The Great Geek Manual

1904
The first underground New York City Subway line opens. The first line runs between the Brooklyn Bridge and Broadway, from City Hall to West 145th Street.

1920
KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is granted the first public radio broadcast license.

1922
The Audion, one of the first systems for synchronizing film with an audio recording, is demonstrated by Western Electric’s Bell Laboratories to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers at Yale University’s Woolsey Hall. The system requires a projectionist to hand-crank the film in time with the audio disk.

1927
The first newsreel to feature sound debuts.
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Art

• Fandomania has rounded up a gallery of Dracula art from Deviant Art.
• Screen Junkies has posted a gallery of 20 Movie Villain Pumpkin Carvings.
• Super Tremendous has posted a gallery of 15 Horrifying Baby Halloween Costumes, beginning with a startled little Alien victim.
• Unreality has posted a gallery of 15 Zombie Road Signs.

Comics

• Need more Dr. Horrible in your life? Dr. Horrible is coming to comics.
• Wired’s Geek Dad interviews the iconic Stan Lee.

Film

• News: Ghost in the Shell to become a live-action movie.
• AMC’s FilmCritic picks Horror Movies to Watch in the Dark.
• AMC’s SciFi Scanner shares Ten Creepy Comic Book Movies To Make Your Halloween a Super Scream, beginning with Blade II.
• The Guardian’s Film Blog waxes nostalgic over The Shining, which they claim (and I agree) is just getting better with age.
• The SciFi quad asks Did James Cameron Steal the Plot for ‘Avatar’?

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I can fancy what you saw. Yes; it is horrible enough; but after all, it is an old story, an old mystery played in our day and in dim London streets instead of amidst the vineyards and the olive gardens. We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish, silly tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form. Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?

- The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen, 1926.

Read the The Great God Pan at Project Gutenberg.

1861
The Pony Express, which has been the fast method of communicating between San Francisco, California and St. Joseph, Missouri officially ceases operations.

1936
The first electric generator at the Hoover Dam goes into full operation.

1960
Saga, a silent shoot-em-up Western play written by the TX-0 computer, the first general purpose transistorized computer, airs on the CBS television network to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The program that wrote Saga is comprised 4,096 words of magnetic core storage. The thirteen thousand lines of code choreographed the movements of each object. A line of direction was written for each action, even if it went wrong. This led to the high point of the show where the sheriff put his gun in the holster of the robber resulting in a never ending loop.

1961
The International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) introduces Hypertape for the IBM 7340, a system faster than any commercially-available magnetic tape system.
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There’s power in the night. There’s terror in the darkness. Despite all our accumulated history, learning, and experience, we remember. We remember times when we were too small to reach the light switch on the wall, and when the darkness itself was enough to makes us cry out in fear.

Get a good ways out from civilization-say, miles and miles away on a lightless lake-and the darkness is there, waiting. Twilight means more than just time to call the children in from playing outside. Fading light means more than just the end of another day. Night is when terrible things emerge from their sleep and seek soft flesh and hot blood. Night is when unseen beings with no regard for what our people have built and no place in what we have deemed the natural order look in at our world from outside, and think dark and alien thoughts.

And sometimes, just sometimes, they do things.

- Turn Coat, book eleven of The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher, 2009.

1671
Giovanni Cassini discovers Iapetus, a moon of Saturn.

1858
The signals carried between Europe and the US over the new transatlantic telegraph cable die altogether as the cable fails. This, the first intercontinental connection, won’t be replaced until 1866.

1945
Radio Corporation of America (RCA) equips its its studios in Radio City, New York with orthicon television cameras, the first cameras to use camera tubes more sensitive to light than film. It marks the beginning of electronic photography.

1955
The first domestic microwave oven is introduced by the Tappan Company in Mansfield, Ohio. Price: US$1,200
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Cognitive liberty is not just about the right to modify one’s mind, emotional balance and psychological framework (for example, through anti-depressants, cognitive enhancers, psychotropic substances, etc.), it’s also very much about the right to not have one’s mind altered against their will. In this sense, cognitive liberty is very closely tied to freedom of speech. A strong argument can be made that we have an equal right to freedom of thought and the sustained integrity of our subjective experiences.

- “Cognitive liberty and right to one’s mind” by George Dvorsky, October 18, 2009.