The Great Geek Manual

1898
Reverend Hannibal Williston Goodwin receives a patent for his celluloid photographic film, which he describes as “nitro cellulose transparent flexible photographic film pellicles.” (US No. 610,861)

1899
The first American automobile fatality occurs when Henry H. Bliss is run over as he exits a streetcar at the intersection of Central Park West and 74th Street in New York City. He steps into the path of an approaching horseless carriage driven by Arthur Smith. Bliss, age 68, is taken to a hospital, where he will die of his injuries. The driver is arrested and held on US$1,000 bail.

1922
The world’s highest shade temperature is recorded at the African village of Al Aziziyah, about twenty-five miles (40km) south of Tripoli, the capital of Libya. Temperatures reach upwards of 136.4ºF (58ºC). The village is a major trade center of the Jifarah plain, just a few miles south of the Mediterranean Sea.

1956
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) introduces the first commercial computer to feature a magnetic disk storage system (hard drive), the IBM 305 RAMAC. The drive itself, which was introduced on September 4, features fifty double-sided twenty-four inch diameter disks or “platters,” each of which is operated by an arm and one read/write head. Each disk has a capacity of about 5MB each, with a transfer rate is 8800 characters per second. RAMAC is an acronym for “Random Access Method of Accounting and Control.” It marks a revolution in computing as it the first business computer designed to provide businesses with real time accounting. In 1957, the first RAMAC will be installed at Chrysler’s MOPAR Division.
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…we must become judicious controllers of our own contexts, making careful and self-reflective choices about what we read, watch, consume.

- “Nanostories are killing us” in And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture by Bill Wasik, June 11, 2009.

1958
Jack St Clair Kilby demonstrates the world’s first integrated circuit to fellow researchers and executives at Texas Instruments (TI). The circuit contains five components, including germanium mesa transistors, resistors, and capacitors linked by wires, on a piece of germanium half an inch long and thinner than a toothpick. The purpose of the demonstration is to prove that resistors and capacitors can exist on the same piece of semiconductor material. The circuit was designed while the TI plant was officially shut down for a vacation. As a new employee, Kilby had not yet earned a vacation and was left virtually alone to determine that resistors and capacitors could be made from the same material and integrated together on a single chip. On February 6, 1959, he will apply for a patent, which will eventually be issued on June 23, 1964.

1959
The Soviet Union launches Lunik II toward the Moon aboard a Luna 8K72 carrier rocket. It will become the first man-made object to strike the Moon on September 13th at 22:02:04 UT, in Palus Putredinis, east of Mare Serenitatis near the Aristides, Archimedes, and Autolycus craters. The probe is equipped with Cherenkov detectors, geiger counters, a magnetometer, micrometeorite detectors, and scintillation counters, but it has no independent propulsion system.

The television series Bonanza premieres on NBC. The western is the first regularly-scheduled television program presented in color in the US.
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Art

• This forum is hosting a contest challenging its member to recreate a vehicle from Star Wars in steampunk style using legos.

Film

• Cinematical picks their favorite On-Screen Mad Scientists.
• Mike Brotherton picks The Ten Best “Silly” Science Fiction Movies.
• The Sci-Fi Squad names The Top Ten African-American Sci-Fi Characters.
• The Shiznit looks back at 15 Famous Movie Good Guys who were also Total Dicks.
• Though four sequels is usually beating a dead horse, AMC has compiled a list of Six Great Movies That Are Sixth in a Series.

Literature

• Interview: Innsmouth Free Press interviews Alex Irvine.
• Interview: SFWA interviews Ysabeau S. Wilce.

Television

• NBC (Finally) Admits Heroes Has Been Sucking… the next step in this ten step program is..

1822
The College of Cardinals reverses the church’s condemnation of the ideas of astronomer Galileo Galilei, stating that “publication of works treating of the motion of the Earth and the stability of the sun, in accordance with the opinion of modern astronomers, is permitted.” However, Galilei’s book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, won’t be removed from the Vatican’s list of banned books.

1831
Charles Darwin and Captain Robert Fitzroy travel from London to Plymouth to inspect the HMS Beagle. This is Darwin’s first sight of the ship on which he would sail during the voyage which will lead to his famous theory of evolution.

1928
General Electric makes the first simulcast in Schenectady, New York, broadcasting a play over radio and TV at the same time. The program is The Queen’s Messenger.

1940
Dr. George R. Stibitz, a Bell Telephone Labs engineer, demonstrates the first example of “remote computing.” Having created built the “Model 1 Complex Number Calculator” a year before at Bell Laboratories, he leaves it in New York City and travels to New Hampshire with a teleprinter, where he allows attendees of the American Mathematical Society at Dartmouth College to enter equations that are transmitted down phone lines and calculated remotely, before the answers are returned to what will later be described as an astounded audience. Wiremen had arranged the hookup between the college and the computer in the Bell Labs building on West Street in New York, New York a day before the demonstration. It took about one minute for the computer to respond accurately via teletype to problems sent to it.
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Art

• 54 Incredible Illustrations by Dan Dos Santos is a gallery of works by one of the hottest cover artists in the market today.

Film

• Interview: Tor.com interviews 9 producer Tim Burton.
• DVDs Worth Watching talks with LeVar Burton who plays Black Lightning in the animated Super/Batman release.
• Fandomania attempt to compile the definitive list of the Ultimate 20 Comic Book Film Adaptations.
• Sci-Fi Scanner’s John Scalzi Ranks Star Trek’s Directors, but if you can’t guess who comes in ass-last, you’re not worthy of the title “Trekkie.”
• The Telegraph counts down the 25 Best Book to Film Adaptations.
• Tola Onanuga claims District 9 isn’t racist against Nigerians, saying that “If District 9 ‘hates Nigerians’, as a Facebook group would have it, then it hates its powerful, white characters even more.”
• Will The First Marvel/Disney Film Be A Pixar Ant-Man?

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I tried a few captions about the stupidity of underestimating a space-faring race, but nothing quite fit. Suggest your own captions below.

1858
George Mary Searle discovers the asteroid 55 Pandora.

1960
Japan begins transmitting regular color television programming using the NTSC system. It’s the third country to adopt the system after Cuba and the United States.

1984
Alec Jeffreys discovers Genetic fingerprinting accidentally while studying genetic markers across generations as a method of tracking patterns of inherited illness in families.

1988
Home Vision Entertainment releases the documentary Comic Book Confidential, directed by Ron Mann and starring Robert Crumb, Will Eisner, William M. Gaines, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, and Frank Miller. The Canadian documentary film surveys the history of comic books in the US from the thirties through the eighties and features interviews with some of the foremost names in the industry. The film will receive the prestigious 1989 Genie Award for Best Documentary. It is also one of the first films to ever be released in CD-ROM format for home computer viewing. Visit the film’s official website.
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