? Seriously? Is there any way we could further facilitate the rapidly decreasing attention span of the American teen?

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