The Great Geek Manual

1006
Supernova SN 1006, the brightest supernova in recorded history, occurs in the southern constellation Lupus, near the star Beta Lupi. Chinese and Arabic astronomers note the supernova, but the speed of the still-expanding shock wave won’t be measured for nearly a millennium. The event is also recorded by observers in Egypt, Iraq, Italy, Japan, and Switzerland. From the careful descriptions recorded by Chinese astronomers of how the light varies, the Supernova is apparently yellow in color and visible for over a year.
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…nerds like us are allowed to be un-ironically enthusiastic about stuff. We don’t have to be like, ‘Oh yeah that purse is okay’ or like, ‘Yeah, I like that band’s early stuff.’ Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself-love it. When people call people nerd, mostly what they are saying is, ‘You like stuff,’ which is just not a good insult at all, like ‘You are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’. … Nerd life is just SO much better than regular life!

- “Harry Potter Nerds Win at Life” by John Green, July 19, 2009.

1879
Electric arc lamps are used for the first time in the United States, as street lights in Cleveland, Ohio.

1953
An episode of the science fiction series Space Patrol becomes the first experimental three-dimensional television broadcast in the U.S. when it is broadcast by ABC affiliate KECA-TV in Los Angeles, California.

1957
The first military nuclear power plant is dedicated at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.
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Saying ‘I notice you’re a nerd’ is like saying, ‘Hey, I notice that you’d rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you’d rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?’ In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even ‘lame’ is kind of lame. Saying ‘You’re lame’ is like saying ‘You walk with a limp.’ Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he’s done all right for himself.

- “July 27: How Nerdfighters Drop Insults” by John Green, July 27, 2007.

1686
The first of the three volumes of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (“Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”) by Isaac Newton is published in Latin. The complete work will come to be regarded as one of the single most significant contribution to science ever published. In it, Newton presents his invention of differential and integral calculus. He also describes his laws of motion, which will become the foundation of all classic mechanics. Read the 1729 English translation of Newton’s Principa online at Google Books.

1910
In England, Claude Grahame-White becomes the first person to pilot a plane at night. The landmark flight comes during the 1910 London to Manchester air race.
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1946
The first commercial ship to be equipped with a radar system, the SS African Star, goes into service.

1953
Professional wrestler Freddie Blassie first coins the term “Pencil neck geek.”

1960
The first atomic powered submarine is launched at Tullibee.
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The future of digital culture — yours, mine, and ours — depends on how well we learn to use the media that have infiltrated, amplified, distracted, enriched, and complicated our lives. How you employ a search engine, stream video from your phonecam, or update your Facebook status matters to you and to everyone because the ways people use new media in the first years of an emerging communication regime can influence the way those media end up being used and misused for decades to come. Instead of confining my attention to whether or not Google is making us stupid, Facebook is commoditizing our privacy, or Twitter is chopping our attention into microslices (all good questions), I’ve been asking myself and others how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and above all, mindfully. This book is about what I’ve learned.

I believe that learning to live mindfully in cyberculture is as important to all of us as a civilization as it is vital to you and me as individuals. The multifold extension of human minds by chips and nets in the first decade of the 21st century has granted power to billions, but in these still-early years of multimedia production studios in your pocket and global information networks in the air, it is clear to even technology enthusiasts like me that our enhanced abilities to create and consume digital media will certainly mislead those who haven’t learned how to exert mental control over our use of always-on communication channels.

- Net Smart: How to Thrive Online by Howard Rheingold, March 16, 2012.

1514
Nicholas Copernicus makes his first observations of the planet Saturn which will later lead his to propose that the Sun is stationary while the Earth and other planets move in circular orbits around it.

1882
Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter demonstrate the photophone, a device in which a mirrored silver disc is made to vibrate by speech from a speaking tube. Light reflected off the disc is captured in a parabolic dish and focused onto a selenium cell, where variations in the reflected light are converted into the electrical signals that are carried to headphones. The laser disc and CD of the seventies will work on a remarkably similar principle.
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