The Wall Street Journal recently did a story about people who play video games as pacifists where they attempt to make it through typically violent games without killing anything. For example Daniel Mullins has been playing Skyrim as Felix the Peaceful Monk and he has yet to register any kills in the game.
1046
Monks record in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that “no man alive…could remember so severe a winter.” It is the first historical record of the beginning of the two hundred year period of exceptionally cold weather conditions which will follow, constituting a period which will later be dubbed the “Little Ice Age.”
1709
Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk is rescued from the desert island on which he has been shipwrecked. His story will later inspire the book Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.
1880
The world’s first electric streetlight is installed in Wabash, Indiana.
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1788
Isaac Briggs and William Longstreet patent the steamboat in Georgia.
1884
The first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary, “A-Ant,” is published. The full title of the series is A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society. Editor Herbert Coleridge first began work on the dictionary on May 12, 1860 and published the first sample pages in April 1861. Length: 352 pages Price: UK2s.6d (US$3.25)
1893
Thomas Edison completes the construction of the first motion picture studio, the Black Maria in West Orange, New Jersey.
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1862
Telescope maker Alvin Clark discovers the dwarf star Sirius B which is the companion of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.
1893
Thomas Edison is issued two patents. (US No. 490,953 -4) The first patent is described as the “Art of Generating Electricity” for a cell made with positive and negative electrodes in a heated chamber containing dry chemicals which are sufficiently exhausted for the gases generated to become good electrical conductors. The second patent is described as the “Manufacture of Carbon Filaments for Electric Lamps.” In it, Edison describes the process of heating vegetable fibers, such as bamboo, in a furnace until the fibers are carbonized, before soaking them in a sugar syrup to fill the material’s pores before reheating them until they are wholly carbonized. This process is fundamental to the creation of incandescent bulbs.
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The full music-video for ‘This Is Aperture’ – a Portal-style remake of ‘This Is Halloween’ from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
1873
Pierre-Jules Hetzel publishes Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne in French. Download it at Project Gutenberg.
1883
James Ritty and John Birch a U.S. patent for the first cash register.
1910
Georges Rignoux of La Rochelle, France describes a primitive “television” system using a matrix of sixty-four photocells to producing a limited grey scale picture. Rignoux had developed the system over the course of several months, with several successful practical experiments, including the first demonstration of the instantaneous transmission of black and white still images in 1909.
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