Breathtaking Math Art based on physics fractals.

David Letterman presents the Top Ten Signs Your Airline is Cutting Costs on the Late Show.

A few uses for all of those left-over CD Spindle Boxes you have lying around.

Fifty Search Engines for Librarians, most of which you’ve never heard of.

Robots will account for thirty percent of U.S. military in twelve years… within fifteen, the world will be at the mercy of world government composed entirely of teen hackers.

Ten Green Concept Cars that are waaaaay out there from Wired.

Ten Skills you Need to Succeed at almost anything.

The fifty best Websites for Writers is an excellent bookmark list for new writers.

Turns out Apple can remotely disable apps installed on your iPhone. Surprise!

- Joseph Campbell

1944
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) president Thomas J. Watson Sr. presents the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC) to Harvard University in a formal dedication ceremony, after which the system becomes known as the Harvard Mark I. It is only the second program-controlled machine, being preceded only by Konrad Zuse’s Z3. The system is the result of Professor Howard Aiken’s research into computation, and it was financed and built by IBM. The whole machine is fifty-one feet in length, eight feet in height, weighs five tons, and incorporates 750,000 parts, including 3,304 electromechanical relays and 72 accumulators. Unlike in Zuse’s earlier binary machine, the arithmetic is still fixed-point and decimal, with a plug-board setting determining the number of decimal places. Input-output facilities include card readers, a card punch, paper tape readers, and typewriters. There are 60 sets of rotary switches, each of which can be used as a constant register, like a mechanical read-only memory. It would perform at a rate of six seconds per multiplication. The system will most famously be used to create ballistics tables for the US Navy.

1955
Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, the forerunner of the later Sony, launches a line of the first transistor radios in Japan.

1959
The first photographs of the Earth from space are transmitted by the satellite Explorer 6.
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Five Apps You Run That Suck, and Five Replacements That Don’t, mostly for filesharers.

Five things you Must know about sleep… one of them being that Edison slept like a baby.

How many of the 100 Most Common English Words can you guess in five minutes? You might be surprised to discover “Paris” and “Hilton” are in there.

Scientists are becoming interested in How Magicians Control your Mind

Reality Wired bring you a gallery of the Ten Best Halo 3 “Dead Corpse” Alphabet Letters.

Ten things you might not know about robots, unless of course you are one.

The New York Times bursts your bubble in an article debunking the Myths surrounding Coffee.

Time Magazine shares its 25 Gotta Have Travel Gadgets in a surprisingly hip list.

Twelve robots that have invaded American homes other than your Transformer set.

Source: Pixdaus

1753
Professor Georg Richmann of St. Petersburg, Moscow, is killed during an experiment with lightning, just one year after Benjamin Franklin’s own experiment involving a kite. Richmann had attached a wire to the top of his house and led it down to an iron bar suspended above “the electric needle” and a bowl of water partly filled with iron filings. Richmann was struck by lighting during a storm as he stood about a foot from the bar, closely observing the needle. “A globe of blue and whitish fire about four inches diameter from the bar struck Richmann’s forehead” with “an explosion like that of a small cannon.” His assistant, Sokolaw, who survives, is thrown to the floor, where he feels receives several blows to his back. After recovering, he finds burn marks and fragments of hot wire on the back of his clothes.

1926
The Warner Brothers studio gives the first public exhibition of the Vitaphone system for showing talking motion pictures. The exhibition features the first Vitaphone film, the silent feature Don Juan starring John Barrymore, which features a musical score and sound effects but no dialog, as well as several talkie short subject films featuring comedians and singers, and a greeting from motion picture industry spokesman Will Hays.

1928
The serial “Real Folks” premieres on NBC radio. It is among the first radio serials, and thus, one the very first regular series in the history electronic media.
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Okay! So I didn’t actually go to the Con in person. But I feel as if I did after the onslaught of ConContent I’ve had to wade through on every single blog I read daily. So just sit back and share the suffering…

12. Even Comic-Con content won’t make anyone care about your blog!

11. Geek has a smell. A nearly tangible smell. Brace yourself.

10. Eye contact. It has the unfortunate effect of encouraging them. You know the ones. Avoid it.

09. Not every character in creation needs its own action figure, despite the example Lucas has set over the years. The proof in the booths.
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Source: Photobucket via Delicious via Waxy via… oh God, not again…

Five ways to keep your PC cool on a hot summer day.

New Ways to Play with Old Hardware includes a surprising range of avant-guard art.

Popular Mechanics provides instruction on How to Build Your Own Speakers: Step-by-Step DIY Tech.

Search criminal records online for free… for now. Better check your own name before heading out to your next job interview.

Smashing Magazine’s Small Design Study Of Big Blogs shed a bit of light of what the average surfer expect from a blog… then is expanded.

Socyberty counts down the planet’s 13 Most Dangerously Endangered Species, which include Scarlet Macaws.

To hell with hundred dollar computers, one group is designing a Twelve Dollar Computer for the third-world.

Tom’s Hardware debunks the Apple Mac Cost Misconception. Macs do not cost more than their PC counterparts.

Twenty-five examples of creative web navigation from Vandelay Design.

Videos of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog at the Comic Con.

- The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster, 1907.
Character: Mr. Failing. Part I, Chapter 12.

1864
Giovanni Batista Donati makes the first spectroscopic observations of a comet tail using the small comet, Tempel, 1864 II. He discovers that, at a distance from the Sun, the spectrum of a comet is identical to that of the Sun, because its visibility is only reflected sunlight. Donati demonstrates that a comet tail formed close to the Sun contains luminous gas. In the spectrum of light from the comet tail, Donati discerned three absorption bands superimposed on a continuous spectrum, which he designates as alpha, beta, and gamma.

1962
Astronomers Allan Sandage and Thomas Matthews accidentally discover the first quasar, 3C 273.

1963
Britain, America and Russia signed a Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in Moscow to prohibit nuclear weapons tests “or any other nuclear explosion” in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water. The treaty still allows for underground testing, but stipulates that such tests couldn’t cause “radioactive debris to be present outside the territorial limits” of their own nation. A total of one hundred eight countries will sign the LNTB Treaty before it goes into effect on October 10, 1963.
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It turns out that if fonts were people, Times New Roman would be Lex Luthor and Arial Narrow would be a hick… pun-tastic!

Source: CollegeHumor

• Jeremy Mayer creates amazing works of art entirely out of disassemble typewriters assembled without solder or welding.

Film

• Dark Knight is continuing to break box office records, now grossing near US$400 million.
• Dark Knight isn’t out of theaters yet, and rumors are already flying that Johnny Depp could be the Riddler in the next Batman Sequel?
• Entertainment Weekly has a gallery of 12 Great Pop-Culture Vampires
• The List Universe brings you the Top 10 Great Robots in Film, starting with Short Circuit’s Johnny 5 and building to False Maria from Metropolis
• Overthinking It explores The Philosophy of Batman.
• Popular Mechanics of all magazines takes a look at the 10 Best Car Chases in Movie History and asks if Wanted Makes the List.

Why Heath Ledger Can Be Replaced As The Joker.

Internet

• Top ten great Star Wars quotes and what actually makes them great.
• UGO has a sizzling gallery of the Top 50 Hottest Sci-Fi Girls, starting with Megan Fox.

Literature

• Free Fiction: “Seeing Other People” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman is now available at Lone Star Stories.
• Warren Ellis talks about the grim future of science fiction magazines.

Television

• Ten Reasons Why the Clone Wars TV Series is Going to Rule.

Am I the only one who thinks that Beaker and Dr. Bunsen Honeydew deserved their own television series? Toss in Pinky and the Brain and Lab Rats episodes, and you would have a brilliant programming block that would pull in the desperately geeky in droves!

Source: The Beaker YouTube Channel