The Great Geek Manual

1907
French inventor Paul Cornu flies the first helicopter. The “flight” carries the vehicle roughly one foot off the ground and only lasts twenty seconds, but it is nonetheless be marked as the first flight of the first helicopter.

1928
Vladimir Zworykin is granted a patent for a color television imaging tube that employs cathode ray tubes and a screen composed of a mosaic of squares in the three primary colors. Several later biographers will call him the “true inventor of television.”

1955
The first live US television program originating from outside the continental United States is broadcast from Havana, Cuba.

1957
Gordon Gould, a doctoral research student at Columbia University and a former member of the Manhattan Project, completes the design of a light-emitting version of the microwave emitting maser, which he names Light Amplication by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation (LASER).

1971
The American space probe, Mariner 9, becomes the first space probe to orbit another planet when it enters into orbit around Mars. The probe’s mission is to return photographs that will map seventy percent of the surface while conducting a study of the planet’s atmosphere.
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Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere”. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part… What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

- The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman, 1964.

Art

• Pink Tentacles has a gallery of Sci-fi illustrations by Shusei Nagaoka.

Comics

• Alan Moore, the comic book writer responsible for Watchmen and V For Vendetta, says he’s writing lyrics for Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s next opera.
• Imagine going to Hollywood on vacation, only to watch Spider-Man being carted off by cops.

Film

• Cracks sifts through the suggest box for Rejected Ideas for Disaster Movies.
• Daily Fill remembers 15 Childhood Movies that Failed the Test of Time.
• Fumiko’s Confession is a short film animated completely by one person. (More)
• John Scalzi explains Four Reasons Why Avatar Is Too Big to Fail.
• There’s a new poster out for the upcoming Kick-Ass movie, and it’s waaay better than the last round of posters.
• This year, there are 20 Cartoons competing for Oscar nominations.
• VideoHound picks The Ten Worst Unexpected Sequels of All Time.

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1799
American astronomer Andrew Ellicott Douglass makes the first written record of a meteor shower in the US, the Leonids meteor shower, from a ship off the Florida Keys. He writes, “In every instant the meteors were as numerous as the stars,” and that the “whole heaven appeared as if illuminated with sky rockets, flying in an infinity of directions, and I was in constant expectation of some of them falling on the vessel. They continued until put out by the light of the sun after day break.”

1901
The first Nobel Prize for Physics is awarded to Wilhelm Röentgen for the discovery of X-rays.

1915
Theodore William Richards of Harvard University becomes the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

1933
Hugh Gray captures what he claims to be the first known photo of the Loch Ness Monster.

1937
Alan Turing publishes a paper entitled “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem.” In it, Turing provides an abstraction that will form the basic theory of computability for several decades. Later renamed the Turing Machine, this abstract engine described in this paper will provide the fundamental concepts of computers that other inventors will later conceive independently.
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Biology is not destiny. It was never more than tendency. It was just nature’s first quick and dirty way to compute with meat. Chips are destiny.

- Heaven in a Chip by Bart Kosko, Ph.D., 2000.

Art

• Interbent has posted a gallery of Humorous Star Wars Street Art.
• Star Wars.com profiles artist Christian Waggoner, who paints Star Wars characters with scenes from the original trilogy reflected in their eyes. [via]

Film

• Interview: Guillermo Del Toro discusses Making The Hobbit at Total Film.
• Interview: Sam Rockwell explains what inspired his Iron Man 2 character.

Internet

• Term Life Insurance has come up with this inforgraphic comparing the Top Earning Dead Celebrities of the Decade.
• Total Film looks at the Best & Worst Movie Star Websites from around the web.