The Great Geek Manual

If a cooler concept than this has made headlines this year, I haven’t seen it. Designer Jim Mielke has recently envisioned this little beauty as the next step in the long evolution of near-reality science fiction communication devices. It’s a a subcutaneous touch-screen that currently serves as a cellphone display.

The interface is an extremely thin, nearly skin-flexible silicon Bluetooth device powered by a fuel cell which converts glucose and oxygen into electricity. It’s surgically inserted as a rolled-up tube, which is then unfurled beneath the skin. (Yeech!) Once it’s installed, the display’s surface uses microscopic spheres to display data through the skin. When the unit receives a call, it actually plays video right on the user’s skin. Once the device is deactivated at the end of a call, it’s completely unnoticeable.

The kickers is that, while this gadget may take cellphone compulsions to an all-time high, it may actually be beneficial in respect to a user’s physical health, because, as the power unit processes blood, it would ideally screen for a range of blood disorders.

Too bad it’s only a concept, but, thirty years ago, people were saying the same thing about Kirk’s communicator, so here’s hoping!

Source: Core77 via PhysOrg

1590
Tycho Brahe discovers a comet in the constellation Pisces.

1616
Copernican theory is declared “false and erroneous” in a decree written by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, and issued by the Catholic Church in Rome. Further, no person was to be permitted to hold or teach the theory that the earth revolves around the sun. When Galileo subsequently violated the decree, he was put on trial and held under house arrest for the final eight years of his life.

1868
C.H. Gould of Birmingham, England, receives a patent for the first stapling device.

1904
Nikola Tesla, in Electrical World and Engineer, describes the process of ball lightning formation. Read more about Tesla’s theories on ball lightning at Bibliotecapleyades.

1924
The Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) changes its name to International Business Machines (IBM).
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1275
Chinese astronomers observe and record a total eclipse of the Sun.

1675
John Flamsteed is appointed the first Astronomer Royal of England.

1774
The Orion Nebula is first sighted by William Herschel.

1840
Alexander S. Wolcott and John Johnson open the world’s first commercial photography studio in New York City. Wolcott will patent a camera using a mirror reflector May 8, 1840.

1880
The first reproduction of a photograph with a half-tone graphic is printed in the New York Daily Graphic newspaper. The graphic is entitled “A Scene in Shantytown.”
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Today is Hinamatsuri, a Japanese holiday for girls.

1863
United States President Abraham Lincoln approves an Act of Congress (12 Stat. L. 806) which charters The National Academy of Sciences. The Act stipulates that the Academy will “whenever called upon by any department of the Government, investigate, examine, experiment or report upon any subject of science or art.” Members of the Academy will serve pro bono, without compensation, but the actual expenses incurred for the Government’s requirements are to be paid from appropriations.

1865
Provisions for photographs are included in the United States Copyright Act.

1873
The US Congress enacts the Comstock Law, making it illegal to send any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” books through the mail. Read the law. Read more about the history of the Comstock laws at About.com.

1883
The first steel vessels for the US Navy are authorized by Congress. Four ships are authorized in total: the cruisers Atlanta, Boston, and Chicago, and the dispatch boat, the Dolphin. Of these, the Chicago will be the largest, with a length of 325 feet and width of 48 feet. The Atlanta and the Boston will be 270 feet long and 42 feet wide.
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1908
Gabriel Lippman introduces the new three-dimensional color photography to the Academy of Sciences.

1933
RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. releases 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, premieres in New York City. The film was produced on a budget of US$650,000. Visit the film’s official website. IMDB listing Running Time: 1 hr 44 mins

1948
William “Willy” A. Higinbotham is issued a patent for an “An Electronic Circuit for Differentiating Voltage Waveforms.” (US No. 2,436,891) The invention was originally built in 1942 for a radar bombsight, but the circuit will eventually come to be used in all analog computers.
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1692
Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, Reverend Parris’ Caribbean slave, are accused of using witchcraft, beginning 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.

1873
E. Remington and Sons in Ilion, New York begin production of the first practical typewriter.

1896
Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity when he develops the photographic plate he had left in a desk drawer and finds that it has fogged with the image of the uranium compound crystals resting on it. Thus, the discovery is the result of a chance occurrence. He had originally stored objects together on February 26, after postponing his intended experiment on phosphorescent emissions stimulated by the sun. Instead, he found spontaneous and penetrating rays, independent of any input of energy. He will share the 1903 Nobel Prize with Pierre and Marie Curie for his work on radioactivity.
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• AOL’s Xdrive online storage service allows users to store up to 5GB of data for free. Users can also install Xdrive as a virtual hard drive for Windows to make it easy to transfer files or perform automated backups.
• CameraSummary extracts the EXIF data from the images. Using it, users can determine what model of digicam was used to take the photo and when it was taken, what resolution settings were used, etc.
• Condiment Packet Gallery is a large collection of tiny photos of resteraunt condiment packets. It’s completely frivolous, but oddly engrossing.
• Eight comic books to read before you die is an interesting list compiled by the San Francisco Chronicle. I was a little bit proud to find that I had read them all already.
• HubbleSite a website devoted to the wide array of the beautiful photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The photos are available as normal pictures, wallpapers, and a variety of purchasable prints and merchandise.
• OhDon’tForget is the great service for the forgetful. It allows users to schedule text message reminders to be sent to any phone.
• PhoneSpell is a site that shows you all the combinations of words that any given phone number spells.
• Seven Addictive Scifi Comic Books Free Online is a list compiled by io9 that actually only includes six comics and a preview issue by my count, but is still worth a look, if like me, you’re a comic addict hard up for cash.
• Vozme is browser based tool that converts any text into an MP3 audio file that you can download. Great for creating ransom messages after you kidnap your neighbor’s dog.
• WordPress as a Contact Manager is an intriguing tutorial on how to use Wordpress as a highly effective, surprisingly flexible tool for organizing data.