The Great Geek Manual

1826
Wilhelm von Biela, an Austrian military officer, discovers Biela’s Comet during its perihelion approach. It’s only the third periodic comet to be discovered.

1885
The American Telephone & Telegraph Company is incorporated as a subsidiary of the American Bell Telephone company in New York.

1935
The synthetic polymer Nylon is first produced by Dr. Wallace H. Carothers of DuPont. It will first be used commercially for the bristles of toothbrushes in 1938.

1953
James D. Watson and Francis Crick announce to their friends that they have determined the chemical structure of the DNA molecule. The formal public announcement won’t be made until April 25, in the April issue of the journal Nature. Watson and Crick aren’t the only scientists who have been trying to make the discovery. Later, in his book, The Double Helix, Watson will write about the intense competition to be the first to discover the structure of DNA.
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If Google is a religion, what is its God? It would have to be The Algorithm. Faith in the possibility of an omniscient and omnipotent algorithm appears to be what Messrs Page and Brin have in common. … Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.

- “St Lawrence of Google,” published in The Economist, January 12, 2006.

1812
The poet Lord Byron gives his first address as a member of the House of Lords, in defense of the Luddite violence against Industrialism in his home county of Nottinghamshire.

1813
The first federal vaccination legislation is enacted.

1900
German chemist Felix Hoffman is issued a patent for Aspirin. (US No. 644,077)

1932
The neutron is discovered by Dr. James Chadwick, using scattering data to calculate the mass of a neutral particle. Since the the experiments of Ernest Rutherford, it was known that the atomic mass number A of nuclei is a bit more than twice the atomic number Z for most atoms and that essentially all the mass of the atom is concentrated in the relatively tiny nucleus. As of about 1930, it was presumed that the fundamental particles were protons and electrons, but that required that somehow a number of electrons were bound in the nucleus to partially cancel the charge of A protons. But it is also known from the uncertainty principle and “particle-in-a-box” type confinement calculations that there just isn’t enough energy available to contain electrons in the nucleus. Read more about the discovery of the neutron at Georgia State University’s physics department’s webpage.
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My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we’ve outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us. …

You could argue that by offloading data onto silicon, we free our own gray matter for more germanely “human” tasks like brainstorming and daydreaming. What’s more, the perfect recall of silicon memory can be an enormous boon to thinking. …

Still, I have nagging worries. Sure, I’m a veritable genius when I’m on the grid, but am I mentally crippled when I’m not? Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?

- “Your Outboard Brain Knows All” by Clive Thompson
Originally published by Wired, September 25, 2007.

Art

• In this four minute video, designer Steven Heller traces the evolution of Olympic Pictograms Through the Ages since their appearance in 1936.
• Quiet Earth has posted a gallery of UltraMarines movie concept art.
• Stéphane Massa-Bidal offers up a few hair-raising Google meets Big Brother series mash-ups.
• Sweet and a bit scary, fans across Deviant Art share their love of Felicia Day.

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Last week, I was looking for something to watch online when I stumbled onto an old mystery series called Ellery Queen (IMDB) from 1975. I’m a huge fan of mystery series – even the hokey old ones.

Having already seen just about every incarnation of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple series, I found the series to be fairly predictable, and I was about to find something else to watch when it struck me.

Ellery Queen is astonishingly similar to the current ABC series Castle. I don’t mean similar in the way every Christie derivative is similar to every other derivative. I mean that Castle could damn well be an out-and-out remake of Ellery Queen.

First off, there’s the name. “Richard Castle” and “Ellery Queen” are both allusions to the game of chess, as is “Jameson Rook,” the pseudonym Castle uses in the series. This, in itself, seems to be an homage and acknowledgment on the part of Castle to the earlier series.
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1909
Kinemacolor films are shown to a paying audience for the first time at the Palace Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue in London, England. The show features twenty-one short films altogether.

1935
Scottish physicist Robert Watson-Watt demonstrates the feasibility of radar (RAdio Detection And Ranging) to Air Ministry officials in Daventry, England. Watson-Watt had discovered the possibility of using radio waves to detect aircraft while experimenting with methods of using radio waves to locate thunderstorms. During the demonstration, a bomber flying through the main beam of a BBC short-wave radio transmitter reflects signals to the ground as it passes overhead. Read more about the early history of radar.

1966
The first Saturn 1B rocket is launched from Cape Canaveral,on an unmanned suborbital test flight, as part of the Apollo program. The AS-201 mission demonstrates the structural integrity of the Saturn 1B rocket, which combines five F-1 rocket engines, and its ability as a launch vehicle to carry future Apollo loads with its 7.5 million pounds of thrust. Despite several malfunctions, the rocket flies for thirty-seven minutes over 5,264 miles (8,472km), reaching a peak altitude of 303 miles (488km).

1986
Warrants are issued for the arrest of seven local users of the The Phoenix Fortress BBS in Fremont, California. The Sysop turns out to be a local law enforcement agent and the board turns out to be a sting operation created to catch hackers and pirates. Three of the arrested users are fifteen years old, two are sixteen, one is seventeen, and one is nineteen. Their computers and some additional equipment is confiscated.
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I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge – myth is more potent than history – dreams are more powerful than facts – hope always triumphs over experience – laughter is the cure for grief – love is stronger than death.

- Robert Fulghum