The Great Geek Manual

1522
Ferdinand Magellan returns to Spain aboard the “Victoria,” becoming the first ship to successfully circumnavigate the globe.

1879
Telephone Company, Ltd. opens the first public British telephone exchange on Lombard Street in London using Edison’s telephone system. The service will be, in effect an exclusive club, to which members will pay a subscription. At first, the exchange serves just eight subscribers. By the end of the year, there will be about two hundred subscribers, and two more exchanges will open on Leadenhall Street in the City, and at Westminster.

1947
The aircraft-carrier Midway becomes the first U.S. vessel to launch a long-range rocket. The test, which is a part of Operation Sandy, fires a captured German V-2 rocket from the flight deck several hundred miles off the east coast of the U.S.
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Humanity is migrating towards its hive mind. Most of what “everybody knows” about us is based on the human individual. Collectively, connected humans will be capable of things we cannot imagine right now. These future phenomenon will rightly seem impossible. What’s coming is so unimaginable that the impossibility of wikipedia will recede into outright obviousness.

- “Why the Impossible Happens More Often” by Kevin Kelly, August 26, 2011.
Originally posted on The Technium.

Art

• The 2011 Dragon*Con Cosplay parade
• Butterfly Shrimp and Laser-Cut Nori
• PBS takes a look at The Art of Steampunk
• Romance is in the air in this gallery of Zombies in Love
• Watch Metal Slug in Real Life

Comics

• Interview: Christos Gage On ‘Angel & Faith’ #1
• Interview: Here is a Village Voice interview with Marv Wolfman, the man who invented the Crisis, kicking off decades of specials.
• 10 Nerdiest Celebrities to Ever Write Comics
• Relaunched DC Sales Numbers Show Super Interest

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1787
Clause 8 of Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution governing copyrights and patents is adopted by the constitutional convention.

1831
Charles Darwin first meets Captain Robert Fitzroy, commander of HMS Beagle, who will be his cabinmate on the historic five-year expedition during which Darwin will visit the Galapogos Islands.

1857
Charles Darwin sends a letter to Harvard botanist Asa Gray, discussing his theory of evolution. The encouragement that Darwin will receive from Gray and other colleges will prompt him to finally publish his theory after twenty years of indecision.
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These supposed impossibilities keep happening with increased frequency. Everyone “knew” that people don’t work for free, and if they did, they could not make something useful without a boss. But today entire sections of our economy run on software instruments created by volunteers working without pay or bosses. Everyone knew humans were innately private beings, yet the impossibility of total open round-the-clock sharing still occurred. Everyone knew that humans are basically lazy, and they would rather watch than create, and they would never get off their sofas to create their own TV. It would be impossible that millions of amateurs would produce billions of hours of video, or that anyone would watch any of it. Like Wikipedia, or Linux, YouTube is theoretically impossible. But here this impossibility is real in practice.

This list goes on, old impossibilities appearing as new possibilities daily. But why now? What is happening to disrupt the ancient impossible/possible boundary?

In a word: emergence. As far as I can tell the impossible things that happen now are in every case manifestations of a new, bigger level of organization.

- “Why the Impossible Happens More Often” by Kevin Kelly, August 26, 2011.
Originally posted on The Technium.

Utilities and Resources

• Codecademy – a free website that provides interactive lessons on coding for web development. Founders Ryan Bubinski and Zach Sims have started the site with eight Javascript lessons, and plan to expand the coursework to other languages.
• Flipping Book Reader – a PDF Reader with an interactive interface where you can flip pages like in a real book. It provides a number of stylish and unique features such as the option to switch to a two page view, book shelf for all accessed documents, a thumbnail view of the table of contents, a customizable interface and the utility to scroll page up/down using the mouse pointer.
• NotiPage – a freeware app that alerts you when selected webpages are updated. Very useful for following forum threads and fix sites that don’t offer RSS.
• ShareMyPlaylists – a web service that makes it easy to share your Spotify playlists on Facebook and Twitter as well as with the ShareMyPlaylists community. It gives you access to a large library of user created playlists that you can browse in your browser but play in Spotify.
• ZenOK – a new cloud storage service that is offering 21GB of storage. It supports file compression, automatic versioning, and file encryption

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Attention blindness is the fundamental structuring principle of the brain, and I believe that it presents us with a tremendous opportunity. My take is different from that of many neuroscientists: Where they perceive the shortcomings of the individual, I sense an opportunity for collaboration. Fortunately, given the interactive nature of most of our lives in the digital age, we have the tools to harness our different forms of attention and take advantage of them.

It’s not easy to acknowledge that everything we’ve learned about how to pay attention means that we’ve been missing everything else. It’s not easy for us rational, competent, confident types to admit that the very key to our success—our ability to pinpoint a problem and solve it, an achievement honed in all those years in school and beyond—may be exactly what limits us. For more than a hundred years, we’ve been training people to see in a particularly individual, deliberative way. No one ever told us that our way of seeing excluded everything else.

- “Collaborative Learning for the Digital Age” by Cathy N. Davidson, August 26, 2011.
Originally published by The Chronicle Review.

1882
Thomas Edison supplies electricity to the first customers of the Edison Illuminating Company at 257 Pearl Street in New York City. Edison inaugurates its operation by pulling a switch on the Wall Street office of his primary financial backer. The station’s “Jumbo No. 1″ generator is a direct-current steam-powered dynamo. It can power about seven hundred sixteen candlepower lamps. Within fourteen months, this first power station serves 508 subscribers and powers 12,732 bulbs.

The New York Times becomes the first newspaper to use the electricity generated by the Edison Illuminating Company. The paper uses the electricity to power twenty-seven lamps in the editorial room and twenty-five lamps in the counting room. The following day, the paper will run an article reporting that its employees unanimously prefer the light provided by the carbon-filament lamp over the building’s former gas lighting.
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