The Great Geek Manual

Art

• Building-sized Inception Advertisements are turning heads in NYC. (More)
• Check out the latest video game propaganda poster by Steve Thomas.
• Futurama’s New York City Takes Lego Form
• The Geek Art Gallery points the way to this Forbidden Planet / Jetsons Mash-up.

Film

• The first pics of Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides are now online.
• Harry Knowles recommends that men go see the new Twilight movie. Hilarious.
• Hogwarts is burning in the first Deathly Hallows poster.
• The Last Airbender is ILM’s latest step in the quest for realistic fire effects.
• Nora Ephron ridicules The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in the New Yorker.
• Wired suggests Top 10 Films to Watch for a Geeky Independence Day.

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1841
John Couch Adams decides to determine the position of an unknown planet by the irregularities it causes in the motion of Uranus. He enters in his journal; “Formed a design in the beginning of this week in investigating, as soon as possible after taking my degree, the irregularities in the motion of Uranus… in order to find out whether they may be attributed to the action of an undiscovered planet beyond it…” In September 1845, he will give James Challis, director of the Cambridge Observatory, accurate information on where the new planet, as yet unobserved, can be found. Unfortunately, the planet won’t be recognized by Cambridge until much later, when it will discovery by the Berlin Observatory on September 23, 1846. The plant will eventually be named Neptune.

1886
Karl Benz unveils and demonstrates the first purpose-built automobile in history, the Benz Patent Motorwagen, in Mannheim, Germany. The vehicle, first ever designed to be powered by a mechanical motor rather than simply being a converted horse carriage, is capable of reaching a top speed of 10mph.

The first U.S. newspaper page set by a linotype machine is published by the New York Daily Tribune for the day’s editorial page. The machine was originally called a “Blower,” but it will be renamed “Linotype” for “line of type,” which is the amount of text that could be set at one time. Within six years, one thousand Linotype machines will have been manufactured. By 1904, there will be ten thousand linotype machines in service.
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Art

• Carlos Ramos pay tribute to director Stanley Kubrick at an art show at Copro.
• Check out the Sci-Fi Air Show.
• Roots t-shirt available from J!NX

Comics

• In the wake of Wonder Woman getting a costume change, Ranker picks The 10 Lamest Superhero Costume Changes Ever, beginning with Electric Superman.

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1698
Thomas Savery patents the first steam engine.

1858
The Donati Comet was first seen and named after its discoverer.

1875
While Alexander Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson are working on Edison’s “harmonic telegraph,” they stumble upon the inspiration that will eventually lead to the creation of the first telephone. In the transmitter room, Watson produces a twang while trying to free a reed that had been wound too tightly to the pole of its electromagnet. Bell, working in the receiving room, hears the twang and realizes that his dream of speech transmission must be possible, because the complex overtones and timbre of the twang he had just heard bore a striking similarity to the sound of the human voice.
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Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.

- New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative by Paul Goodman, 1970.

1874
After much preparation at home and abroad, the Philadelphia Zoo, the first zoological gardens in the United States opens to the public with several hundred native and exotic specimens on the grounds of Solitude, the last estate in the area owned by the Penn family, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was originally chartered by the Pennsylvania state legislature on March 21, 1859 as the Zoological Society of Philadelphia whose core purpose is to oversee “the purchase and collection of living wild and other animals” and “for the instruction and recreation of the people.” Rumors of a civil war make it a difficult time for private undertakings, and delayed the opening. In 1875, this zoo will become the first U.S. zoo to exhibit a male Indian rhinoceros.

1881
The first international telephone call is made between Calais, Maine in the United States and St. Stephen, New Brunswick in Canada.
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What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest.

- “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains” by Nicholas Carr, May 24, 2010.