The Great Geek Manual

1701
The Collegiate School of America, later named Yale University, is founded by Congregationalists who are unhappy with the liberal bent of Harvard.

1843
Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton conceives of the concept of quaternions, non-commutative extensions of complex numbers as he strolls along the Royal Canal in Dublin, Ireland with his wife. During the walk, he realizes that the theory of conjugate functions which he had been working on since the thirties could be solved using quadruplets rather than triplets. In his excitement over the realization, he carves the underlying equations in a nearby bridge.

1908
In Farnborough, the first aeroplane flight in England is accomplished by Samuel Cody, a self-proclaimed American cowboy who built his own flying machines. Read more online.

1914
The first blood transfusion of World War I is performed on a wounded soldier when Isidore Colas gives his blood to Corporal Henri Legrain of 45th Infantry Corps of the French Army.
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Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.

- M is for Magic by Neil Gaiman, 2007.

Art

• Top Cultured envisions 7 Chick Flicks Turned Badass.
• Where the Wild Things Are tops MetroMix’s picks for This decade’s 10 riskiest book-to-film adaptations.

Comics

• Comic Alliance counts down Dracula’s Greatest Comics Appearances.

Film

• TreeHugger counts down the 9 Best Eco Apocalyptic Science Fiction Films of All Time, beginning with Matrix and Children of Men.

Literature

• According to Tor.com, Nanotech IS distinguishable from magic. Suck it, Clarke.
• Tor.com reminisces over the books of the cosy catastrophe genre.

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…gods, religions and national boundaries are absolutely imaginary. They don’t tend to exist. As soon as you pull back half a mile and look down at the Earth there are no national boundaries. There aren’t even national boundaries when you get down and walk around. They’re just imaginary lines we draw on maps. I just get fascinated by people who assume that things that are imaginary have no relevance to their lives.

- Neil Gaiman

1764
Edward Gibbon observes a group of friars singing in the ruined Temple of Jupiter in Rome, which inspires him to begin work on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

1783
Frenchman Jean- François Pilâtre de Rozier makes a tethered, captive-balloon ascent, in the gardens of La Muette. The Montgolfier-made balloon, Aerostat Reveillon, is “the first man to leave the Earth,” rising to the end of a 250 foot tether and remaining aloft for fifteen minutes before landing safely.

1878
Thomas Edison establishes the Edison Electric Light Company in New York City with a syndicate of leading financiers, including J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts, who advanced him US$30,000 for research and development. Edison’s goals is to connect his lights in a parallel circuit, subdividing the current, so that, unlike arc lights, which are connected in a series circuit, the failure of one light bulb will not cause a whole circuit to fail. The company will eventually become a part of General Electric in 1892.

1910
The first air-sea rescue using radio saves the crew of the airship America.
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So, the other day, I was comparing the results of various search terms on Bing and Google. When I got around to check which engine returned the best advice on raising your credit score, I discovered this gem.

Needless to say, Google wins hands-down in my book.

Art

• Interview: Tor.com interviews steampunk artist James Ng.
• io9 has posted a gallery of Iron Man Storyboard art and some beautiful steam punk concept art.

Film

• News: Remember the TV series Millennium? There may be a movie on the way.
• Den of Geek names 10 franchises that are likely to be resurrected in the next 10 years, including Charlie’s Angels and Home Alone.
• Entertainment Weekly names its picks for the 20 Scariest Movies of All Time.
• In 1981, Philip K. Dick wrote a letter to Jeff Walker regarding “Blade Runner,” predicting that it’s effect would be overwhelming on both artists and the public.
• The movie post for DayBreakers is uber-creepy and quite futuristic. (Also here)

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Stories are, in one way or another, mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors, stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in the darkness. Fantasy – and all fiction is fantasy of one kind or another – is a mirror. A distorting mirror, to be sure, and a concealing mirror, set at forty-five degrees to reality, but it’s a mirror nonetheless, which we can use to tell ourselves things we might not otherwise see. (Fairy tales, as G. K. Chesterton once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.)

- Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman, 1998.