The Great Geek Manual

Before we work on artificial intelligence why don’t we do something about natural stupidity?

- Steve Polyak

1906
A US patent is issued to inventor Greenleaf Whittier Pickard, an electrical engineer, for the crystal detector, one of the first devices widely used for receiving radio broadcasts, until the later development of the later triode vacuum tube. His patent describes the device as “a means for receiving intelligence communicated by electric waves.”

1920
KDKA becomes the first radio station credited with broadcasting regularly scheduled professional programming.

1931
The first commercial teletype service was introduced by American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T).

1947
A permanent television is installed on a seagoing vessel for the first time.

1950
The NTSC color television system comes into effect as a standard in the US.
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Film

• News: J.J. Abrams will be Producing Samurai Jack: The Movie. Is Aku the smoke beast?
• News: Steven Spielberg Teams with Stephen King for an Under the Dome miniseries.
• Cinematical names the Top Seven Movies that Start Fights, including The Matrix Reloaded.
• Paste Magazine compiled a great list of The 25 Best Movie Performances of the Decade.
• SciFi Squad picks the The Top Ten Most Memorable Astronaut Movies in honor of the upcoming Planet 51.

Internet

• CollegeHumor has come up with the perfect Internet Application for Adults. I say, let’s make it mandatory!
• Check out what AdSense pairs with this Robert Pattinson website.
• Get the scoop on Flarf, the poetry of Googled search terms.

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Tinkering is what happens when you try something you don’t quite know how to do, guided by whim, imagination, and curiosity. When you tinker, there are no instructions, but there are also no failures, no right or wrong way of doing things. It’s about figuring out how things work and reworking them.

- Massimo Banzi, one the developers of the Arduino project

1477
William Caxton issues his first dated printed book in England, Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres (”Sayings of the Philosophers). Caxton will produce approximately one hundred copies of the work.

1879
Eugen Skladanowsky presents the first public projection of photographs at the Floria Theatre in Berlin.

1894
The “New York World” publishes the first regular Sunday comic section.

1929
Vladimir Kozmich Zworykin demonstrates a television receiving system called the Kinescope to the Institute of Radio Engineers in the US.

1951
See It Now hosted by Edward R. Murrow becomes the first live coast-to-coast commercial television broadcast in the US. The program will become well know for its high journalistic standards.
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Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.

- Thoughts and Aphorisms by Sri Aurobindo, 1913.

1947
The first transistor, a solid-state amplifier made of germanium, plastic, and gold, is invented by Walter Brattain and John Bardeen in a series of experiments conducted between November 17 and December 23.

1960
Customer trials of the world’s first electronic Telephone Central Office in Morris, Illinois begin.

1967
Surveyor 6 becomes first man-made object to lift off the Moon.

1970
Douglas Engelbart receives a patent for the first computer mouse. (US No. 3541541) The patent, titled “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System,” is a simple hollowed-out wooden block, with a single push button on top.
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We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.

- William E. Vaughan