The Great Geek Manual

In the information age, you don’t teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he’d have a talk show.

- Timothy Leary

1861
The Patent Act of 1861 increases the duration of a patent’s term from fourteen to seventeen years.

1908
Gabriel Lippman introduces the new three-dimensional color photography to the Academy of Sciences.

1933
RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. premieres the great-granddaddy of all monster movies, King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Bruce Cabot, at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City. In it, a film crew brings what it bills as the “eighth wonder of the world,” a giant prehistoric ape, back to New York, where he subsequently escapes and runs amok through the city. The film will spawn one of Hollywood’s first blockbuster movie franchises and save RKO Studios from an untimely bankruptcy. Produced on a budget of US$650,000, the film will gross US$89,931 over the course of its first four days, even with tickets priced at thirty-five and seventy-five cent, setting an all-time attendance record for an indoor event. Visit the film’s official website. IMDB listing
Running Time: 1 hr 44 mins
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The scientists by large know more liberal arts, than the science known by liberal artists and that needs to change. If you go to a science cocktail party and someone talks about Shakespeare no one is gonna say “Oh I was never good at Shakespeare! I was terrible in nouns and verbs!” No, you’ll never hear that. But if you go to a liberal art party, an artists party, and someone start talking about math it’s all “Oh I was never good at math, I hated math” and they all chuckle and all agree, and all like sip the next sip of champagne and go on talking about the art and that’s somehow ok. No that’s not ok.

- Neil DeGrasse Tyson in an address before the 2010 World Science Festival

Art

• Large Hadron Collider Quilts
• The posters for The Avengers gets Gender-Swapped.
• Some Epic Hobbit cosplay!
• I’m seriously rooting for Dovakin Dragon Fighting Armor to become the new “Slave Leia” of cos events.
• I think all sculptures from here on out should be constructed of smartphones!
• The Art of Video Games is an upcoming Smithsonian exhibit on the evolution of video game art over the past 40 years.

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1692
Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, Reverend Parris’ Caribbean slave, are accused of using witchcraft, marking the beginning of the Salem witch trials.

1872
Edward Drinker Cope reads his paper to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in which he gives the name Ornithochirus to the remains of an creature with large wings. However, Cope’s rival Othniel Charles Marsh beats him to print by publishing a paper in the American Journal of Science a few days earlier, using the alternative name Pterodactylis.
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The existence of hyperlinks is enough to convince even the most stubborn positivist that there is always another side to the story. And on the web, fringe believers can always find each other and marinate in their own illusions. The “web world” is too big to ever know. There is always another link. In the era of the Internet, Weinberger argues, facts are not bricks. They are networks.

… human beings (or rather “Dasein,” “being-in-the-world”) are always thrown into a particular context, existing within already existing language structures and pre-determined meanings. In other words, the world is like the web, and we, Dasein, live inside the links.

- “The Difference Between Online Knowledge and Truly Open Knowledge” by C.W. Anderson, February 3, 2012.
First posted by The Atlantic.