The Great Geek Manual

1925
A two minute long motion picture of a solar eclipse is recorded by the United States Navy from the dirigible Los Angeles from an elevation of about 4,500 feet, about nineteen miles east of Montauk Point, Long Island, New York. It is the first time a dirigible has been used for astronomical observations in the U.S.

1948
International Business Machines (IBM) dedicates the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), also known as the Poppa, at the company’s world headquarters in New York City. The SSEC is the first computer to combine electronic computation with stored instructions, and it will be the first computer to run a stored program and the last large electromechanical computers to be built. It contains 13,500 vacuum tubes and 21,000 relays and occupies three sides of a 1,800 square foot room. Among it’s most notable accomplishments will be the calculation of a table of the Moon’s positions which will be used to plot the course of the 1969 Apollo flight.
It will be decommissioned in 1952.
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Art

• 50 Weird Examples Of Harry Potter Fan Art
• Archetype is a low budget sci-fi short film featuring Hollywood-level special effects.
• Duct Tape Bowser
• Futuristic Solar Radiation Gel Pills for the basement-bound nerds
• Rule 63 Princess Of Persia cosplay
• Nothing completes a costume like a badass pair of Dragon Claw Gauntlets
• Where have all the book illustrators gone? Charles Dickens enjoyed close collaborative relationships with the illustrators of his novels, but now it’s rare to find a picture outside the world of children’s books. Is drawing a lost art, or could we be on the brink of a new golden age?

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1959
Robert Noyce of Texas Instruments conceives the idea of an integrated circuit. In 1968, Noyce will found Intel with Gordon Moore and Andy Grove.

1983
According to Twin Galaxies, Ed O’Neil scores a record-setting 252,114,350 points playing the Williams Electronics arcade game Robotron at the Outer Limits arcade in Durham, North Carolina. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

The action television series The A-Team premieres on the NBC network with the episode “Mexican Slayride.” The series will become a cultural icon of the eighties, garnering a significant cult following. The series will run for ninety-eight episodes over five seasons. TV.com entry
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What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that’s not true.

Obviously it doesn’t matter that much if you’re a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there’s a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence.

- “What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology” by Tim Maudlin, January 2012.
Originally published by The Atlantic.

1889
The Columbia Phonograph Company is formed in Washington, D.C. as a successor to the Volta Graphophone Company. The company will go on to become the first record company to produce pre-recorded records rather than just blank cylinders.

1908
Edouard Bélin uses his Bélinographe, a system able to send remote photographs over telephone and telegraphic networks, to transmit a photograph 1,700km from Paris to Bordeaux to Lyon then back. The historical event takes twenty-two minutes.
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…any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. … Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don’t exist, or we can’t see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter.

This vote has consequences. If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then this answer is equally profound. It amounts to saying that the universe provides us with a picture of the ultimate end-point of technological development. In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don’t produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained.

- “The Deepening Paradox” by Karl Schroeder, November 2011.
Originally posted to Kschroeder.com.

1789
The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy or the Triumph of Nature Founded in Truth by William Hill Brown, is published in Boston, Massachusetts by Isaiah Thomas.

1888
Charles Babbage’s son, Henry Provost Babbage, uses the mill portion of the Analytical Engine he constructed from his father’s drawings to compute multiples of Pi in order to prove that the design is functional.

1920
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a non-profit organization that defends and the constitutional rights of individuals, is formed. The organization will have a significant impact on a number of fundamental issues surrounding the internet, the media, and the communication industry in general. Visit the official ACLU website.
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The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

- Charles Bukowski